poverty

Billie Jean Kanion: "I've been homeless for quite some time in San Francisco. Just yesterday I was given a gift of a new apartment. It's a second start to my life. So I'm very grateful right now. There are some great people working for the homeless. I just got lucky."

Men in Bangladesh transport rice to market near the border town of Rajshahi. Rice has been cultivated in south Asia for more than 4,000 years, and today Bangladesh is the world's fourth-largest producer of rice. So does it import or export rice?

This is a microcredit bank in Nepal. It's run by Women Awareness Centre Nepal (WACN). The organization was created in 1991 by a group of women to improve the socioeconomic status of women and children, particularly from disadvantaged groups. Find out more.

Former US President Bill Clinton is using his 64th birthday on Thursday to improve lives around the world. And to do it, he's using Birthday Wish, a service of the Causes website that makes it easy to ask people to do good things on your birthday.

Street people have always been a part of the landscape in big US cities like Los Angeles and New York. But Nashville, Tennessee, Olympia, Washington, and St. Petersburg, Florida, have seen homeless populations grow as more people lose jobs and housing.

Ali Hewson is 48 today. She's the mother of four children. Her husband is Bono, the lead singer of U2. She runs a fashion business that's become part rock 'n' roll and part big business since Moët Hennessy-Louis Vuitton bought a 49 per cent stake.

Dopy, Lo, and Piss-Mouth are homeless youth who live on the streets of Berkeley, California, near San Francisco. They and their friends see their lifestyle as a choice of freedom over security. Each has lived on the streets for more than eight years.

In a 2003 interview with The New York Times, Ursula Burns, the new CEO of Xerox, said she grew up poor on Manhattan's Lower East Side with "lots of Jewish immigrants, Hispanics and African-Americans, but the common denominator was poverty."