there are many different ways of helping people in extreme poverty there are
reliable organizations you can find them online
they've been independently audited and assessed they will use your money very
well very cost-effectively and they will save lives one way of doing that is to
provide cataract surgery for people who have cataracts here in the United States
many people develop cataracts as they as they get older I think I'm probably
gonna have to have my own cataracts removed before very long but that's not
an issue for me it's covered by by health insurance and even if people are
really poor in the United States they don't have health insurance then
Medicaid or Medicare will will do it for them but in many poor countries they
can't afford it so if they develop cataracts even though it's quite simple
to remove them they will slowly lose their vision and be blind for the rest
of their life there are organizations like the Fred Hollows foundation and
Seaver which will use your donation to do cataract operations in poor countries
and they often have trained people local doctors to do them like dr. brewer too
has performed hundreds of thousands of operations and so that's one example of
how you can help another example is repairing a condition
called obstetric fistula so as the name implies this is something that happens
during childbirth usually for girls who have children before their bodies are
really mature or perhaps they're malnourished and so in any case they're
not very strong and on top of that they don't have any medical care during
childbirth because they're living in some village in a rural area where they
have no medical attention so occasionally then something will go
wrong with the birth the baby will get obstructed in the birth process and is
unable to get out to be born and so is wriggling and kicking - such a long time
that the baby wears a hole in the uterus and through two sometimes the bladder
sometimes the bowel sometimes both then assuming the the baby does eventually
get born and the woman survives she is an incontinent either of urine or feces
or maybe both now in these conditions in rural areas with poor hygiene there's no
way that she can keep clean so her husband is quite likely to get rid of
her basically to throw her out and she may go back to her family but the family
also can't really cope with somebody who smells bad and can't keep clean so they
may build her a little Hut at somewhere away from the family home and
essentially she's then gonna be an outcast for the rest of her life and as
I say often these are quite young women but this this fistula this hole can be
repaired it can be repaired relatively cheaply maybe seven seven hundred and
fifty dollars so you can donate to the fistula foundation they can use the
money to perform the surgery essentially you're giving let's say an 18 year old
girl her life back which otherwise would be ruined and she can then go back to
having a normal life so that's another thing that's clearly I think a very good
thing to do one more example which may be in a way goes more to the roots of
poverty there's an organization called village enterprise which helps people in
villages to develop small businesses small enterprises themselves and it's
been shown that what you need to succeed in this is a combination of things you
need to give them some asset that they don't have maybe it's a some cash so
that they can buy a little motor scooter or something and do something with that
or maybe it's chickens so that they can produce eggs and sell the eggs or a
market stall then you need to give them some training in how to run the kind of
business that they've got the asset to run and you also need to get together
with other people in the village it's usually women to form a sort of support
group support group where they talk to each other about their problems but also
if they're making money they pool their say
and if somebody needs a bit of help than they can get a loan from that to bridge
them over a difficult time so Village Enterprise does all of those things and
it's been shown through very careful control trials that this does help the
people to get out of poverty and boost the village as well because there's more
commerce going on in that village so it's a successful way to help people who
otherwise don't have opportunities to work their way out of poverty to do
exactly that