What more in the name of love?

What more in the name of love.

Bono and the End of Poverty.

U2 singer Bono has been actively covered in the press lately, not for his latest CD, but for his stand on world poverty. Time magazine recently named Bono one of it' s "Persons of the Year" alongside Bill and Melinda Gates. The increased giving to human aid projects around the world has even come to be known as the "Bono Effect." So what is a rocker doing digging so deeply in the causes and cures of world poverty and does he have a message that we should all listen to? In the foreword to Jeff Sachs' groundbreaking new book The End of Poverty the rock-star turned humanitarian has these things to say about global poverty:

Hunger, disease, the waste of lives that is extreme poverty is an affront to all of us.

Fifteen thousand Africans dying each and every day of preventable, treatable diseases - AIDS, malaria, TB- for lack of drugs that we take for granted. This statistic alone makes a fool of the idea that many of us hold on to very tightly: the idea of equality.

Equality is a very big idea, connfreedom freedome, but an idea that doesn't come for free. If we're serious, we have to be prepared to pay the price. Some people will say we can't afford to do it. I think we can't afford not to do it.

We can be the generation that no longer accepts that an accident of latitude determines whether a child lives or dies. We can't say our generation didn't know how to do it. We can't say our generation couldn't afford to do it. And we can't say our generation didn't have reason to do it.

Bono knows what he is talking about. He has invested himself heavily in the crusade to end extreme poverty on the planet and knows it is within our reach to do so. That sounds perhaps like a pipe dream. Few of us have taken on the task of really imagining that extreme poverty could be eliminated on the planet and within our lifetime. Many of us have come to believe that extreme poverty is a persistent fact of life that will not go away no matter how much time and money is invested in its eradication.

In the next few newsletters, we'll examine more closely what can be done about extreme poverty and discuss Jeff Sachs' claim that we have it within our grasp to eliminate it by the year 2015.