Ellie's Run For Africa

Facts About Africa

By The Numbers

• In Africa, $25 helps to put a kid in school by providing uniforms, books and shoes.
• In Africa, $7 can feed one person for a month; educate two children for one school term; save one person’s life from malaria; and provide clean water to seven Africans for a year. (1)
• Kibera, Kenya is a slum where over 800,000 people live in an area just over one square mile.
• Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 24% of the global disease burden and only 3% of the world’s health workforce. (2)
• Every forty seconds, a child in Sub-Saharan Africa dies from a mosquito bite. (3)
• 12.1 million African children have lost one or both parents to HIV/AIDS. (4)
• 22 million Sub-Saharan Africans are infected with HIV/AIDS – composing 2/3 of the worldwide total. (5)
• In 2006, 1/2 of the children – aged six months to three years in the Guidan Roumdji district of Maradi, Niger – suffered from acute malnutrition. (6)
• Up to 2.5 million innocent Darfur civilians have been forced to flee their homes and now live in internally displaced-persons camps in Sudan due to political unrest and violence. (7)

What’s Happening to Help?

Several organizations – like Ellie’s Run for Africa, The Mocha Club, African Leadership, Doctors Without Borders and others – realize that every little thing we can do makes an impact in places all over the world.

Fortunately, larger organizations also realize the need for action. In 2000, leaders from 189 nations signed on to the Millennium Development Goals – a set of eight ambitious targets designed to reduce global poverty and disease by 2015. (8)

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.
2. Achieve universal primary education.
3. Promote gender equality and empower women.
4. Reduce child mortality
5. Improve maternal health
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
8. Develop a global partnership for development

Remember, you can take part in fighting these global issues. Become a hero.