"It is my fervent wish, as I come together with human rights activists around the world today, that we shine the candle of hope for the forgotten prisoners of poverty.Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is people who have made poverty and tolerated poverty, and it is people who will overcome it. And overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life. While poverty persists, there is no true freedom."
- Nelson Mandela, from an Amnesty International Ambassador of Conscience Award acceptance speech on November 1, 2006
21.jpg)
.JPG)
3 comments:
Great quote Jude.
It was interesting to me that this year the Nobel Peace Prize committee chose the founder of the Grameen Bank to underscore Mandela's notion that economic development and "peace" are intertwined. He also was quoted as saying that there is nothing natural or inevitable about poverty.
I was lucky to have been able to see, hear, and blog about Muhammad Yunus (founder of Grameen Bank) who spoke at the 2006 Clinton Global Initiative meeting. He was part of the panel led by Senator Hillary Clinton about women and global poverty. What a vibrannt and intelligent soul he is. He began the microfinancing movement when he started giving poor people
credit and assisting them in their risky local business ventures. They never could have done it without his ideas and support. He inspired and enabled many NGOs around the world to begin offering small loans to women who could otherwise never get any type of credit from standard commercial banks. He has also inspired private-interest donors (including globally influential corporations) to join in with a lot of capital. Yunus has helped make believers of them - he's amazing. It's a revolutionary concept right now, and I hope that many may soon see it as the way to solve global poverty and increase opportunity for women. It's not a perfect system yet, and there will still be oversight required to ensure that borrowers aren't soaked with exorbitant interest rates on these small loans, but imagine the overall result - the political upheaval of the "old boy system" in some of these developing countries. I think it bodes well for progress in a globalized economy.
Hi Jude, Thanks for linking Sophistica World, but the url is http://www.sophisticaworld.com and the blog is http://sophisticaworld.silkblogs.com
Hope this helps,
All the Best and hugs,
Michael Pokocky
Post a Comment