The Global Citizen Festival

The new website Global Citizen hosted a music festival in New York's Central Park over the weekend. The Global Citizen Festival's goal was to build awareness of battling poverty world wide. Between sets of music, concert goers heard from celebrities on what is going on in the rest of the world. Neil Young and Crazy Horse, The Black Keys and the Foo Fighters were some of the headliners.

From the New York Times, writer Jon Pareles tells us more about the purpose for the concert.

Global Citizen, the Web site and festival, grew out of the Global Poverty Project, which strives to end extreme poverty: the situation of more than 1.4 billion people trying to subsist on less than $1.25 a day. The Global Poverty Project works with nongovernmental organizations worldwide, spanning education, women’s rights, public health, including providing mosquito nets and malaria treatment as well as training midwives to help eradicate polio in the three countries where it remains endemic. It was noted that Mr. Young is a polio survivor.

Concertgoers received free tickets by enrolling an e-mail address with Global Citizen and then performing certain actions through the Web site, including watching videos, spreading information via social media and doing something for a partner organization.

During equipment changes there were video clips, activists and celebrities — among them Katie Couric, Selena Gomez, Olivia Wilde and Katharine McPhee, as well as the economist Jeffrey D. Sachs — detailing poverty-related death tolls and efforts to change them. The concert’s hosts called for actions like sending a poverty-related tweet to the presidential candidates.

Leaders of organizations from India, Haiti and Somalia got rock-star-size ovations. But the audience was there for the music; Foo Fighters fans started shouting for the band before the Unicef pitch ended.

Introducing Global Citizen

Technology can do a lot to improve the fortunes of those in poverty. Technology can build awareness through blogs like our own. The hope is that the awareness can prompt many into action.

Technology applications can also improve access to the world economy to the bottom billion. Online micro-credit platforms and mobile money transfer apps give the poor more opportunity than ever before. 

Hugh Evans and Simon Moss have started a website called Global Citizen to build awareness and inspire action. The pair wrote this op-ed piece for the Huffington Post to promote their new website.

They're using technology that was pioneered in countries like the U.S. to fight poverty themselves. M-Pesa, a mobile money transfer service for people without bank accounts, has more than 17 million customers across sub-Saharan Africa. Ipaidabribe.com has crowd-sourced more than 20,000 reports of officials who demanded bribes in India, and has now expanded to Kenya, Indonesia, Pakistan and Zimbabwe.

Closer to home charities, campaigners and fundraisers are using technology to create a generation of global citizens, who alongside being American, Cubs fans and New Yorkers, also see themselves as part of the wider world, and people who will stand up and use their money, their networks, and their voices to ensure that we create a world without extreme poverty.

It's in this vein that we recently launched Global Citizen, a new platform for people here in the U.S. and around the world to learn more about the progress that's being made in international development and take action to build the movement to end extreme poverty forever. Combining articles, videos and infographics about the issues with actions like signing petitions, sharing to social networks and donating, Global Citizens can earn points for taking action, and, over time, get access to rewards that recognize their contributions.

Since the launch of Global Citizen 42 days ago, it is clear that the issue of global poverty resonates with everyday Americans. More than 70,000 users have signed up to take action and earn tickets to the Global Citizen Festival on September 29. There have been more than 61,000 tweets using the hash-tag #GlobalCitizen in the past three weeks.