Blog Action Day: Poverty

Today is Blog Action Day 2008 and this year’s topic is poverty. Blog Action Day aims to raise awareness about a specific issue by having thousands of bloggers blog about a single chosen topic on the same day. For my post, I want to take a look at how new media can help to fight poverty.

• Jobs
  While one could argue that new media threatens some job descriptions, it has also created hundreds of new job types and employed hundreds of thousands of people (me included). New media also gives you new ways to find jobs in any industry with sites like Workopolis, Monster and even the business social networking site LinkedIn.
• Knowledge
  With unlimited information at your fingertips, you can learn something about almost any topic imaginable. Prestigious institutions like MIT have free course material online. You can even earn a degree online from various universities. Knowledge and education aren’t free tickets out of poverty, but they do help.
• Fundraising
  Charities have flocked to new media and most accept donations online. The Causes application on Facebook is one of the most popular and there are countless Facebook groups dedicated to numerous issues, including poverty.
• Investing
  Some argue charity is bad for poverty, that investments do more to help. Kiva is one new media project that aims to battle poverty by empowering anybody to micro-lend to entrepreneurs in distressed regions. Brilliant.
• And of course, raising awareness about the issue through campaigns like Blog Action Day.

This is not to say that these initatives aren’t doable without new media, but new media is an enabler that can be used to help fight poverty.

What other ways do think new media could help poverty?

Tags: blog action day, poverty

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.