Surviving on a $1.25 a day
The next time you sit down to eat, ask yourself the question “could I survive on $1.25 a day?” For most of us that are fortunate enough to have houses, cars, big screen televisions, computers and the various other technological paraphernalia that we enjoy, the answer is most probably no. But for nearly 1.5 billion people, this is their everyday reality. It’s what the World Bank defines as “extreme poverty” http://tinyurl.com/yg329p3. And if you were to double the daily allowance to $2.50 a day, over 3 billion people or approximately 45% of the global population, survive on this amount or less.
I was reminded of this depressing statistic while I was reading a MacLean’s article about a couple that have written a book detailing their month long attempt to eat on one dollar a day http://tinyurl.com/yehay79 to save money. After a month, one of the co-authors had lost nine pounds and they refuse to share the menu they used for the month because of its health risks.
The interesting thing for energy4everyone is that the United Nations Development Programme continues to highlight the crucial role energy has to play in the alleviation of poverty and achieving the eight Millennium Development Goals http://www.undp.org/energy/publications.html. In fact, the UNDP has so many publications on the topic that I’ve simply inserted the link to its energy publications page – you can browse away!
What can you do about it? Well, improving awareness about the positive and much needed role of energy in helping to reduce poverty would be a great start. Energy enables almost everything that we do on a day-to-day basis, and along with clean drinking water, is one of the fundamentals to life. After that? Well, keep spreading the word and see if you can find a way to help those communities in need around the world. Every little bit helps when you only have $1.25 a day.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 24th, 2010 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.