This Thursday, the members of the UN will be gathering in New York to discuss the Millennium Development Goals. The UN ambitiously hopes to end poverty by 2015. This week’s summit marks the halfway point and an opportunity to evaluate their progress.

In the last few years, celebrities have joined the campaign to raise awareness about poverty, attempting to convince us that global poverty can be eradicated by pressuring the G8. However, the celebrity campaign ironically represents the flawed approach of this approach. The poor of this world are the victims of an unfair distribution of wealth that is flaunted by obscenely overpaid celebrities like Bono, Bob Geldof, Tom Hanks, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Cameron Diaz, 50 Cent, George Clooney, Madonna, etc.

The real problem with their campaign is the way it distracts people from real solutions and avoids the fact that we need to make fundamental changes to the distribution of wealth in order to make a lasting impact on poverty.

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Care International is campaigning for significant changes to the way the international aid community tries to tackle poverty.

The world’s poorest are paying a high price for the international aid system’s failure to address factors keeping them in chronic poverty.

With food price rises adding to the problem many people just don’t have enough to eat.

Most of them live on the edge because we keep them there. Money raised to respond to emergencies often leaves them worse off than they were before.

CARE is demanding that we put a stop to this by calling for a dramatic overhaul of the system which is keeping them trapped.

Our report calls on the international community to give higher priority to recovery and prevention programmes like seed distribution and improved veterinary services so that families can pull themselves back from the edge and be in a stronger position to fight off the next emergency themselves.

Have a look at their video or read more about the report.

Barbara Crossette writes in The Nation: As the UN meets to assess its ambitious plan to heal a suffering world, the voices of billions of women who still lack fundamental rights must be heard. Read on

The Indian edition of Vogue Magazine recently published a series of photos using impoverished villagers as models for expensive luxury goods. Almost 500 million people in India live on less than $1.25 per day. Still, India’s fast-growing economy is becoming a huge marketplace for luxury goods. Vogue’s campaign highlights the unsettling wealth gap in an incredibly distasteful way.

The photographs feature people in tattered clothes holding luxury items that sell for hundreds of dollars. The models are unidentified, with the captions only indicating the brands.

Read more in The New York Times or watch the Channel 4 coverage