I just watched a video describing how Scott Harrison started charity: water. The organization helps to address the basic need for clean drinking water, something that I have taken for granted for a long time now. The wells that charity: water builds helps to build communities, reduce the frequency of water-borne diseases, and free up the millions of hours lost searching for and transporting water.
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I'm grateful for the video because it helped me to break out of a funk that I've been in for almost a whole day. The video helped to remind me that there are more important things that I can spend my time doing and that I have a mission I should be working on.
The video also raised an important question: should I promote causes that I have not personally supported? In response, I am now committing myself to support, financially or through volunteer work, every cause I mention on this blog or on my Twitter account. I have to look back and plan to give to all the charities that I have promotes and keep track of my progress.
Charity: water's work also got me thinking about the UN Millennium Development goals. I did not remember what they specifically were before watching the video even though I read them during my last visit to the UN. They are:
- End Hunger: Reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day and reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.
- Universal Education: Ensure that all boys and girls complete a full course of primary schooling
- Gender Equity: Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education preferably by 2005, and at all levels by 2015.
- Child Health: Reduce by two thirds the mortality rate among children under five.
- Maternal Health: Reduce by three quarters the maternal mortality ratio and achieve, by 2015, universal access to reproductive health.
- Combat HIV/AIDS and Other Diseases: Halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS and
- Halt and begin to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases.
- Environmental Sustainability: Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs; reverse loss of environmental resources; reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water; and achieve significant improvement in lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers, by 2020.
- Global Partnership: Deal comprehensively with developing countries’ debt problems through national and international measures to make debt sustainable in the long term; In cooperation with the developing countries, develop decent and productive work for youth; In cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, provide access to affordable essential drugs in developing countries; In cooperation with the private sector, make available the benefits of new technologies—especially information and communications technologies.
You can learn more about the Millennium Development Goals at http://www.endpoverty2015.org/
Some interesting questions also popped up in my head: How best can we address these goals? Should governments be responsible or should governments give logistical/information support to those who can? How can governments affect real change that ends problems like the lack of drinking water? Should we focus on dealing with fewer sets of problems at a time?
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