- Poverty affects all of us … it attacks the very foundation of our society.
- It erodes self-respect and personal dignity.
- It is at the root of most violence.
- It undermines our safety and destroys our stability.
- It cripples our workforce, reducing our collective productivity.
- It ensures that the majority of our people remain unemployable, because of lack of education.
- It discourages foreign investment.
- It destabilises the very foundations of business: the expansion of a robust consumer base.
- Economically empowering and socially uplifting those less fortunate than ourselves is a strategic imperative that we, as South Africans, must engage in if we hope to sustain the measure of development and social stability we have achieved since 1994.
As South Africans, we are, each of us, confronted on a daily basis by human beings who need so much more than we are able to give: The pregnant young mother selling newspapers in the rain, the blind beggar assisted by a child who should be in school, the unemployed neighbour who has resorted to stealing, the old mother walking painfully slowly up the hill, carrying a grandchild whose mother had died of AIDS …
"These are our children.
We will all profit by,
or pay for,
whatever they become …"
— James Baldwin
