The Scholar Ship Hunger Banquet and Creative Capitalism

From a Hunger Presentation made on the Scholarship following the Hunger Banquet
 Over 2 billion people are now living in poverty (<$2/day) and over 1 billion in ‘utter poverty’ live with hunger (< $1/day)

 Worldwide, out of a population of 5.5 billion, 840 million people live with chronic hunger

 Three dimensions of hunger
 Insufficient availability of food
 Shortfalls in the nutritional status of children
 Child mortality, attributable to under-nutrition

 90 percent of the world’s undernourished children live in just 36 countries, notably low- and middle-income countries, which has resulted in mortality and overall disease burden

 8.8 million people die of hunger-related causes each year

 More than 3.5 million mothers and children under 5 die unnecessarily due to under-nutrition and millions more are permanently disabled by the physical and mental effects of a poor dietary intake in the earliest months of life

 10% of these deaths can be attributed to emergencies (e.g. war or catastrophic weather)
 Most hunger deaths are due to:
 Chronic malnutrition caused by inequitable distribution
 Inefficient use of existing food resources
 Micronutrient deficiencies and/or common infectious diseases, such as diarrhea


January 24, 2008, World Economic Forum Davos, Switzerland: Excerpts from Remarks by Bill Gates, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation:

“The great advances in the world have often aggravated the inequities in the world. The least needy see the most improvement, and the most needy see the least—in particular the billion people who live on less than a dollar a day.
There are roughly a billion people in the world who don't get enough food, who don't have clean drinking water, who don't have electricity, the things that we take for granted."

" Why do people benefit in inverse proportion to their need?
Market incentives make that happen.
In a system of pure capitalism, as people's wealth rises, the financial incentive to serve them rises. As their wealth falls, the financial incentive to serve them falls—until it becomes zero. We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well."

" I like to call this new system creative capitalism—an approach where governments, businesses, and nonprofits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world's inequities...What unifies all forms of creative capitalism is that they’re market-driven efforts to bring solutions we take for granted to people who can't get them. As we refine and improve this approach, there is every reason to believe these engines of change will become larger, stronger, and more efficient."

"We are living in a phenomenal age. If we can spend the early decades of the 21st century finding approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits and recognition for business, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce poverty in the world. This task is open-ended. It can never be finished. But a passionate effort to answer this challenge will help change the world.”