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Poverty is a global problem, and the entire human family will have to contribute to the solution.

As the first female secretary general of Caritas Internationalis, the worldwide humanitarian agency of the Catholic Church, Lesley-Anne Knight is hopeful but pragmatic. Women are under-represented in the confederation of 162 national agencies (Catholic Relief Services and Catholic Charities U.S.A. in the United States), and she hopes her appointment will help change that.

Her gender, though, doesn't matter day to day. "I have a job to do and I am trying to do it to the best of my ability, just as anyone would," Knight says.

She was elected to a four-year term as the leader of Caritas in 2007 because of her 25 years of experience working on development and humanitarian issues. The Zimbabwe-born British citizen has lived in eight countries and speaks five languages. "Growing up in Zimbabwe and going to university in apartheid-era South Africa left me with a profound awareness of injustice," she says.

Knight is realistic but confident about taking on the world's problems because humankind does so together. This hopeful attitude comes from her faith. " ‘I say to you, whatever you did for these least brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me,' " Knight says, referring to Matthew 25:40. "Jesus'

words...remind us of a universal truth: Whatever our race or religion, we are all part of one humanity."

What's the state of global poverty today?

Our world today is as unjust as ever. Because of globalization, we are now so much more acutely aware of our human interdependence and interconnectedness, which makes the ongoing reality of poverty and injustice all the more scandalous.

You will remember that when the Asian tsunami struck in December 2004, it killed 230,000 people. The same number of people die every five days from the effects of extreme poverty. That is the scale of the problem. The United Nations estimates around 18 million people die every year from hunger and preventable diseases related to poverty.

Poverty, however, is not just about people dying. It is about people living today and knowing that tomorrow they will not eat, living with disease, living without proper housing, living without education, living without clean water and sanitation, living with no sense of personal safety or security.

How can the world meet such overwhelming challenges?

I see three key areas that could make a huge difference: aid, trade, and debt relief. Clearly, an increase in development aid is urgently needed, but aid alone is not enough. It must go hand-in-hand with coherent and just policies on trade and debt.

It is estimated that poor countries lose out on more than $2 billion a day as a result of unfair trade policies such as subsidies, tariffs, and dumping-14 times what they receive in aid. If the remaining debts of the poorest African countries were canceled, the money they would have spent on debt repayments could be redirected to poverty reduction.

Two other really pressing issues for the 21st century are violent conflicts and climate change. Out of the 40 humanitarian appeals that Caritas launched last year, 28 were climate-related. The expected results of climate change-rising sea levels, violent storms, floods, drought, encroaching deserts, diminishing supplies of glacier water, and erratic weather patterns-have the greatest impact on people living in poverty in developing countries, those who are least able to adapt to these changes.

The links between climate change and violent conflict, too, are particularly worrying. Increasing pressures on natural resources-in particular water, minerals, and oil-coupled with food shortages and crop failures strain fragile social and political systems. For instance, drought has been identified as one of the factors contributing to the conflicts in Darfur.

Conflict reduces people's capacity to adapt to climate change, producing a vicious circle that worsens poverty and hampers development efforts. We just need to look at Sudan, the Congo, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, East Timor, Indonesia. Campaigns to tackle climate change must be linked to development and to emergency humanitarian programming.

What role does Caritas play in poverty relief?

We are entering a whole new phase for our confederation. We need to modernize and we need to professionalize. We need to take stock of the expertise we have and focus on making the greatest impact. I think one of our tendencies in the past has been to be spread very thinly, to be doing a lot of work around the world and yet not knowing where to focus to make the biggest difference.

That doesn't mean that our core programs-professional, rapid assistance in emergencies and our development programs-aren't priorities. But increasingly we need to be able to speak out about the root causes of the injustice that we deal with on a daily basis. We have a moral obligation and a legitimate voice to ensure that policy makers in governments know the realities of the poor.

There will clearly be a shift toward ensuring that our advocacy messages, our research work, the positions we take-on conflict resolution, climate change, the increasing number of female migrants and refugees, the delivery of aid, or issues of trade and debt-are robustly researched. We need to have policies to put on the table. We need to ensure that we have a very good position at the table-be that with national governments, the European Union, the United Nations-and that we are credible and respected because of our expertise on the ground with poor communities.

Does this mean that Caritas is evolving from simply an emergency relief agency into an advocacy group?

I think there was a perception that all we did was relief work, but the reality is that all of our Caritas organizations have been doing some advocacy work, even though they receive very little recognition for it. We need to give advocacy the position that it merits and become a respected, legitimate voice that can speak up on development issues.

But I wouldn't say everything's now going to be advocacy. First and foremost, our global Catholic network deserves recognition alongside the Red Cross, the world's largest humanitarian organization.

If there's a disaster tomorrow in Nepal or Paraguay or Zimbabwe or the Congo or Somalia, there is a Caritas organization and a network of our volunteers who can spring into action within 24 hours. As a Catholic organization committed to total human development, we were there before the emergency struck. We know the local context and empower local people to take development forward in their own hands. Our global humanitarian network has enormous potential, but it often isn't acknowledged.

The new challenges of the 21st century require us to be flexible. There's climate change, ongoing violence, terrorism, and we need to know our positions on these issues. We owe that to the poor with whom we work.

For instance, one of our key concerns, especially in the West, is terrorism, but often we don't link it to its root causes. We create more security for ourselves-through military action, tighter borders-instead of addressing the injustice or poverty that causes it.