Poverty
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Research at the Earth Institute is organized into nine themes. Poverty is one of them.
Featured Projects and Centers:
Extreme poverty is generally defined as living on less than $1 a day—over a billion people in the world fit into this category. At the Earth Institute, researchers take a “human needs” approach and look at the root causes of extreme poverty, thinking beyond the dollars to ask whether people have the basics they need for economic growth.
Our poverty work follows the framework laid out by the United Nations Millennium Project, an initiative commissioned by the UN Secretary-General that recommended action plans for cutting global poverty in half and achieving the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. Researchers, scientists and development practitioners work together to fight global poverty by addressing its multifaceted causes: hunger and malnutrition, inadequate access to health care and education, lack of safe drinking water and sanitation, energy problems, trade barriers and gender inequality.
The following are active poverty related projects:
The Millennium Villages Project
The Millennium Villages project offers a bold, innovative model for helping rural African communities lift themselves out of extreme poverty. The Millennium Villages are proving that by fighting poverty at the village level through community-led development, rural Africa can achieve the Millennium Development Goals—eight globally-endorsed targets for reducing extreme poverty and hunger by half and improving education, health, gender equality and environmental sustainability—and escape the extreme poverty that traps hundreds of millions of people throughout the continent.
Millennium Villages take a multi-sector and integrated approach, including focusing on agriculture, health, education and infrastructure, enhanced by local capicity development in technical, managerial and participatory skills. Two years after the first Millennium Village was established, Sauri, in western Kenya, received recognition at the Africities summit for its progress in economic development.
Currently there are more than 80 Millennium Villages in 10 African countries. The project is led by the Earth Institute at Columbia University, the United Nations Development Programme, and Millennium Promise, a non-profit organization.
Global Poverty Mapping
The Poverty Mapping Project at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), was created in 2004-2005 and seeks to expand the current understanding of the global distribution of poverty, along with the geographic and biophysical conditions of impoverished communities.
Access Project
Established in 2002 to assist countries with financing and implementation of projects supported by The Global Fund, a group set up to finance a dramatic turnaround in the fight against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, the Access Project, part of the Earth Institute’s Center for Global Health and Economic Development, now focuses more broadly on improving the quality and accessibility of health care systems for the poor.
Tropical Agriculture and Rural Environment
The Tropical Agriculture Program of the Earth Institute is dedicated to addressing the interactions between agricultural production, environmental quality and human well-being. The program uses science, technology, management, and policy tools to improve environmental quality, nutrition, and farmers' incomes through sustainable agricultural practices in developing countries.
The program’s work focuses on the tropics, where expansion and intensification of agriculture is needed to improve food security, but the risk of threatening long-term environmental integrity is an issue of local and global concern. The Tropical Agriculture Program also leads the Earth Institute's Millennium Villages Project, supports the Millennium Development Goal Centers in Nairobi, Kenya, and Bamako, Mali, and administers the United Nations Millennium Project Task Force on Hunger.