Over 800 million people suffer from chronic hunger, and over ten million children die each year from preventable causes. These may seem like overwhelming statistics, but as Stephen Smith shows in this call to arms, global poverty is something that we can and should solve within our lifetimes. Ending Global Poverty explores the various traps that keep people mired in poverty, traps like poor nutrition, illiteracy, lack of access to health care, and others and presents eight keys to escaping these traps. Smith gives readers the tools they need to help people overcome poverty and to determine what approaches are most effective in fighting it. For example, celebrities in commercials who encourage viewers to "adopt" a poor child really seem to care, but will sending money to these organizations do the most good? Smith explains how to make an informed decision. Grass-roots programs and organizations are helping people gain the capabilities they need to escape from poverty and this book highlights many of the most promising of these strategies in some of the poorest countries in the world, explaining what they do and what makes them effective.
About the Author, Stephen Smith
Stephen C. Smith is Professor of Economics at George Washington University. He lives in Reston, Virginia.
This book grew out of the author's effort to respond to a question his wife posed to a development economist: How should they allocate their charitable giving among the numerous worthy-sounding groups that aim to reduce poverty? There has in fact been an enormous reduction in world poverty in recent decades due to rapid economic growth in some very poor countries, most notably China and India. Smith contends that although growth creates a favorable environment for reducing poverty, it does not automatically ensure it; too many poor people are caught in poverty traps of various kinds. His book offers sensible guidelines to both individuals and corporations about how they can help, but its main contribution is to describe the successes of many programs on the ground, ranging from programs to improve nutrition to those working on education or microcredit, often run by local nongovernmental organizations, which have emerged to fill the gaps left by incompetent or corrupt governments. Many of these success stories rely on women, who are determined that their children should have better lives than they have; the men who typically control governments do not fare well in these accounts.
