"Every year, 9 million children die before their fifth birthday. A woman in sub-Saharan Africa has a one-in-thirty chance of dying while giving birth - in the developed world, the chance is one in 5,600. There are at least twenty-five countries, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa, where the average person is expected to live no more than thirty-five years. In India alone, more than 50 million school-going children cannot read a very simple text.
This is the kind of paragraph that might make you want to shut this book and, ideally, forget about this whole business of world poverty. The problem seems too big, too intractable. Our goal with this book is to persuade you not to."