You may have heard of Matt Napier, Australian anti-poverty advocate, long distance trekker and motivational speaker, who in August 2016, walked 2296 km across Southern Africa to raise awareness about global poverty.

On June 16, the Canberra local will embark on his next adventure, walking 1,850 km through Namibia in Southern Africa. Over the course of three months, Matt will trek through the treacherous Namib Desert, which he says the locals call “the land God created in anger,” accompanied by his wife, Wendy, who will drive the support vehicle. The pair will then continue up along the Skeleton Coast, and expect to finish up at the Angolan border in early August.

As well as funding the venture from their own pockets, the Napiers recently launched two crowd-funding campaigns to raise money for communities experiencing poverty.

Read More: Why This Australian Is Walking Across Africa

Partnering with Empower Projects and Caritas Australia, they aim to raise enough funds to provide “safe drinking water and access to toilets for several villages in Zimbabwe” as well as “permaculture training to schools in Malawi to help improve long term food security.” The couple hopes to raise $40,000 by the time they return to Australia, in order to get the projects up and running as soon as possible.

Read more: Trump’s Plan to Slash Foreign Aid is Out of Step with History

Global Citizen spoke to Matt about his upcoming adventure and the experiences which led him to become an anti-poverty advocate.

Matt first became aware of global poverty as a result of the news coverage surrounding the Ethiopian famine of 1984-85, which led to the deaths of around 1 million people, according to One.

However, it wasn’t until he visited Nepal in 2007 that he had his first up-close experience of extreme poverty. Shaken by the starvation and needless loss of life that he witnessed there, Matt eventually went on to found his awareness raising campaign, Walk to a Better World.

The campaign operates around a central philosophy of giving a leg up rather than a hand out.

“We want to work with the locals and empower them,” Matt explains, giving an example of one Zimbabwean village who needed money for school uniforms for their children. “Instead of just giving them $2,000 for uniforms we decided to put that money towards a chook pen for the village,” he says. “From there they’d sell the chooks in the marketplace,” allowing them to make “over $2,000 per year. So they could afford new uniforms every year now if they needed them, or the excess money could be used on community projects.”

Read More: Matt Napier Sets Off Walking Across Africa

Matt’s experiences in Africa have profoundly impacted his world view, opening “his eyes to how materialistic we are in the developed world,” and really highlighting some of the simpler joys of life. “It amazes me that you can walk into a village where children live a very basic lifestyle” and watch them “kicking around a makeshift soccer ball, and you can’t wipe the smiles off their faces. Money certainly doesn’t buy happiness.”

He shares how, after arriving in Botswana in 2016, he was woken on the first morning by the sound of a villager, riding a ute and calling into a megaphone for everyone to gather to welcome him to the country. “The whole village turned up, around 500 in total,” he says, “and the chief gave us an amazing welcome and performed some of their native dances which were fantastic. The people are so warm and welcoming.”

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Matt also had some sad stories to tell. He says an especially confronting moment for him occurred in a slum in Maputo, Mozambique, where he met a single mother of three. She lived in a basic 2mx2m corrugated iron house, prone to flooding whenever it rained, and was the sole caregiver for her children who suffered from HIV AIDS, mental illness, and paraplegia, respectively. She had also previously lost a fourth child. “Seeing her situation really broke my heart, ” Matt says.

Despite the hardships he has witnessed, Matt remains hopeful, and says he will continue to advocate to alleviate poverty, as well as in other areas he is passionate about such as refugees, foreign aid, and action on climate change.

“I can start to feel a change amongst the younger generations, about our social responsibilities to help the poorest in the world,” he says. “I hope that together we can all become better global citizens.”

You can follow Matt’s journey at Walk to a Better World.

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This Australian Man Is Walking 1,850 Kilometers in Africa to Raise Awareness for Global Poverty

Ein Beitrag von Sarah Wood