Poverty, especially in rural areas, and illiteracy go hand in hand. The majority of the world's poor, about 1 billion of the world's 5.7 billion people, live in rural areas. Of those, 500 million are children. About 40,000 people die every day from hunger-related causes, most in rural areas. About a third of the children of the developing world are failing to complete even four years of education, either because they drop out of school early, or because they never enrol in school at all. But education is no longer a numbers game. Success or failure depends now more on the quality and relevance of education.