zyOzy: activating youth in a global fight against extreme poverty and hunger.

One third of deaths - some 18 million people a year or 50,000 per day - are due to poverty-related causes. That's 270 million people since 1990, the majority women and children, roughly equal to the population of the US .

Every year more than 10 million children die of hunger and preventable diseases%u2026that's over 30,000 per day and one every 3 seconds.  

Of the 1.3 billion people living in poverty around the world, 70% are women.

Currently more than 11 million children in Africa have lost at least one parent to HIV/AIDS; that number is expected to reach 20 million by 2010.

One in four adults in the developing world - 872 million people - are illiterate - 2/3 are woman.

Universal primary education would cost $10 billion a year - that's half what Americans spend on ice cream.

Women do about 66% of the world's work in return for less than 5% of its income.

The poorest 49 countries make up 10% of the world's population but account for only 0.4% of world trade. Their share has halved since 1980.

In sub-Saharan Africa , there are currently 4.1 million people with AIDS who are in immediate need of life-saving anti-retroviral drugs.

In our world today around 2.5 billion people do not have access to improved sanitation and some 1.2 billion people do not have access to an improved source of water.

The United Nations estimates that unfair trade rules deny poor countries $700 billion every year. Less than 0.01% of this could save the sight of 30 million people.

In 1970, 22 of the world's richest countries pledged to spend 0.7% of their national income on aid. 34 years later, only 5 countries have kept that promise.