About the book

6.8 billion people live in our world today. Yet the economic playing field is far from level. The scourge of chronic poverty circles the globe with profound consequences:

• Ours is a world where 30,000 will not wake up tomorrow – simply due to the lack of calories to stay alive today.
• Ours is a world where more than half of us live on less than $2 a day, while the top 6% own 59% of all available resources.
• Ours is a world where millions of children will never enter a classroom and only one in a hundred will have the opportunity to go to college.
• Ours is a world where the excesses of the West bring profound limitations to the East and the South. As a result of the current financial crisis, another 100 million people are expected to dip below the $2 a day wage threshold in 2009.

Still, ours is a world that God loves, and longs to see restored to wholeness and equity. Hope endures. Faces of Opportunity is a small coffee table book that puts a face to this hope. Through short narratives and striking photos, this book shows the grassroots impact of microfinance – how business-building services like small loans are making it possible for individuals to work their own way out of chronic poverty.

The twenty women and men in this story radiate the hope that some of the great injustices of our time can be undone through some of the great sacrificial kindnesses of our time.