Specifically women in poverty. Why a focus on women? Here's why:

• Seven out of 10 of the world's hungry are women and girls, according to the UN World Food Program.
• Of the 37 million people living below the poverty line in the US, 21 million are women, according to US Census Bureau figures from 2006.
• More than two-thirds of the world's unpaid work is done by women -- the equivalent of $11 trillion or almost 50% of world GDP, according to a global UNDP study from 1995. The informal slogan of the Decade of Women was "women do two-thirds of the world's
• Women in the US earned only 77 cents for every $1 earned by a man in 2005, according to the Institute for Women's Policy Research. In the developing world, the ratio is just 73 cents, according to World Bank estimates. For women of colour, the gap is even worse -- African American women earn 63 cents and Latinas 53 cents.
• Two-thirds of children denied primary education are girls and 75% of the world's 876 million illiterate adults are women, reports the Millennium Campaign in 2007.
• The UN Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women reported in 2001 that eliminating gender inequality in the labour market in Latin America would both increase women's wages by about 50% and increase national output by 5%.

-- womenfightpoverty.org

Education is the key to fighting poverty here in Chicago, the United States and around the globe. We could take the old adage and say that if you give a girl a loaf of bread her family eats for the day, but teach the girl to read you feed a family for life. Many organizations are working on educating girls around the world, including the World Wildlife Federation. Yeah, the panda people!

And we can't keep looking across the oceans to battle poverty either. It's right here in our country, on our block: according to the Pew Hispanic Center (PDF), "Hispanic women are twice as likely as non-Hispanic women to live in poverty; 20 percent of Hispanic women are poor compared with 11 percent of non-Hispanic women."

There are plenty of organizations we can get involved with or send money to in order to combat poverty. It won't be easy, but together we can do it.