The Solution

Caveat: I am going to talk about poverty and AIDS. They are becoming increasingly present in my thoughts, because, well Africa will do that to you.

Assumptions:
1. I admit, throwing money at a problem does not necessarily fix it.
2. Rich people are really rich.
3. The problem has a pretty simple solution.

The catalyst is this: Business Week - 50 Most Generous Philanthropists, which is quite interesting and sad at the same time. Look through it, but I did some analysis for us. These are some of the main topics and the number of people who had it listed under their main causes. The list is not exhaustive.

Education 30
Art 14
Health 11
Children/Youth 8
Medical research 7
Social causes 6
Science 6
Environment 5
Humanitarian 3
Cancer 2
Libraries 2
Conservation 2
Poverty 1 *In Oklahoma
Animals 1
Civil rights 1
Eradication of obesity and diabetes 1
Science about life's big questions 1
Unleashing human potential 1 *microloans

The one and two word descriptions don't do justice to some of the causes, and some can be grouped together, but I wanted you to get any idea of these causes.

At first I wanted to complain about how these people chose to give away their money. Clearly I have no right to do that and it wouldn't do any good. What I would like to do, though is to highlight the potential for giving and how it can really impact the GLOBE and not just certain interests.

Some of the biggest issues today are poverty and AIDS. Here are some statistics:

Poverty.Com: "About 25,000 people die every day of hunger or hunger-related causes, according to the United Nations. This is one person every three and a half seconds."

World Health Organization: "In 2007 33.2 million [30.6 – 36.1 million] people were estimated to be living with HIV, 2.5 million [1.8 – 4.1 million] people became newly infected and 2.1 million [1.9 – 2.4 million] people died of AIDS."
"...68% of the global total, are in sub-Saharan Africa. Eight countries in this region now account for almost one-third of all new HIV infections and AIDS deaths globally."

So, when I looked at the causes that these top 50 people donated to, I wondered, how could you choose a library over a country with starving people (including the streets of USA)? How could you choose an Ivy League University over the 1 billion people who do not have access to safe drinking water? New Life International

But, look at the slideshow on the top givers and their causes, there are some neat things being done there, and I respect that too. Here are some comments that stuck out to me:

Ira Fulton, #42: "I have fun making money," says Ira, "but I have more fun giving it away."

T. Denny Sanford, #17: He gathers feedback from children to inform his giving and has funded a children's hospital, modeled after a medieval castle to entertain children while they heal.

George Kaiser, #3: Kaiser has said he plans to increase his gifts "until I die with $1 left, assuming I can get the timing just right."

Bill and Melinda Gates, #2: To help measure effect and constantly innovate its giving model, the Gates Foundation created an Impact Office in 2006 to improve its programs, track progress, and build effective giving models in the future.

So, what's the point? Well if even one of these givers focused on a developing country, they could feed literally every person in that country enough to survive on a daily basis. (23 cents per meal that has all the nutrients a person needs to survive on one meal a day, Kids Against Hunger) They could provide safe drinking water to everyone.

Lets make this practical, take the 1 billion people without access to safe drinking water worldwide. "Access" means that they get their water from a contaminated source. New Life International, see the link above, developed a water purifier that costs $1,000. They state that the operational costs of the purifier are about $1 per person, per year. They are quite simple, and the locals can be trained to operate it very easily. One purifier can service an entire village, which for the sake of calculation we will say is 1,000 people. There are 1,000,000 "villages" of people around the world without safe water. So $1 billion could purchase purifiers for all of these people. You would need another $1 billion of operational costs per year. So it would cost $2 billion to provide safe drinking water to all of the people around the world who need it.

On the list of 50 people, the total amount given in the last 4 years was... 71 billion dollars.

If that action were taken, 3,800 children a DAY would not have to die. World Vision

So, can't we do more?