On Ending Extreme Poverty

In the year 2000, the leaders of the world gathered to respond to the startling statistics of poverty at the start of the new millennium. More than one billion people still lived on less than $1 dollar per day. Over 115 million children did not go to school. Four out of ten people in the world did not have access to a simple latrine. Two out ten had no source of safe drinking water. More than half a million women died per year from complications of childbirth that are almost completely preventable. The world leaders agreed to a framework to end extreme poverty that are called the Millennium Development Goals.

Through my job at the journal Feminist Economics, I had the opportunity to interview Professor Caren Grown about the Millennium Development Goals and efforts like microlending that are meant to end extreme poverty, especially for women and children. Dr. Grown has worked with the World Bank, the International Center for Research on Women, and the MacArthur Foundation and her research is extremely well respected in economics and policy studies. Her experience working across academia, foundation, and major institutions puts her in a special position to comment on international action to address gender inequalities, especially at the macroeconomic level. She has published several books, most recently The Feminist Economics of Trade (Routledge 2007), and co-edited a number of collections. I am posting an excerpt of a talk she gave at Rice University along with my interview of her. The whole piece was originally aired on 90.1 KPFT in Houston on a show called Border Crossings.

Click on the title of the talk to give it a listen: Poverty, Gender, and the Millenium Development Goals: Debates, Progress, and Ways Forward.