How We Can Help
Global poverty is too large a problem for any one person to solve, but
each of us can still transform the lives of thousands of people.
While it is difficult to help directly, we must not forget our most important
advantage: on a world scale, we are very rich. We can thus pay
for efficient services in health and education which, though desperately
desired, are out of the reach of those in poverty. If the typical US citizen
gave 10% of their income to the right NGOs, then each year they could:1
- Distribute 700 mosquito nets, preventing 1,900 cases of malaria and
6 deaths
- Cure 170 people of tuberculosis, preventing 8 deaths
- Save 1,100 years worth of healthy life
- Provide 1,100 additional years of school attendance
Read through that list again and consider that we could each acheive
one of these great benefits every single year. Read it through
and try to imagine the scale of those numbers: to see the individual names
and faces in your mind. Pick out one of these individuals and try to imagine
the huge effect this will have on his or her life. It is just staggering.
In a single week we can perform something like a miracle: saving a life,
or restoring sight to the blind. Over our lives, we can each perform thousands
of these ‘miracles’, leaving behind a remarkable legacy. Moreover,
we can do all of this without leaving our countries, without leaving our
preferred jobs, and without even giving up any parts of our lives that
are truly important to us.
We clearly have a duty to do at least this much. We can
do something of extreme moral importance without sacrificing
anything of comparative value. How could we look these people
in the eye and justify our failure to give even such a small
amount? Isn't this the least we could do?
Many people flee from these facts and try hard to forget them, but we
needn't do so. Instead, we can embrace the facts and simply decide to
give generously. This is what the members of Giving What We Can
have done. We've each made a public pledge
to give at least 10% of our incomes to where we believe it will do the
most to fight poverty. Whatever our incomes, we will all have a tremendous
effect on thousands of lives. We don't seek any praise for this as it
seems to us to be the least we could do. What we do want is for others
to join us in this endeavour:
to share advice on the most effective ways to help, and to give what we
can.
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