World Relief Canada

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    Poverty Facts

    Less than $1 a day to live on

    More than one billion people in the world live on less than one dollar a day. Another 2.7 billion struggle to survive on less than two dollars per day. Poverty in the developing world, however, goes far beyond income poverty. It means having to walk more than one mile everyday simply to collect water and firewood; it means suffering diseases that were eradicated from rich countries decades ago.

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    Preventable causes

    Every year eleven million children die - most under the age of five and more than six million from completely preventable causes like malaria, diarrhea and pneumonia. Around the world, a total of 114 million children do not even get a basic education and 584 million women are illiterate.

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    Hunger

    More than 800 million people go to bed hungry every day... 300 million are children.

    Of these 300 million children, only eight percent are victims of famine or other emergency situations. More than 90 percent are suffering long-term malnourishment and micronutrient deficiency.

    Every 3.6 seconds another person dies of starvation and the large majority are children under the age of 25.

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    Water

    Every 2.6 billion people - over 40 percent of the world's population - do not have basic sanitation, and more than one billion people still use unsafe sources of drinking water.

    Four out of every ten people in the world don't have access even to a simple latrine.

    Five million people, mostly children, die each year from water-borne diseases.

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    Health

    Every year six million children die from malnutrition before their fifth birthday.

    More than 50 percent of Africans suffer from water-related diseases such as cholera and infant diarrhea

    Everyday HIV / AIDS kills 6,000 people and another 8,200 people are infected with this deadly virus.

    Every 30 seconds an African child dies of malaria - more than one million child deaths a year.

    Each year, approximately 300 to 500 million people are infected with malaria. Approximately three million people die as a result.

    TB is the leading AIDS-related killer and in some parts of African, 75 per cent of people with HIV also have TB.

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    Agriculture

    In 1960, Africa was a net exporter of food; today the continent imports one-third of its grain.

    More than 40 percent of Africans do not even have the ability to obtain sufficient food on a day-to-day basis.

    Declining soil fertility, land degradation, and the AIDS pandemic have led to a 23 per cent decrease in food production per capita in the last 25 years even though population has increased dramatically.

    For the African farmer, conventional fertilizers cost two to six times more than the world market price.

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    The Devastating Effect of Poverty on Women

    More than 40 per cent of women in Africa do not have access to basic education.

    If a girl is educated for six years or more, as an adult her prenatal care, postnatal care and childbirth survival rate, will dramatically and consistently improve.

    Educated mothers immunize their children 50 percent more often than mothers who are not educated.

    AIDS spreads twice as quickly among uneducated girls than among girls that have even some schooling.

    The children of a woman with five years of primary school education have a survival rate 40 percent higher than children of women with no education.

    A woman living in sub-Saharan Africa has a 1 in 16 chance of dying in pregnancy or childbirth. This compares with a 1 in 3,700 risk for a woman from North America.

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    Pregnancy

    A woman living in sub-Saharan Africa has a 1 in 16 chance of dying in pregnancy or childbirth. This compares with a 1 in 3,700 risk for a woman from North America.

    Every minute, a woman somewhere dies in pregnancy or choldbirth. This adds up to 1,400 women dying each day - an estimated 529,000 each year - from pregnancy-related causes.

    Almost half of births in developing countries take place without the help of a skilled birth attendant.

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    Source

    Source: www.unmillenniumproject.org/documents/3-MP-PovertyFacts-E.pdf

    • Our Mission

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      World Relief Canada’s Mission is to respond to the relief and development needs of the world’s poor in the name of Jesus Christ, through our global network of Christian organizations, in partnership with Canadian and overseas Churches.

      Our Vision

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      World Relief Canada’s Vision is to see people responding, with compassion and justice, to the needs of the poor, oppressed and suffering in ways that bring healing and transformation in the world’s poorest communities.

      Core Values

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      World Relief Canada's Core Values are the essential cornerstones upon which we do our work and are reflected in the following six areas.

      • Economic Justice
      • Transformation
      • Empowerment and Equity
      • Environmental Integrity
      • Mutual Independence
      • Financial Accountability