Fight Poverty with Linguistics?

Maybe you haven't thought of linguistics or Bible translation as helping to alleviate poverty? What about literacy or bilingual education or the many other aspects of the type of development work that our organization is involved with?

OK... I hear some of you skeptics out there... so let me give you one example:

The Millennium Development Goals were adopted by 189 United Nations member states to be achieved by 2015 Goal #1 is to Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.

This is how our work in Adult literacy can dramatically impact a community:

Income improvement and hunger relief within ethnolinguistic communities is achieved when life-changing information is communicated in a language that people understand well. Higher literacy rates often result in higher per capita incomes.  Just imagine having a book that you can read to learn more about good nutrition for your family, or as a farmer to be able to read a book dealing with improved farming methods and you can get an idea of how this might work.

If you'd like to read how we are working with others to meet these goals, you can find it here:

Thanks to http://www.canil.ca for the picture which we really like!