News: World record number of people stood up against poverty.
A worldrecord breaking 117 million people in 131 countries stood up last weekend as part of a United Nations-led campaign demanding world leaders to keep their promises to halve extreme poverty and achieve the other Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by their target date of 2015.
Over 8,000 events were held around the globe, from Afghanistan and Burundi to Thailand and Uganda, as part of the “Stand Up and Take Action against Poverty” campaign held from 17 to 19 October.
The exact number of registered participants was 116,993,629 people. That’s almost 2% of the total world population! The break down:
* Africa: 24,496,151
* Middle East region: 17,847,870
* Asia: 73,151,847
* Europe: 951,788
* Latin America: 211,250
* North America: 123,920 (1)
* Oceania: 210,803 (1)
This event broke the Guinness World Record for the largest social mobilization on a single issue ever. (Full)
More posts on The Road about activism and poverty.
(1) Note: These figures were originally not included, but updated later.
Picture courtesy UN
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Peter. Flemish, European, aid worker, expeditioner, sailor, traveller, husband, father, friend, nutcase. Not necessarily in that order.
2 comments:
Interesting to note that USA and/or North America is shining with its abscense in the listing.
@anonymous:
You were right. I wrote to them this afternoon, and they answered: "Thank you for the information, this was an omission and has now been corrected".
Meanwhile, the figure is still not updated on their homepage, but were updated in their blog and press release. I updated the figure later in my blog post (added with a footnote).
Bottomline is still:
1/ It is a sign it was ommitted in the first place.
2/ There is quite a disparity between figures in North America and the rest of the world, no?
It seems to be mostly the poorer countries to remind the worldleaders about the MDG...
P.
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