Poverty photography

There were more than 1,000 entries for the prestigious Environmental Photographer of the Year 2014 award which were judged on impact, composition, originality and technical ability.

Street Children in the Philippines www.littlechildren.org #littlechildrenoftheworld #littlechildrenofthephilippines

I stare at this image a lot. I ask myself how . . . and why . . . and feel so helpless in making a difference. I know a lot of people care. I know a lot more people are living at the door's edge a paycheck away from homelessness on the streets. And that's a scary place to be. It's a scene each and everyone of us could end up in given a wrong set of circumstances or decisions.

Poverty in other countries is not comparable to the poverty in the US. As we see in this picture how families have to live in slums and even bathe in dirty water every day of their lives. According to UNICEF more than 22,000 children die from poverty each day. Pictures like these allow people to understand and get a sense of what it is like to truly live in poverty.

poverty is not an excuse for having education. #EducationIsABridgeToSuccess#SlumKid #SmokeyTours

Cleveland's child poverty rate is among the worst in the nation. And conditions aren't much better for adults.

When I was in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia recently as part of the U.S. government’s delegation to the Third International Conference on Financing for Development, I was struck by how much the international development landscape is changing. Where governments were once the primary source of development assistance, today the private sector, civil society, academia and donors are all working together to discover, fund and scale innovative solutions to longtime development challenges.