A Wealth of Information: ORU Professor Works With UN to Increase World Knowledge

Think of the word "poverty." What leaps to mind? The general connotation is lack of material resources, but in the developing world, there are other kinds of poverty as well.

Including poverty of information.

Dr. Dwight Davidson, Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education, knows this firsthand, which is why he has been working with an evolving effort through the United Nations called InfoPoverty.

"InfoPoverty is an effort to draw countries and non-profit entities together to formulate ways to use technology, primarily the use of internet and the capabilities that come from that, to help reduce the poverty," says Dr. Davidson. "The Bible is replete with verses of how we need to look out after the children, the poor, the hungry, and I see this as a new type of potential technological missionary work."

The goal of the InfoPoverty initiative is self-sufficiency among impoverished communities, but the road to this goal is a long one that needs Spirit-empowered minds along the way.

"Our eventual hope is that they could offer this to some of our ORU students as they graduate and go into missionary work," Dr. Davidson says. "Their education, coupled with the equipment and material that can be made available through InfoPoverty, as well as the support from the UN, could give them a running start on impacting the world."

"We're empowering people within these impacted communities to have the skills and technology to do these things for themselves."