Angelina Jolie Targets World Hunger

Sept. 13, 2005 — -- The spotlight is nothing new to Angelina Jolie. Now, the tabloid favorite is working to deflect the attention that follows her every move to a part of the world that is often forgotten -- Africa.

"Africa is beautiful, marvelous, smart people, strong people, strong country and has a potential to be so much," Jolie told "Good Morning America" in advance of the release of a new MTV documentary chronicling her trip to a village in Kenya with Dr. Jeffrey Sachs of the U.N. Millennium Project. "I'd love to see Africa flourish because I think it would just … It's magnificent and it has so much hope, so much possibility."

Wednesday's MTV premiere of "The Diary of Angelina Jolie & Dr. Jeffrey Sachs in Africa" coincides with the opening of the U.N. Special Summit on Millennium Development Goals. In 2000, almost 200 world leaders vowed to work toward reducing extreme poverty, disease and hunger by 2015.

"This is not emergency relief," said Sachs, director of the U.N. Millennium Project. "This is an opportunity to solve poverty once and for all. It's not charity. It's an investment, an investment that could help make the world a safer place."

In Sauri, a group of small villages in Kenya, support from the U.N. provides bed nets to keep away mosquitoes carrying malaria, fertilizer to grow crops, school lunches so every child is assured one meal a day, school equipment, and anti-retroviral drugs for every person living with AIDS.

Jolie was in Sauri the first day a computer was delivered to the school.

"The first time they saw the computer, they weren't that excited," Jolie said. "Then I realized, of course they're not, because to them it was a weird box. So they've gone to the Internet from zero to 60."

Jolie has been a U.N. goodwill ambassador since 2001, and has traveled to 15 countries. For Jolie, the pictures of devastation following Hurricane Katrina were all too familiar.