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Jeffrey Sachs - Fighting Poverty with Connectivity
Sachs, a professor of economics at Columbia University, is one of the world's foremost experts on poverty reduction. He explains how mobile phones are decreasing economic isolation in Africa, and why we could be halfway to achieving an important goal in 2020: the end of extreme poverty.
Extract from Jeffrey Sachs on Fighting Poverty with Connectivity
Jeffrey Sachs: Jeffrey Sachs
Jeffrey Sachs: When I began the Millennium villages project, four years ago by going to impoverished places in Africa,
Jeffrey Sachs: I was quite confident that if we helped with agriculture, education, health and so forth
Jeffrey Sachs: that these places
Jeffrey Sachs: could find their way out of poverty.
Jeffrey Sachs: But even four years ago these were almost isolated parts of Africa.
Jeffrey Sachs: Within the four
Jeffrey Sachs: last years the mobile phone has arrived.
Jeffrey Sachs: If every village had wireless connectivity and it had computers in the schools,
Jeffrey Sachs: clinics, community centers and the farmer cooperatives.
Jeffrey Sachs: If community health workers or agriculture workers were carrying
Jeffrey Sachs: their cellphones, interconnected with the computers there would be no such thing
Jeffrey Sachs: as economic isolation anymore.
Jeffrey Sachs: Jeffrey Sachs doesn't think we're doing yet everything that can be done
Jeffrey Sachs: to use the power of wireless broadband and all that it will
Jeffrey Sachs: bring. But I see it before my eyes in just the last couple of years making
Jeffrey Sachs: a decisive difference. And now
Jeffrey Sachs: any village where I go, somebody has got a cell phone.
Jeffrey Sachs: Somebody can make an emergency call. Someone can find out the price
Jeffrey Sachs: on the market. Someone can start a business, empowered by the fact that
Jeffrey Sachs: they can reach a customer or a supplier. Someone can
Jeffrey Sachs: drive a taxi or a truck for that reason as well. Everything is changing quickly.
Jeffrey Sachs: What worries me is that
Jeffrey Sachs: we're so close to the edge on climate change, on food supply, on a crowded planet
Jeffrey Sachs: that we could spiral into disarray, even
Jeffrey Sachs: into violence, before we get the solutions in place.
Jeffrey Sachs: We're in a race against time. Jeffrey Sachs has said that by 2015 we
Jeffrey Sachs: could, on time, achieve the millennium development goals. So we have quantitative goals set for the year 2015. By 2025, ten
Jeffrey Sachs: years after the millennium goals we could live in a world in which extreme depravation is eliminated.
Jeffrey Sachs: What does that mean? It means everyone would have enough to eat.
Jeffrey Sachs: Everybody would have access to electricity. Everybody would have
Jeffrey Sachs: access to safe drinking water. Everybody would live in a neighborhood where there's a school and a clinic.
Jeffrey Sachs: That is Jeffrey Sachs' definition of escaping from extreme poverty. So 2020 would be smack in the middle of the success of
Jeffrey Sachs: the millennium goals and on our way to ending extreme poverty. That's what I'd like to see in the year 2020 - we made it, we
Jeffrey Sachs: achieved the millennium development goals. And look, just over the next hill is the end of extreme poverty.
Jeffrey Sachs: We could be the generation that end extreme poverty on the planet. No other generation before us could make
Jeffrey Sachs: that claim. No other generation before us had that power in our hands. What a thrill that we could be the ones to do it.
Jeffrey Sachs: Jeffrey Sachs