Poverty reduction by bloggng

If a child in a poor nation gets infected with some disease but the parents, friends and neighbours are all convinced that the child is sick because he/she climbed a mango tree belonging to the local traditional healer/spirit medium. If the disease is so serious that the poor child dies do we say that the child died because of the disease or because of lack of correct information?

If one of the ways of defining poverty is a lack of resources then the high infant mortality rates that reduce the number of human resources is an indicator of poverty. The same can be said of literacy/numeracy levels within a population. Uneducated populations are generally poor - to a greater extent than poor populations being uneducated.

With correct information at hand one can make choices that improves lives. Isn't it widely agreed that education lifts us out of poverty? Well, that's information alleviating poverty. Though I must add that some information indirectly leads to poverty - books with titles like "How to make a bomb with grocery store ingredients" are not what I am talking about.

So what am I saying here? INFORMATION, INFORMATION, INFORMATION freely flowing throughout the globe, universal access to this information etc. These are the things that fight poverty by working on the causes and effects. EDUCATION, EDUCATION, EDUCATION. Made freely available to all will fight poverty from the root causes.

Look at the image in this blogs header. See how dark Africa is? Well, there dosen't seem to be enough power to light it up for the kids to do homework at night, or for researches to power up IT. It was enough for me to quit massspectrometry to assemble and install low power computers.

EXCHANGE INFORMATION (blogging for instance) to REDUCE POVERTY. That simple!

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