Why Are We Here?

In many parts of the world, women and girls as young as 8 are trapped.

Trapped :

• By their society
• By their family
• By their circumstances
• By their poverty
• By their ignorance



Today it remains the case that over a billion people live in extreme poverty – having less than $1 per day to live on.

Life expectancy in Malawi in 2000 was only 37 years compared with 77 for the UK. Twelve million children in Africa have been made orphans by the AIDS pandemic and in some communities women in particular have never even heard of AIDS let alone know how to avoid it. So far, more than 15 million people in Africa are estimated to have died from AIDS – more than the highest estimates of the Iraq war, the Rwandan genocide, the Khmer Rouge regime and the holocaust combined.