Make Poverty History
Published in Girlfriend, April 2007.
Millions of people around the world are standing up to make poverty a thing of the past. Here’s why.
Next time you’re feeling peeved because your mum banned you from watching Home & Away for a week, snap out of anger mode for a moment and ask yourself a few questions. Are you still in school? When you finish school, do you expect to work in a job you, at least, kind of like? Do you have access to contraception if and when you decide to have sex (meaning you can put off kids until you want them and protecting you from disease)?
If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions (or better yet, all three), lucky you – you’re doing better than millions of girls your age around the world. Across the globe, teenage girls are dropping out of schools they can’t afford to attend, getting married to people they didn’t choose, and working in jobs that are low-paid at best and exploitative at worst – all because of where they happened to be born.
But this isn’t a guilt trip or a pity party. The good news is that there are a lot of people out there who are working to put an end to inequality - Scarlett Johansson, Sienna Miller and Drew Barrymore among them. The even better news is that you can do something about it too.
What's The Problem?
We’ve all seen the heartbreaking ads on TV, and most of our parents have pulled out the “look how fortunate you are” card at one point or another (like when you were a kid and didn’t want to eat your broccoli). But there’s more to poverty than not having enough food on the table.
As a volunteer with the Oaktree Foundation, an aid and development organisation run entirely by young people, 16-year-old Laura Pontin visited South Africa last year. “You hear about all these problems that are going on, you get statistics and you see it on the telly, but when you actually go over and meet people and see how real it is, it’s another thing altogether,” she says.
While she was in South Africa, Laura visited a rural high school, where she was shown around by the school’s prefects. “It was appalling,” she says. “There were 50 kids per class, and no doors or windows.”
The Poverty Effect
Still, a school with no doors or windows is better than no school at all. In most countries, attending school is no less compulsory than it is in Australia, but actually getting there can be another matter. Most developing countries have some kind of school fee, and schools are located few and far between, making it difficult for many families to give their children an education.
And making it through school can have a serious impact on what comes after. Knowing how to read and write makes it easier to find work or to set up your own business; it makes you less vulnerable to exploitation; and it even helps you stay healthy – poor education is related to the rate of HIV/AIDS transmission.
Take almost any issue affecting our world today – disease, war, the environment – and, chances are, it’s the poor who are affected most. Something like climate change affects us all, but it affects the poor most, directly threatening their homes and livelihoods. Even in the US, the world’s richest country, it was the poorest people who suffered the consequences when Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans in 2005.
Fatally Female
For girls, these problems are magnified – especially when traditional values (read: sexism) are thrown into the mix. If a family only has the resources to educate some of its children, the ones it educates will more often than not be male. In Cambodia, many girls complete only primary school before leaving to focus on domestic duties.
Add poor job prospects and a lack of information to the equation and you’ve got a situation ripe for exploitation. In Cambodia, the trafficking of teenage girls is a serious problem. Lured by promises of a better life, girls are taken from (and sometimes even sold by) their families and sold into brothels, where they’re held in rooms, threatened, beaten and provided only with food and cosmetics. In some parts of Cambodia, more than 40 per cent of sex workers under the age of 19 are HIV positive.
Make Poverty History
The Make Poverty History coalition is growing by the day, with political and business leaders, rock stars and young people around the world coming together. The past two years have seen major developments, with a global call to action in the form of the Live8 concerts, held in ten cities around the world.
Sydney high school student Caitlin Brush, 16, says today’s teenagers are the first generation with the wealth and resources to end poverty. In her work with the Oaktree Foundation, Caitlin has spoken to politicians about why Australia should increase its aid budget, written letters to MPs, and coordinated a dinner at her school which raised $20,000.
For Caitlin, being involved in the campaign is simply a matter of ethics. “Imagine you’re walking through a forest one day and you hear someone asking for help. What do you do? You run for help. This is the same thing. These people are asking for help. It’s our responsibility to help them.”
Issy Burchett, 16, who sailed from Sydney to Melbourne as part of the campaign, feels the same way. “There are people who are just as important as us, but don’t have what we have, and they deserve to have as good a chance at life as we do.”
4 ways you can make a difference
- Know the issues. Log on to the web to get clued up on what’s going on. One.org and MakePovertyHistory.org.au are great sources of information.
- Spread the message. Write a letter to your MP, talk to your friends, or write an article for your school newspaper.
- Join a group. The Oaktree Foundation (www.theoaktree.org) and World Vision’s VGen (www.stir.org.au) give high school students a hands-on role in their campaigns. Use and develop your skills in advocacy, fundraising, media and more.
- Buy a white armband to show your support – they’re available from Oxfam (www.oxfam.org.au).
- by Rachel Hills
