about the issue: fast facts

Preventable Disease

Every 30 seconds, an African child dies from malaria, more than one million child deaths a year.

Every year 11 million children die, most under the age of five and more than 6 million from completely preventable diseases like malaria, diarrhea and pneumonia.

Five million people, most of them children, die each year from water-borne disease.

Extreme Hunger

900 million people suffer from chronic hunger.

We currently produce more than three times the food it would take to feed every man, woman, and child on the planet yet:

More than 800 million people go to bed hungry every day, 300 million are children.

Almost 100 billion pounds of food is wasted in America each year.

9.6 million Americans, including 3 million children, live in household s that experience hunger.

More than 40 percent of Africans, do not even have the ability to obtain sufficient food on a day-to-day basis.

5 million people (slightly less than half the entire population) in Zimbabwe alone will need international food assistance this year.

Extreme Poverty

2.5 billion people live on less than $2 per day.

35.9 million people live below the poverty line in America including 12.9 million children
One in five children live in poverty in rural America. A woman living in sub-Saharan Africa has a 1 in 16 chance of dying in pregnancy. This compares with a 1 in 3,700 risk for a woman living in North America.

More than 2.6 billion people, over 40 percent of the world’s population, do not have basic sanitation and more than one billion people still use unsafe drinking water.

Lack of Education

Around the world, a total of 114 million children do not even get a basic education and 584 million women are illiterate.

More than 40 percent of women in Africa do not have access to a basic education.

The children of a woman without five years of primary school education have a survival rate 60 percent lower than children of women with education.