On October 17th millions of supports around the world will stand up and speak out to make poverty history. Last year over twenty three millions people including 49,000 Canadians took the challenge set by the United Nations Day for the Eradication of Poverty. World leaders promised to end poverty by 2015, and by standing up we are letting world leaders know that they are being held accountable. The poverty statistics researched by UNICEF are alarming! Half the world (that is nearly three billion people) lives on less than two dollars a day. The Gross Domestic Product of the poorest forty eight nations is less wealth than the three richest people in the world combined. Nearly a billion people are unable to read or sign their name and are illiterate. Less than one per cent of what the world spends on weapons each year could put every child world wide in school. One billion children live in poverty, 640 million live without adequate shelter, 400 million have no access to safe water, and 270 million have no access to health services. 27,000 children die every day, that is one child every three seconds, and the causes range from things like hunger, and preventable diseases and illnesses. The causes for world poverty are numerous and include debt and unfair structural adjustments policies supported by the World Bank and IMF to ensure a lower standard of living for people in poorer nations. Wealthily nations could forgive debt to poorer nations and offer grants instead of loans to supply food and build infrastructure. War, famine, natural disasters, climate change, and AIDS, are all further examples of things that contribute to world poverty. All of these issues must be addressed through horizontal strategies through the co-operation of governments and NGO’s and corporations. We also must be willing to listen to the needs of other nations; they understand their own problems far more than we do. I am all for standing up against poverty on October 17th, but we can’t be metaphorically sitting down the rest of the time. Utopian goals of eliminating world poverty by 2015 can not be met vis-à-vis empty promises and half hearted bandage efforts. Eliminating world poverty will take a lot of hard work, money, infrastructure, and co-operation. We have to stand against world poverty every day; otherwise the goal of eliminating poverty by 2015 will become yet another failed bench mark by the global community. We cannot let this happen, not again!

-Jason Setnyk