Last week, 25-year-old Hugh Evans, a former young Australian of the year, launched the Global Poverty Project at a landmark meeting of the United Nations in New York alongside Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Foreign Affairs Minister Stephen Smith.

Mr Evans said the project was inspired by Al Gore's climate change campaign and would feature a documentary aimed at kick-starting grassroots action.

"The campaign to end extreme poverty has lost momentum, partly because of the focus on climate change, yet sadly there are still more than one billion people living on less than a dollar a day.

"At the rate we're going, we will fail to meet the UN Millennium Development Goals that we set in order to halve extreme poverty by 2015.''

He said the world's richest nations needed to increase their foreign aid from 0.5per cent to 0.7per cent of their gross national income.

"The difference, although it might sound very small, could potentially save the lives of an additional 2000 children within our region whose livelihoods are in jeopardy from extreme poverty. Australia is making progress with bipartisan support for a commitment to 0.5per cent GNI in foreign aid by 2015, but we've got plenty of ground to make up from past neglect and we still only rate 15 out of 22 world aid donors.''

Mr Evans became interested in the poverty issue when he went to the Philippines as a 14-year-old World Vision ambassador.

"I stayed with a family living in the slums of Manila. Their house was built on top of a garbage tip. It got me engaged with these issues and I started seeing that the challenge of ending extreme poverty is not only about making a difference on a grassroots level, but also on a systemic political level.''

He formed the Oaktree Foundation, a youth aid and development program based in Australia, which since 2003 has raised more than $1million for various causes.

Details: globalpovertyproject.com