The Changing World


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A Dollar A Day, Part ONE
	Almost half the world's population lives on less than a dollar a day. In this BBC World Service series, Mike Wooldridge looks at what it's really like to have to live on a dollar a day and how it can mean different things in different countries. He investigates whether the global target of halving world poverty by 2015 can really be achieved.
PART 1	Poverty was a key issue in the recent elections in Kenya and the unrest that followed. This series starts in the months before the election, in Kaimosi, Western Kenya. It is here that Mike meets Isaiah, his disabled wife and six grandchildren. They live on the little they can grow on their small plot of land and the paltry seven to ten dollars a month he makes from growing tea. By contrast, their neighbors Francis and Christine are both able to work, growing and selling maize, mending bicycles and making bricks. Between them they make about two dollars a day, and own one mosquito net. Mike Woodridge examines the hopes and prospects of Kenyans as they struggle to make ends meet.

PART 2	Ayacucho, in the Peruvian Andes, was the birthplace of the Shining Path Movement that waged a bitter conflict against the government during the 1980s and 90s. Thousands lost their lives - or disappeared. Today, ten years after the conflict ended, Mike Wooldridge reports from Ayacucho, which remains one of the poorest areas of Peru. He also looks at a new government program that attempts to help the poor by giving women the equivalent of a dollar a day in return for sending their children to school and vaccinating them.

	Click here to listen to A Dollar A Day, Part Two

THE CHANGING WORLD is the sister documentary series of PRI's The World. Each week, we offer American radio listeners two in-depth documentaries from the BBC World Service that probe issues critical to our understanding of our evolving world.

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