HIV and Women

This past weekend I attended an HIV outreach event. I eagerly approached the PG plaza mall in order to find members of a particular nonprofit in order to raise HIV awareness. The afternoon began with an array of intruiging incidents. First, we had set up a booth as we were not allowed to solicit people directly in the mall. On the table where we sat there consisted of two brochures. One in reference to women and the other in reference to men. The brochure refering to women said, "A call to women of color" and within the brochure only black women were targeted. In the male brochure it seemed to include both Latio and Black men. I bring this up for various reasons.

1. HIV is a growing and devastating the black population yet this cannot be regarded isolated from other incidents
2. a brochure that targets mainly black individuals may in some ways be helpful but in other ways assumes that black men and women engage in more risky behavior.

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Poverty Facts and Stats

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• by Anup Shah
• This Page Last Updated Tuesday, March 04, 2008

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1. Half the world — nearly three billion people — live on less than two dollars a day.^{Source 1}

2. More than 80 percent of the world’s population lives in countries where income differentials are widening.^{Source 2}

3. The poorest 40 percent of the world’s population accounts for 5 percent of global income. The richest 20 percent accounts for three-quarters of world income.^{Source 3}

4. According to UNICEF, 26,500-30,000 children die each day due to poverty. And they “die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.”^{Source 4}

5. Around 27-28 percent of all children in developing countries are estimated to be underweight or stunted. The two regions that account for the bulk of the deficit are South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

   If current trends continue, the Millennium Development Goals target of halving the proportion of underweight children will be missed by 30 million children, largely because of slow progress in Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.^{Source 5}

6. Based on enrolment data, about 72 million children of primary school age in the developing world were not in school in 2005; 57 per cent of them were girls. And these are regarded as optimisitic numbers.^{Source 6}

7. Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names.^{Source 7}

8. Less than one per cent of what the world spent every year on weapons was needed to put every child into school by the year 2000 and yet it didn’t happen.^{Source 8}

9. Infectious diseases continue to blight the lives of the poor across the world. An estimated 40 million people are living with HIV/AIDS, with 3 million deaths in 2004. Every year there are 350–500 million cases of malaria, with 1 million fatalities: Africa accounts for 90 percent of malarial deaths and African children account for over 80 percent of malaria victims worldwide.^{Source 9}

10. Water problems affect half of humanity:

    • Some 1.1 billion people in developing countries have inadequate access to water, and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation.
    • Almost two in three people lacking access to clean water survive on less than $2 a day, with one in three living on less than $1 a day.
    • More than 660 million people without sanitation live on less than $2 a day, and more than 385 million on less than $1 a day.
    • Access to piped water into the household averages about 85% for the wealthiest 20% of the population, compared with 25% for the poorest 20%.
    • 1.8 billion people who have access to a water source within 1 kilometre, but not in their house or yard, consume around 20 litres per day. In the United Kingdom the average person uses more than 50 litres of water a day flushing toilets (where average daily water usage is about 150 liters a day. The highest average water use in the world is in the US, at 600 liters day.)
    • Some 1.8 million child deaths each year as a result of diarrhoea
    • The loss of 443 million school days each year from water-related illness.
    • Close to half of all people in developing countries suffering at any given time from a health problem caused by water and sanitation deficits.
    • Millions of women spending several hours a day collecting water.
    • To these human costs can be added the massive economic waste associated with the water and sanitation deficit.… The costs associated with health spending, productivity losses and labour diversions … are greatest in some of the poorest countries. Sub-Saharan Africa loses about 5% of GDP, or some $28.4 billion annually, a figure that exceeds total aid flows and debt relief to the region in 2003.^{Source 10}

11. Number of children in the world

    2.2 billion

    Number in poverty

    1 billion (every second child)

    Shelter, safe water and health

    For the 1.9 billion children from the developing world, there are:

    • 640 million without adequate shelter (1 in 3)
    • 400 million with no access to safe water (1 in 5)
    • 270 million with no access to health services (1 in 7)

    Children out of education worldwide

    121 million

    Survival for children

    Worldwide,

    • 10.6 million died in 2003 before they reached the age of 5 (same as children population in France, Germany, Greece and Italy)
    • 1.4 million die each year from lack of access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation

    Health of children

    Worldwide,

    • 2.2 million children die each year because they are not immunized
    • 15 million children orphaned due to HIV/AIDS (similar to the total children population in Germany or United Kingdom)

    ^{Source 11}

12. Rural areas account for three in every four people living on less than US$1 a day and a similar share of the world population suffering from malnutrition. However, urbanization is not synonymous with human progress. Urban slum growth is outpacing urban growth by a wide margin.^{Source 12}

13. Approximately half the world’s population now live in cities and towns. In 2005, one out of three urban dwellers (approximately 1 billion people) was living in slum conditions.^{Source 13}

14. In developing countries some 2.5 billion people are forced to rely on biomass—fuelwood, charcoal and animal dung—to meet their energy needs for cooking. In sub-Saharan Africa, over 80 percent of the population depends on traditional biomass for cooking, as do over half of the populations of India and China.^{Source 14}

15. Indoor air pollution resulting from the use of solid fuels [by poorer segments of society] is a major killer. It claims the lives of 1.5 million people each year, more than half of them below the age of five: that is 4000 deaths a day. To put this number in context, it exceeds total deaths from malaria and rivals the number of deaths from tuberculosis.^{Source 15}

16. In the developing world, the national share of consumption for the poorest fifth of people was just 3.9% in 2004.^{Source 16}

17. 1.6 billion people — a quarter of humanity — live without electricity:

    Breaking that down further:

    Number of people living without electricity

    Region	Millions without electricity
    South Asia	706
    Sub-Saharan Africa	547
    East Asia	224
    Other	101

    ^{Source 17}

18. The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the 41 Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (567 million people) is less than the wealth of the world’s 7 richest people combined.^{Source 18}

19. World gross domestic product (world population approximately 6.5 billion) in 2006 was $48.2 trillion in 2006.

    • The world’s wealthiest countries (approximately 1 billion people) accounted for $36.6 trillion dollars (76%).
    • The world’s billionaires — just 497 people (approximately 0.000008% of the world’s population) — were worth $3.5 trillion (over 7% of world GDP).
    • Low income countries (2.4 billion people) accounted for just $1.6 trillion of GDP (3.3%)
    • Middle income countries (3 billion people) made up the rest of GDP at just over $10 trillion (20.7%).^{Source 19}

20. The world’s low income countries (2.4 billion people) account for just 2.4% of world exports^{Source 20}

21. The total wealth of the top 8.3 million people around the world “rose 8.2 percent to $30.8 trillion in 2004, giving them control of nearly a quarter of the world’s financial assets.”

    In other words, about 0.13% of the world’s population controlled 25% of the world’s financial assets in 2004.^{Source 21}

22. For every $1 in aid a developing country receives, over $25 is spent on debt repayment.^{Source 22}

23. 51 percent of the world’s 100 hundred wealthiest bodies are corporations.^{Source 23}

24. The wealthiest nation on Earth has the widest gap between rich and poor of any industrialized nation.^{Source 24}

25. The poorer the country, the more likely it is that debt repayments are being extracted directly from people who neither contracted the loans nor received any of the money.^{Source 25}

26. 20% of the population in the developed nations, consume 86% of the world’s goods.^{Source 26}

27. In 1960, the 20% of the world’s people in the richest countries had 30 times the income of the poorest 20% — in 1997, 74 times as much.^{Source 27}

28. An analysis of long-term trends shows the distance between the richest and poorest countries was about:

    • 3 to 1 in 1820
    • 11 to 1 in 1913
    • 35 to 1 in 1950
    • 44 to 1 in 1973
    • 72 to 1 in 1992^{Source 28}

29. “Approximately 790 million people in the developing world are still chronically undernourished, almost two-thirds of whom reside in Asia and the Pacific.”^{Source 29}

30. For economic growth and almost all of the other indicators, the last 20 years [of the current form of globalization, from 1980 - 2000] have shown a very clear decline in progress as compared with the previous two decades [1960 - 1980]. For each indicator, countries were divided into five roughly equal groups, according to what level the countries had achieved by the start of the period (1960 or 1980). Among the findings:

    • Growth: The fall in economic growth rates was most pronounced and across the board for all groups or countries.
    • Life Expectancy: Progress in life expectancy was also reduced for 4 out of the 5 groups of countries, with the exception of the highest group (life expectancy 69-76 years).
    • Infant and Child Mortality: Progress in reducing infant mortality was also considerably slower during the period of globalization (1980-1998) than over the previous two decades.
    • Education and literacy: Progress in education also slowed during the period of globalization.^{Source 30}

31. A mere 12 percent of the world’s population uses 85 percent of its water, and these 12 percent do not live in the Third World.^{Source 31}

32. Consider the global priorities in spending in 1998

    Global Priority	$U.S. Billions
    Cosmetics in the United States	8
    Ice cream in Europe	11
    Perfumes in Europe and the United States	12
    Pet foods in Europe and the United States	17
    Business entertainment in Japan	35
    Cigarettes in Europe	50
    Alcoholic drinks in Europe	105
    Narcotics drugs in the world	400
    Military spending in the world	780

    And compare that to what was estimated as additional costs to achieve universal access to basic social services in all developing countries:

    Global Priority	$U.S. Billions
    Basic education for all	6
    Water and sanitation for all	9
    Reproductive health for all women	12
    Basic health and nutrition	13

    ^{Source 32}

Notes and Sources

1. This figure is based on purchasing power parity (PPP), which basically suggests that prices of goods in countries tend to equate under floating exchange rates and therefore people would be able to purchase the same quantity of goods in any country for a given sum of money. That is, the notion that a dollar should buy the same amount in all countries. Hence if a poor person in a poor country living on a dollar a day moved to the U.S. with no changes to their income, they would still be living on a dollar a day. In addition, see the following:

   The 2007 Human Development Report (HDR) from the United Nations Development Program notes that, “There are still around 1 billion people living at the margins of survival on less than US$1 a day, with 2.6 billion—40 percent of the world’s population—living on less than US$2 a day.” (See page 25. The report also notes that the alleviation is limited mostly to parts of Asia.)

   For much of the 1990s and early 2000s, it was understood that roughly half of humanity had been living on about $2 a day.

   So, on initial read of the UN HDR report, this implies a reduction in recent years from half of humanity to 40 percent. However, the reduction may not be as much as previously thought. The previous link is to a Bretton Woods Project article noting that, “Preliminary recalculations of global economic output excluding differences in domestic prices and currencies, released by the World Bank in mid-December [2007], may undermine the much-trumpeted claims that globalisation has reduced the number of people living in extreme poverty.”)

   Also note that the use of $1 a day (and $2 a day) as poverty income measurements from the World Bank have been questioned and criticized as understating the level of poverty:

   • The World Bank has been criticized for almost arbitrarily coming up with a definition of a poverty line to mean one dollar per day.
   • In addition, as also stated in the previous link, in the United States for example, the poverty threshold for a family of four has been estimated to be around eleven dollars per day. The one dollar a day definition then misses out much of humanity to understand the impacts. Even the two dollars per day that I have pointed out here, while affecting half of humanity, also misses out the numbers under three or four, or eleven dollars per day. These statistics are harder to find, and as I come across them, I will post them here!
   • As an aside, Morgan Spurlock, the Oscar nominee for his documentary Super Size Me where he went 30 days on a diet of burgers only to see the effects, produced another documentary where for 30 days he tried to live on the minimum wage of $5.15 per hour. At times he was earning $50 to $70 a day and yet the tremendous hardships he faced was incredible (including a ludicrous $40 for a bandage in a hospital, and some $500 for just being seen to).
   • More fundamental than that though, for example, is a critique from Columbia University, called How not to count the poor . The report describes 3 main errors as being:
     1. An ill-defined poverty line;
     2. A misleading and inaccurate measure of purchasing power equivalence; and
     3. Incorrect extrapolation of limited data giving the false impression of precision while masking the high probably error of the estimates.
     These errors are feared to lead to “a large understatement of the extent of global income poverty and to an incorrect inference that it has declined.” (Emphasis added). This allows the World Bank to insist that the world is indeed “on the right track” in terms of poverty reduction strategy, attributing this “success” to the design and implementation of “good” or “better policies”.

   Nonetheless, the statistic has not been lost on some of the most prominent people in the world:

   • The New York Times in one of their email updates, in their Quote of the Day section, for July 18, 2001 provided the following quote: “A world where some live in comfort and plenty, while half of the human race lives on less than $2 a day, is neither just, nor stable.” — President Bush
   • See also James Wolfenson, The Other Crisis, World Bank, October 1998 who said: “Today, across the world, 1.3 billion people live on less than one dollar a day; 3 billion live on under two dollars a day; 1.3 billion have no access to clean water; 3 billion have no access to sanitation; 2 billion have no access to electricity.” (See also note 21 below.)
   • Koffi Anan, UN Secretary General, in a speech on the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, 17 October 2000, said “Almost half the world’s population lives on less than two dollars a day, yet even this statistic fails to capture the humiliation, powerlessness and brutal hardship that is the daily lot of the world’s poor.”

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2. 2007 Human Development Report (HDR), United Nations Development Program, November 27, 2007, p.25.

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3. Ibid

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4. See Today, over 26,500 children died around the world from this web site. (Note that the statistic cited uses children as those under the age of five. If it was say 6, or 7, the numbers would be even higher.)

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5. See the following:
   • 2007 Human Development Report (HDR), United Nations Development Program, November 27, 2007, p.25. (The report also notes that although India is rising economically, “the bad news is that this has not been translated into accelerated progress in cutting under-nutrition. One-half of all rural children [in India] are underweight for their age—roughly the same proportion as in 1992.”)
   • Millennium Development Goals Report 2007

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6. Millennium Development Goals Report 2007 . The report importantly notes that “As high as this number seems, surveys show that it underestimates the actual number of children who, though enrolled, are not attending school. Moreover, neither enrolment nor attendance figures reflect children who do not attend school regularly. To make matters worse, official data are not usually available from countries in conflict or post-conflict situations. If data from these countries were reflected in global estimates, the enrolment picture would be even less optimistic.”

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7. The State of the World’s Children, 1999, UNICEF

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8. State of the World, Issue 287 - Feb 1997, New Internationalist

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9. 2007 Human Development Report (HDR), United Nations Development Program, November 27, 2007, p.25.

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10. 2006 United Nations Human Development Report, pp.6, 7, 35

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11. State of the World’s Children, 2005, UNICEF

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12. 2007 Human Development Report (HDR), United Nations Development Program, November 27, 2007, p.25.

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13. Millennium Development Goals Report 2007

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14. Ibid, p.45

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15. Ibid, p.45

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16. Millennium Development Goals Report 2007

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17. Ibid, p.44

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18. See the following:
    • World Bank Key Development Data & Statistics, World Bank, accessed March 3, 2008
    • Luisa Kroll and Allison Fass, The World’s Richest People, Forbes, March 3, 2007
    • World Bank’s list of Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (41 countries), accessed March 3, 2008

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19. See the following:
    • World Bank Key Development Data & Statistics, World Bank, accessed March 3, 2008
    • Luisa Kroll and Allison Fass, The World’s Richest People, Forbes, March 3, 2007

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20. Trade Data, World Bank Data & Statistics, accessed March 3, 2008

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21. Eileen Alt Powell, Some 600,000 join millionaire ranks in 2004, Associate Press, June 9, 2005

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22. Based on World Bank data (accessed March 3, 2008) as follows:
    • Total debts of the developing world in 2006: $2.7 trillion
    • Total official development assistance in 2006: $106 billion

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23. See the following:
    • Holding Transnationals Accountable, IPS, August 11, 1998
    • Top 200: The Rise of Corporate Global Power, by Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh, Institute for Policy Studies, November 2000

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24. The Corporate Planet, Corporate Watch, 1997

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25. Debt - The facts, Issue 312 - May 1999, New Internationalist

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26. 1998 Human Development Report, United Nations Development Programme

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27. 1999 Human Development Report, United Nations Development Programme

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28. Ibid

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29. World Resources Institute Pilot Analysis of Global Ecosystems, February 2001, (in the Food Feed and Fiber section). Note, that despite the food production rate being better than population growth rate, there is still so much hunger around the world.

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30. The Scorecard on Globalization 1980-2000: Twenty Years of Diminished Progress, by Mark Weisbrot, Dean Baker, Egor Kraev and Judy Chen, Center for Economic Policy and Research, August 2001.

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31. Maude Barlow, Water as Commodity - The Wrong Prescription, The Institute for Food and Development Policy, Backgrounder, Summer 2001, Vol. 7, No. 3

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32. Consumerism, Volunteer Now! (undated)

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Document History

Select a date or option from the list below. Then, scroll through the page to see those updated areas highlighted. (New feature for updates in 2004, onwards).

Date	Reason
March 4, 2008	Added and updated various statistics
November 24, 2006	Updated some stats related to water
April 3, 2006	Small note on living on the minimum wage in the US in comparison to the statistic of how many live on one or two dollars a day
June 11, 2005	Added statistic on concentration of wealth amongst top 0.13% of the world’s population
February 18, 2005	Added a number of statistics regarding the state of children around the world
April 28, 2004	Cited a list of global priority spending in 1998

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Alternatives for broken links

Sometimes links to other sites may break beyond my control. Where I can, I try to provide alternative links to backups or reposted versions here.

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The main link is

• Ignacio Ramonet, 'The politics of hunger', Le Monde Diplomatique, November 1998http://mondediplo.com/1998/11/01leader

If the above link has expired, please try the following alternative

1. http://www.zmag.org/crisescurevts/hunger.htm

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The main link is

• Sanjay G. Reddy and Thomas W. Pogge, 'How not to count the poor', Columbia University, June 14, 2002http://www.columbia.edu/~sr793/count.pdf

If the above link has expired, please try the following alternative locations

1. Not of the report from the Bretton Woods Projecthttp://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/art-16224
2. Institute of Social Analysis, an organization set up by Colombia Universityhttp://www.socialanalysis.org

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The main link is

• http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/

If the above link has expired, please try the following alternative

1. Full report, 8Mb in size http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/pdfs/report/HDR06-complete.pdf

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The main link is

• http://www.unicef.org/sowc05/english/index.html

If the above link has expired, please try the following alternative locations

1. Actual report http://www.unicef.org/sowc05/english/sowc05.pdf
2. Home page for the reporthttp://www.unicef.org/sowc05/
3. News report mentioning these stats from Inter Press Servicehttp://ipsnews.net/new_nota.asp?idnews=27504

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The main link is

• http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/business/industries/...

If the above link has expired, please try the following alternative locations

1. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/world_wealth
2. Google search resulthttp://www.google.com/search?lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Some%2...
3. http://thinkprogress.org/index.php?p=1062

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The main link is

• http://www.cepr.net/globalization/scorecard_on_globalizatio...

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1. http://www.attac.org/fra/toil/doc/cepr05.htm

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Use the following HTML code on your page:<p>Anup Shah, <a href="http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Facts.asp">Poverty Facts and Stats</a>, GlobalIssues.org, Last updated: Tuesday, March 04, 2008</p>

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Anup Shah, Poverty Facts and Stats, GlobalIssues.org, Last updated: Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Why is it important to understand and study infectious diseases?

1. many of them kill rampantly even in cases where diseases are easily preventable
2. diseases are critical to understanding societies: the way they manifest, the way they impact our bodies, our minds, our society
3. diseases in many contexts also highlight our societal and physiological weaknesses, insecurities and vulnerabilities
4. the philosophical and metaphoric nature of disease is insurmountable
Sometimes we often realize the devastating emotional, physiological and psychological impact of diseases on our bodies. Most people perceive diseases be be ailments of the body and although this is true we ought to look deeper.
the truth is that disease fits into the larger context of social problems
As I perceive it here are the problem areas:
1. structural inequalities
- in health
- in education
- in housing
- in employment opportunities
2. the allocation of resources
- the few rich of the world use up most of the resources
3. access
- fundamentally the first two points touch on access
- what ends up happening is that some people are never able to even get to the ladder to climb it.
4. the fixation with the top down approach
- obviously it really has not worked well
- yes, policies are important to change but they are more likely to change if more people in the ground level and aware and want these issues changes
- more community organizing needs to be done including community based participatory research so we arent just going into places and assuming thier needs
-community organizing allows us to undertstand the needs and the desires of communities first hand.
5. human nature, desire and capitalism
- it is so easy to get caught up in our own lives
when we do it ourselves it seems so harmless, but if everyone only looks out for themselves then we will all be worse off(i think, even though i know econ people would disagree with this)
- there is much less trust, respect.
- we are conditioned to compete, fight, and conditioned to be driven, even if this means we leave some people behind.
but this survival of the fittest idea is scary
-we may be black white yellow brown but what most people forget is that we are human first. human always.
and if survival of the fittest...and profit..are the only things that drive us..we as mankind will not be surviving.
all people in the world deserve
1. health
2. shelter
3. food
4. love and support
its maslows hierachy of needs.
wut is so odd is that the happiest people i have known have very little and it is the ones who own a lot are unhappy.

project idea 2

problem: more black men in prison than in college
why:
- structural inequalities
- lack of employment opportunities
- prison industrial complex
- alienating and isolating inviduals
-blacklisting
solution:
- mentors for young black men
- programs in prison to positively involve black men
- programs that will allow young black men to transition into life

in continuation of dreams

SAVE THE WORLD: PROJECT 1
TOPICS
1. Teenage Pregnancy: US
- 750K women get pregnant every year
Problem: not enough resources for women
- lack of support system
- lack of help with child care
- lack of networking
Solution
- instead of isolating and alienating teenage mothers provide means by which we can help them
---provide child care for teenage mothers
---provide a support system where teenage mothers can provide support
---provide tutors and mentors for women
---involve teenage fathers- it cannot be one sided
---teenagers need love support and kindness- if we are there to support them, they will not have to compromise school, their lives, thier happiness.