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exploding movement of “social entrepreneurs” who offer new approaches to supporting women in the developing world.
social entrepreneurs create their own context by starting a new organization, company, or movement to address a social problem in a creative way.
Sunitha trained the former prostitutes not only to make crafts or bind books—the kind of thing that other rescue organizations do—but also to be welders or carpenters.
Prajwala has rehabilitated some fifteen hundred young women by moving them through six to eight months of job training that will help them start new careers.
The networks and introductions that Bill Drayton made for her, as an Ashoka Fellow, also magnified her voice. It’s a prototype of the kind of alliance between first world and third that the abolitionist movement needs.
We sometimes think that Westerners invest too much effort in changing unjust laws and not enough in changing culture, by building schools or assisting grassroots movements. Even in the United States, after all, what brought equal rights to blacks wasn’t the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments passed after the Civil War, but rather the grassroots civil rights movement nearly one hundred years later. Laws matter, but typically changing the law by itself accomplishes little.
“Empowering women begins with education,”
Young people often ask us how they can help address issues like sex trafficking or international poverty. Our first recommendation to them is to get out and see the world. If you can’t do that, it’s great to raise money or attention at home. But to tackle an issue effectively, you need to understand it—and it’s impossible to understand an issue by simply reading about it. You need to see it firsthand, even live in its midst.
One of the great failings of the American education system, in our view, is that young people can graduate from university without any understanding of poverty at home or abroad. Study-abroad programs tend to consist of herds of students visiting Oxford or Florence or Paris. We believe that universities should make it a requirement that all graduates spend at least some time in the developing world, either by taking a “gap year” or by studying abroad. If more Americans worked for a summer teaching English at a school like Mukhtar’s in Pakistan, or working at a hospital like HEAL Africa in
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A growing collection of psychological studies show that statistics have a dulling effect, while it is individual stories that move people to act.
Pathos over logos.
maternal death not just as a public health concern but also as a human rights issue.
During World War I, more American women died in childbirth than American men died in war.
“Women are not dying because of untreatable diseases. They are dying because societies have yet to make the decision that their lives are worth saving.”
In most societies, mythological or theological explanations were devised to explain why women should suffer in childbirth, and they forestalled efforts to make the process safer. When anesthesia was developed, it was for many decades routinely withheld from women giving birth, since women were “supposed” to suffer.
United Nations agencies tend to be inefficient and bureaucratic, far less nimble and cost-effective than private aid groups, and probably do more for the photocopier industry than for the world’s neediest—but they’re still irreplaceable.
All told, some 25 percent of AIDS care worldwide is provided by church-related groups. “In most of Africa, these are the cornerstone of the health system,” Dr. Helene Gayle, the head of CARE, said of the Catholic-run clinics. “In some countries, they serve more people than the government health system.”
If there is to be a successful movement on behalf of women in poor countries, it will have to bridge the God Gulf. Secular bleeding hearts and religious bleeding hearts will have to forge a common cause. That’s what happened two centuries ago in the abolitionist movement, when liberal deists and conservative evangelicals joined forces to overthrow slavery. And it’s the only way to muster the political will to get now-invisible women onto the international agenda.
A society that has more men than women—particularly young men, is often associated with crime or violence. The historian David Court-wright has argued that one reason America is relatively violent, compared to Europe, is the legacy of a male surplus. Until World War II, the United States was disproportionately male, and the frontier was overwhelmingly so. The result, he suggests, was a tradition of aggressiveness, short tempers, and violence that still echoes in America’s relatively high homicide rates. The same analysis, while controversial, may also help explain why male-dominated Muslim
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At the other extreme of effectiveness is Sakena Yacoobi, a force of nature who runs an aid organization called the Afghan Institute of Learning. Short and stout, her hair bundled in a scarf, waving greetings to one person while bantering in rapid-fire English with another, Sakena is perpetually in motion. Perhaps the reason fundamentalists haven’t silenced her yet is that she herself is an Afghan Muslim, less threatening than an outsider. American organizations would have accomplished much more if they had financed and supported Sakena, rather than dispatching their own representatives to
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“Every day there is a death threat.” She laughs. “I’m always changing cars, changing bodyguards.” It pains her, as a pious Muslim, that some fundamentalists want to kill her in the name of Islam. She leans forward and becomes even more animated. “From my heart, I tell you: If they were educated, they would not behave like that. The Koran has quotation after quotation that says you must treat women well. Those people who do bad things, they are not educated. I am a Muslim. My father was a good Muslim, and he prayed every day, but he did not try to marry me off. There were many offers for me
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If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. —DEREK BOK
ORGANIZATIONS SUPPORTING WOMEN These are some of the groups that specialize in supporting women in developing countries. In addition, of course, there are many outstanding aid groups, such as International Rescue Committee, Save the Children, and Mercy Corps, that are not listed because women are not their focus. This list is not exhaustive but a rather quirky compendium of groups we’ve seen in action. It’s a starting point for further research. Two useful Web sites to consult for more information about aid groups are www.charitynavigator.org and www.givewell.net. 34 Million Friends of UNFPA,
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