About the Initiative
Throughout the world, over three billion people live on less than two dollars per day. The poorest -- including several hundred million inhabitants of Sub-Saharan Africa -- survive on less than one dollar per day. The existence of widespread and severe poverty throughout most of the world poses an enormous moral challenge for citizens and leaders of developed countries. The faculty and leadership of Georgetown University recognize that confronting extreme poverty and improving the human condition is the ethical imperative of our lifetimes.
Overview
With this in mind, Georgetown instituted the "Initiative on Global Development" to mobilize the university's diverse resources towards the goals of fighting poverty and ending human suffering. The university's leadership, faculty, and students, believe that academic institutions can play a crucial role in responding to the challenge of global inequality through scholarship, teaching, and the exercise of institutional agency.
The "Initiative on Global Development" seeks to achieve this mission by:
- supporting faculty research in the area of international development and providing opportunities for interdisciplinary interaction,
- expanding Georgetown's development curriculum to provide future practitioners with the necessary background to become leaders in the field,
- facilitating service opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to make an impact and to enhance their career opportunities in the field, and
- holding lectures and conferences with leading development practitioners and coordinating the university's efforts with other development organizations.
Fighting poverty, inequality, and injustice is at the very heart of Georgetown's Jesuit identity. There are many roads to realizing these goals -- promoting growth in emerging markets, providing humanitarian relief, strengthening health systems abroad, extending the rule of law, preventing and mitigating conflict, making better informed policy, advocating debt relief, debating aid effectiveness -- where Georgetown hopes to play an important role. There are few challenges more important.
We hope that this website will prove to be a valuable tool both within the Georgetown University community and beyond our campus in confronting the tensions at the center of international development.
If you would like to get involved with the initiative, please contact us.
