From the slums of India to the backstreets of Belfast - poverty can take many a prisoner and yet it’s not an unbeatable enemy. That’s the message that the head of a key Indian urban poor development project brought to Northern Ireland this week.

From a single table offering free medication in a Delhi slum twenty years ago Dr Kiran Martin has watched Asha become a globally recognised ministry.  She says: “In India, doctors don’t go to slums – in fact that’s the last place on earth they go.”  But thanks to Dr Martin’s vision Asha is now a community health and development society that reaches almost 300,000 slum dwellers in the city of Delhi, enabling people there to transform their lives.  And it was with this message of community empowerment that she came to the province this week.

Dr Martin met MLAs in Stormont on Thursday with a clear message: “Please never forget the poor in other parts of the world.”  And she called on politicians to recognise that: “It’s all of our responsibility to share not only our wealth, but our concern and to fight poverty together.”  Addressing the issue of hidden poverty in Ireland, the inspirational Indian woman says that, “governments must look for strategies to give people back their dignity.”  The Asha model has had staggering results in Delhi where in twenty years the infant mortality rate has dropped from 100 children dying in every 1000 to just 18.

The people of Delhi’s slums face “an inhumane existence”, according to Dr Martin – with constant threat of their homes being demolished, the predatory power of the slum mafia, and of course the highly visible poverty.  Teams from Northern Ireland have seen this with their own eyes as volunteers from Ballymena and Belfast schools have visited the Asha project.  Indeed further trips lie ahead for fresh teams this October.

But as for Northern Ireland Dr Martin says it feels like a different place with “a lot more hope” in the air.  But she’d love to see peace transferred into the lives of the poorest in our society.  For her the key to that is giving people a voice and role in their own community; inspiring them to dream dreams and then to go live them out.