Today is Blog Action Day which this year is dedicated to Poverty. Bloggers around the world have signed up to blog about this important and comprehensive topic.

Three bloggers, Collis Ta'eed, Leo Babauta and Cyan Ta'eed, launched Blog Action Day on 15th October 2007. Last year’s theme was on The Environment and we participated with our own blog entry.

We want to join Blog Action Day again this year, together with around 9,000 bloggers who have already signed up.

I looked up a few statistics to prepare for our Blog Action Day entry and found some rather depressing facts.

Poverty Facts and Stats: Did you know that three billion people live with less than two dollars a day; or that nearly a billion who entered the 21st century are unable to read a book or sign their names?

But what is poverty? Poverty has many aspects. It means to have no or not much money; it means not to have shelter; it means hunger; it means unemployment… Poverty is powerlessness. It particularly constitutes a threat in developing countries.

So what can we do? The United Nations Millennium Campaign to end poverty by 2015 has set its goal to end poverty in the next seven years. This means to end hunger, enable children to receive education, support gender equality, promote child and maternal health, combat HIV and similar diseases and promote environmental sustainability.

As the leading Information Technology (IT) corporation in the world, we at HP try to combat poverty with the help of our core competencies. i.e. by providing knowledge, skills and our technology.

According to the Millennium Development Goals Report 2007, the average global unemployment rate of people aged 16-24 is 14%. It is significantly higher in regions such as North Africa (30%) and the Middle East (23%). Did you know that, even though unemployed or low income earners might have access to a computer, they do not know how to use it? This is also a form of poverty that we try to address, for example, through our flagship programme Graduate Entrepreneurship Training through IT (GET-IT).

I think that micro-enterprise development is one of the most effective ways of creating jobs and addressing poverty. With GET-IT, we foster business development by providing young people with IT skills so that they can enter business life more easily and even start their own business. GET-IT creates entrepreneurs and addresses problems of unemployment and low economic growth.

Let me share with you some encouraging success stories of GET-IT: In Russia, 51% of women participating in GET-IT trainings said that they have improved their social status through the programme. 11% of those have found a job. I was delighted when I heard about that.

We also work closely with local non-governmental organisations to set up GET-IT centres. NGO representatives are trained by our partner MEA-I so that they can then train young graduates. We know very well that both the education deficit and poverty rate in African countries are quite high and so we have also established a partnership with UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization) and plan to open more GET-IT training centres in African countries in the future.

Poverty constitutes a global issue which clearly cannot be healed by one player alone. Instead, it is up to everyone of us to consider what he or she can do to improve the situation and to act accordingly. I think that the theme of poverty is great as a Blog Action Day topic. We need to continuously raise awareness and show how small and big things can be achieved. I cannot wait to read some entries of other Blog Action Day participants.

Jeannette Weisschuh, Head of Global Citizenship, HP EMEA