Africa has the greatest proportion of people living in poverty by The Millennium Villages project 8:04am 14th Mar, 2011   Africa has the greatest proportion of people living in extreme poverty -- more than 32 percent or roughly 300 million people living on less than $1 a day. The continent''s environmental, epidemiological and geographical challenges -- including low-productivity agriculture, a high disease burden, and high transport costs render African countries most vulnerable to persistent extreme poverty.    This means that to collect safe drinking water and firewood for cooking, people must walk several miles every day.    It means that a child in sub-Saharan Africa dies of malaria every 30 seconds, and that 1 in 16 women die in childbirth.    With such obstacles many rural communities can become stuck in a poverty trap, unable to make the investments in human capital and infrastructure required to achieve self-sustaining economic growth.    The following facts depict the gravity in numbers:    * Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rate of undernourishment in the world, with one-third of the population below the minimum level of nourishment.    * At least one million people in Africa die from malaria each year, 90 percent of these deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa.    * A woman living in sub-Saharan Africa has a 1 in 16 chance of dying in pregnancy. This compares with a 1 in 3,800 risk for a woman from North America.    * More than 50 percent of Africans suffer from water-related diseases such as cholera and infant diarrhea.    * In one out of four African countries, half the children enrolled in the last year of primary school do not pursue their studies the following year.    The Millennium Villages project offers a bold, innovative model for helping rural African communities lift themselves out of extreme poverty.    The Millennium Villages are proving that by fighting poverty at the village level through community-led development, rural Africa can achieve the Millennium Development Goals -- global targets for reducing extreme poverty and hunger by half and improving education, health, gender equality and environmental sustainability -- by 2015, and escape the extreme poverty that traps hundreds of millions of people throughout the continent.    With the help of new advances in science and technology, project personnel work with villages to create and facilitate sustainable, community-led action plans that are tailored to the villages'' specific needs and designed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.    Simple solutions like providing high-yield seeds, fertilizers, medicines, drinking wells, and materials to build school rooms and clinics are effectively combating extreme poverty and nourishing communities into a new age of health and opportunity.    Improved science and technology such as agroforestry, insecticide-treated bed nets, antiretroviral drugs, the Internet, remote sensing, and geographic information systems enriches this progress.    Over a 10-year period spanning two five-year phases, community committees and local governments build capacity to continue these initiatives and develop a solid foundation for sustainable growth. Visit the related web page
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