Poverty is the worst form of violence.

The Numbers


11,000,000: There are over 11 million children in Sub Saharan Africa who have been orphaned by AIDS.

4,000,000: The UN predicts the number of people needing urgent food assistance will increase to 4 million in the first three months of 2008.

5000%: Zimbabwe’s current inflation rate, a world record.

90%: Percentage of Zimbabwe’s population is living on less than $1 a day – this often means they are living on pennies.

70%: Percentage of deaths in children under 5 in Zimbabwe that are caused by HIV/AIDS.

35: The life expectancy for women in Zimbabwe. 35 and falling.

20%: In Zimbabwe, more than 20% of young women are infected with HIV/AIDS. Poverty perpetuates this disease as women turn to the sex industry for money, contraceptives become scare, medicines are too expensive, mothers do not get prenatal care, education is rare, and sexual violence rates increase. HIV/AIDS is then passed onto their children.

1%: At this moment, only a fraction of 1% of the population can afford one meal a day.

But the statistics only get us so far.

Millions of people in Zimbabwe need your help: finding a solution to their hunger, healing their ailments, earning a living wage, and mending their families, community, and country.

These women, and other women worldwide, deserve to live past their 35th birthday.

It is the right of every person to earn a living wage. It is the right of every person to have access to healthcare. It is the right of every person to live.

Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic poverty, which robs people of the freedom to satisfy hunger, or to achieve sufficient nutrition, or to obtain remedies for treatable illnesses, or the opportunity to be adequately clothed or sheltered, or to enjoy clean water or sanitary facilities.
Amartya Sen
“Development as Freedom”

There is no doubt that the only correct way to love the poor will be to struggle for their liberation. Their liberation will consist, first and foremost, in their liberation at the most elementary level – that of their simple, physical life, which is what is at stake in the present situation.
Father Sobrino

God is inflexibly opposed to evil in any form. The root of the downfall and the misfortune of humanity comes from the deliberate opposition to truth, which is the fundamental reality of God and of human beings.
Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi