This is what Africa has in abundance, space, almost 12 million square miles of desert, savanna, coastline, and people, 700 million in sub-Saharan Africa, 11% of the planets population, more than half of them children, and almost all of them poor. This too is what Africa has in abundance, poverty. Sub-Saharan Africa is 1, almost half the people here live on less than 65 cents a day, not enough money, not enough food. One in three Africans is undernourished, malnutrition is a 2 here, one in five children die before reaching the age of five. So many lives are short, 3 is just over 45 years, often less for women, who die bearing children, die of AIDS. Sub-Saharan Africa has just 4, but close to 70% of all people living with HIV, more than 29 million people. 58% of them, women. More than 16 million Africans 5, that's the population of Hong Kong, Denmark and Ireland combined. 12 million children have 6, many of them like these in Uganda HIV positive. HIV, AIDS is only one disease plaguing Africa. Malaria kills almost 7. Measles kills more than a thousand children every day. That's one child nearly every minute. Measles can 8, but in sub-Saharan Africa only about a half of all children are immunized during the first year of life. 9 in Nigeria let polio, which was nearly eradicated in the world, takes route again, spread to 17 previously polio-free countries. There is no vaccine 10; the best prevention is clean water, which more than 300 million Africans don't have. Water of any kind 11, or so distant, that the working years of many lives are spent hauling water. Work for most is hard. 12, labour as farmers, grow what they can, where they can, and get it to market however they can. Across sub-Saharan Africa economic growth is low, slow, and 13. Corruption is another kind of plague here. And so is war. One in every five Africans lives in a society 14, armed conflict has ruptured nearly half of all the countries in sub-Saharan Africa in the past 5 years. Most horribly in Liberia, Congo, Darfur, and Sudan. Uncounted millions have 15. Without stability and good government progress is limited, so is the willingness of donors to give and investors to invest to bring 16 into the modern world. To improve education, 41% of Africans cannot read or write, as many as half of all African children 17. Even those who complete high school are ill-equipped to be part of a 21st-century work force, or the technological age. Less than one percent of the African population has a computer; only one in forty owns a telephone. Yet Africa 18 beneath the surface, literally in minerals, gold, cobalt, copper, diamonds and in oil. Sub-Saharan African countries will earn more than 200 billion dollars in oil revenues 19. And Africa has incalculable wealth in its people, who are among the most perseverant and resilient on Earth, who want and have 20, and in a growing number of African countries free elections.