The MDR Committee recently concluded a very successful Membership Action Plan Seminar (MAPS) in Kuantan. Thanks to the generosity of RC Kuantan the MAPS was organised at no cost to Rotarians and my special thanks to AG Dato’ Annamalai for a great job. There were 38 participants and todate the total number of participants for all 4 MAPS conducted in Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Ipoh and Kuantan is 236 Rotarians. I would like to record my sincere appreciation to PDG Leslie Salehuddim , who has been an exemplary Advisor to our committee and an outstanding servant to Rotary. He has presented at all 4 MAPS and his contribution has proven invaluable. I would also like to record my thanks to Pres Peter Boyd, PP Dayal and AG Dato’ Saranpal Singh, who acted as panelists in a very useful and honest panel discussion on how we can create a better impact for Rotary in the East Coast. My thanks also to AG Dato’ Annamalai for moderating the session.
PP Dr Siva Ananthan sharing a light moment with the Rotarians
The panel discussion drew a lot of vital discussion on the subject of membership development challenges
The good and participative attendance is a clear indication that our Rotarians are committed to growing District 3300, which has for the last so many years stagnated in terms of membership growth. Thailand has 4 Districts and the Phillipines has 10 Districts. It is time we emulated their example and thought about how we too can grow exponentially.
Let us look past the pettiness of small politics and focus on the bigger picture. We just hit the magic mark of 7 Billion people on the planet. The human population is growing at an alarming rate and together with that the magnitude of human problems and misery. Organisations like Rotary International and people like Rotarians are what stands between a manageable situation and total mayhem. I use the phrase manageable situation with the maximum possible latitude.
According to the Millenium Project (www.unmillenniumproject.org), more than one billion people in the world live on less than one dollar a day. Another 2.7 billion struggle to survive on less than two dollars per day. Poverty in the developing world, however, goes far beyond income poverty. It means having to walk more than one mile everyday simply to collect water and firewood; it means suffering diseases that were eradicated from rich countries decades ago. Every year elevenmillion children die — most under the age of five and more than six million from completely preventable causes like malaria, diarrhea and pneumonia.
In some deeply impoverished nations less than half of the children are in primary school and under 20 percent go to secondary school. Around the world, a total of 114 million children do not get even a basic education and 584 million women are illiterate.
Following are basic facts outlining the roots and manifestations of the poverty affecting more than one third of our world.
Health
■ Every year six million children die from malnutrition before their fifth birthday.
■ More than 50 percent of Africans suffer from water-related diseases such as cholera and infant diarrhea.
■ Everyday HIV/AIDS kills 6,000 people and another 8,200 people are infected with this deadly virus.
■ Every 30 seconds an African child dies of malaria —more than one million child deaths a year.
■ Each year, approximately 300 to 500 million people are infected with malaria. Approximately three million people die as a result.
■ TB is the leading AIDS-related killer and in some parts of Africa, 75 percent of people with HIV also have TB.
Hunger
■ More than 800 million people go to bed hungry every day…300 million are children.
■ Of these 300 million children, only eight percent are victims of famine or other emergency situations. More than 90 percent are suffering long-term malnourishment and micronutrient deficiency.
■ Every 3.6 seconds another person dies of starvation and the large majority are children under the age of 5.
Water
■ More than 2.6 billion people — over 40 per cent of the world’s population—do not have basic sanitation, and more than one billion people still use unsafe sources of drinking water.
■ Four out of every ten people in the world don’t have access even to a simple latrine.
■ Five million people, mostly children, die each year from water-borne diseases.
Agriculture
■ In 1960, Africa was a net exporter of food; today the continent imports one-third of its grain.
■ More than 40 percent of Africans do not even have the ability to obtain sufficient food on a day-today basis.
■ Declining soil fertility, land degradation, and the AIDS pandemic have led to a 23 percent decrease in food production per capita in the last 25 years even though population has increased dramatically.
■ For the African farmer, conventional fertilizers cost two to six times more than the world market price.
The devastating effect of poverty on women
■ Above 80 percent of farmers in Africa are women.
■ More than 40 percent of women in Africa do not have access to basic education.
■ If a girl is educated for six years or more, as an adult her prenatal care, postnatal care and childbirth survival rates, will dramatically and consistently improve.
■ Educated mothers immunize their children 50 percent more often than mothers who are not educated.
■ AIDS spreads twice as quickly among uneducated girls than among girls that have even some schooling.
■ The children of a woman with five years of primary school education have a survival rate 40 percent higher than children of women with no education.
■ A woman living in sub-Saharan Africa has a 1 in 16 chance of dying in pregnancy or childbirth. This compares with a 1 in 3,700 risk for a woman from North America.
■ Every minute, a woman somewhere dies in pregnancy or childbirth. This adds up to 1,400 women dying each day — an estimated 529,000 each year—from pregnancy-related causes.
■ Almost half of births in developing countries take place without the help of a skilled birth attendant.
Now more than ever, the Rotary mission is vital. My friends let us take up the reins into our hands and build an eddifice of service that will stand the test of time and serve for posterity. We need to work together and we need to work now. Rotarians are people who make a difference and refuse to surrender.
