Poverty affects millions of people throughout the world. Today, 736 million people live in extreme poverty, surviving on less than 2 dollars a day. Fortunately, over the past 200 years, world poverty has been decreasing. This book explores the realities of those living in poverty, outlines the history of the issues, and examines the innovations designed to eliminate extreme poverty on a global level. Young readers will gain a greater understanding...

The teenage son of an Appalachian single mother who dies when he is eleven uses his good looks, wit, and instincts to survive foster care, child labor, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. "Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival....

In New England in the late nineteenth-century, a fatherless family, happy in spite of its impoverished condition, is befriended by a very rich gentleman and his young son.

For more than thirty years, humankind has known how to grow enough food to end chronic hunger worldwide. Yet while the “Green Revolution” succeeded in South America and Asia, it never got to Africa. More than 9 million people every year die of hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases every year—most of them in Africa and most of them children. More die of hunger in Africa than from AIDS and malaria combined. Now, an impending global food crisis...

"[The author] takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge. Arleen is a single mother trying to raise her two sons on the 20 dollars a month she has left after paying for their rundown apartment. Scott is a gentle nurse consumed by a heroin addiction. Lamar, a man with no legs and a neighborhood full of boys to look after, tries to work his way out of debt. Vanetta participates in a botched...

Sang Ly struggles to survive by picking through garbage in Cambodia's largest municipal dump. Under threat of eviction by an embittered old drunk who is charged with collecting rents from the poor of Stung Meanchey, Sang Ly embarks on a desperate journeyto save her ailing son from a life of ignorance and poverty.

Mary Roberts is a poor gutter child living in a council flat in 1950's London. When she and her sister are left at an orphanage by their mother, they don't think their lives can get any worse. Harry Evans is an orphan who finds himself, with Mary and her sister, on board a ship bound for Australia. They're sent to a farm school for children where abuse and neglect are rife. A journey that will change their lives forever, and from which they'll...

"From her first stumbling efforts as a young idealist venturing forth in Africa to the creation of the trailblazing organization she runs today, Jacqueline Novogratz tells stories with unforgettable characters. She shows, in ways both hilarious and heartbreaking, how traditional charity often fails, but how a new form of philanthropic investing called "patient capital" can help make people self-sufficient and can change millions of lives. More than...