The Micah Challenge

The new Micah Challenge website is now live. We focused on the Micah Challenge today at Richview and it was pretty challenging to me. There are some great resources at the site. Some facts: The world is enjoying unprecedented wealth, and yet more than one billion people live in abject poverty, struggling to get by on less than $1 a day. Each day, 50,000 people die from preventable, poverty-related causes. 850 million people go to bed hungry every night. Today, 15 million children are orphans because of AIDS. One in six AIDS-related deaths is now a child. Every 3.6 seconds, another person dies of needless poverty. Today, the richest three people in the world own assess that exceed the combined economic activity of the world’s poorest 48 countries. If the world had 1,000 people, 600 of those would live in a shantytown. A woman in sub-Saharan Africa is 200 times more likely to die in childbirth than a woman in North America. That’s 1 in 16 in that part of Africa that die in childbirth. Closer to where I live, the disparity between rich and poor neighborhoods in the city of Etobicoke is increasing. There has been a 69% increase in poor families in Toronto over the past twenty years. The community in which I live (lots of apartment buildings) has moved from moderate poverty in 1991 to high poverty in 2001, according to the United Way.