The UK Department for International Development (DFID), in association with Rough Guides has created a wonderful new book called The Rough Guide to a Better World. The book is available for free in UK Post Offices starting on Monday, 29 November, or is ready for free download in a number of formats, including PDF and several e-book formats, as well as readable online in HTML format.
The book was developed to forward the eight Millennium Development Goals agreed to by nearly 190 countries at the UN Millennium Summit in September, 2000. Those goals are:
- Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
- Achieve universal primary education
- Promote gender equality and empower women
- Reduce child mortality
- Improve maternal health
- Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
- Ensure environmental sustainability
- Develop a global partnership for development
DFID found that
…lots of people are concerned about poverty, but that they aren’t sure what positive action they can take. Many in the UK also feel powerless in the face of the negative images and stories about the developing world carried by television and newspapers.
We have worked with Rough Guides to publish Better World to encourage people to become actively engaged in fighting poverty. Better World explains the challenges, the Millennium Development Goals and highlights progress that has already been made.
With a forward by Saint Bob Geldof, the book features a terrific introduction to the issues, the challenges, and the actions people can take to begin changing the world. Globalization is often looked at with great skepticism by people of my political persuasion, but it is not the process of globalization I find objectionable, it is the horribly inequitable way in which it occurs. Globalization of healthcare has helped alleviate a great deal of suffering already. As the book states:
Not many people know this… The number of children who die before reaching their fifth birthday, for example, halved between 1960 and 2001. The number of adults who cannot read or write fell from 53 percent in 1970 to 27 percent in 2001, while today twice as many people now have access to basic sanitation than did in 1975; and over the last twenty years the number of children attending primary school in the world has gone from eight out of ten to nine out of ten… if you live in a developing country – in 1960 you could expect to live until you were 46. Today you can expect to live until you are 64.
Of course, in the UK, “…men can expect to live to 75, and women to 79.” The hope for a book like this is that by reading about some of the simple steps we can all take, the next 40 years will eliminate this disparity in longevity altogether.
Oh… the title of this post? I t comes from a saying quoted in the intro to the Rough Guide: “If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.”
