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The International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, as every 17^th October, calls us again to strengthen our commitment to change our world and enable millions of people to lead different lives.

Around 2 billion people globally live on just 3 dollars a day. Around 3.4 billion people live on 5.5 dollars a day.  Almost half of the world population live every day in a condition that the majority of the citizens of the North would not be able to face. Half of the world’s population!

Can we just wait and see? Even if we renew this call every year, we’ll never be tired of repeating that we need a different effort. We need justice and we need it now.

Can we just place blame? No, we want policies! Policies to transform our world now: we want fair rules for trade, effective rules for financial markets, fiscal justice to finance redistribution, universal social protection, health and education, water and food for all, sustainable and decent work for all, in a world that cares to put human persons, their dignity and intelligence at the core, instead of greed, egoism and fear.

These are the proposals we raised in the People’s Assembly Declaration, when we met in September in New York, with a huge number of organizations and movements of civil society from all over the world.

Our call could be seen as naïve. We know that some powerful people are even ready to use weapons to fight the poor, as is currently happening in the Middle East. But we know as well that we are the heirs, with a lot of friends in the world, of the struggles against slavery, injustice and war in the past centuries. Struggles that our mothers and our fathers together won.

These legacies are the jewels feeding our hope.

GCAP – the Global Call for Action Against Poverty – is calling again to fight poverty, inequalities and injustice in all their forms. We do it chanting again that We Shall Overcome.