Photo: David duChemin (c) The BOMA Project
At the BOMA Project, our mission is to help vulnerable people in some of the world’s poorest and most remote regions–the drylands of Africa–become self-sufficient and forge their own paths out of extreme poverty. Our proven poverty graduation model has already impacted more than 116,000 women and children in Northern Kenya since 2009, and we firmly believe that extreme poverty can be eradicated in our lifetimes. But the road will not be easy. In this important essay in the New York Times, Bill and Melinda Gates, founders of the Gates Foundation, discuss the challenges ahead as we and other organizations work to achieve the UN’s #1 Sustainable Development Goal: End poverty in all its forms, everywhere.
“As extreme poverty disappears from many places…it gets more and more concentrated in the most challenging places in the world. Poverty is especially stubborn in a group of about a dozen countries in sub-Saharan Africa marked by violent conflict, severe climate change, weak governance and broken health and education systems. More and more, extreme poverty will be a feature of life only where people’s opportunities to overcome it are brutally limited.” –Bill and Melinda Gates, New York Times, September 22, 2018
By empowering women to become self-reliant, productive members of their communities, we can help break the generational cycle of poverty afflicting millions living in the remote areas that represent the true last mile of social and economic isolation. Our vision of reaching 1 million women and children by 2022 is audacious but attainable, and helping to achieve SDG #1 is too. Please join us.