Should more foreign aid be targeted to women? The NY Times recently published a special issue called ‘Saving the World’s Women: How changing the lives of women and girls in the developing world can change everything’. Here’s why women matter.
The NY Times recently published a special issue on saving the world’s women. Here’s why it matters.
Images thanks to Flickr user B. Sandman
A lot of young women are reluctant to cop to being feminists. It seems there’s a sense that feminism is done ‘n’ dusted—thanks very much for the vote, the reproductive rights and the payrise. But a recent article in the NY Times shows that while western women may feel they’re treated (if not paid) equally, the rest of the world has a long way to go. Here are some horrifying facts from the story:
- 21 percent of young women surveyed in Ghana reported that their sexual initiation was by rape
- 1 percent of the world’s landowners are women
- there are an estimated 5,000 honour killings an hour
- one woman dies in childbirth around the world every minute
- 130 million women have been subjected to genital cutting
Yeowch. But it gets worse.
The global statistics on the abuse of girls are numbing. It appears
that more girls and women are now missing from the planet, precisely
because they are female, than men were killed on the battlefield in all
the wars of the 20th century. The number of victims of this routine
“gendercide” far exceeds the number of people who were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century.For
those women who live, mistreatment is sometimes shockingly brutal. If
you’re reading this article, the phrase “gender discrimination” might
conjure thoughts of unequal pay, underfinanced sports teams or unwanted
touching from a boss. In the developing world, meanwhile, millions of
women and girls are actually enslaved.
The article, ‘The women’s crusade‘ by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl
WuDunn, is adapted from the book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women
Worldwide. I highly recommend reading the whole lengthy article, but if you don’t want to register on the NY Times website, here are a few excerpts.
“Women hold up half the sky,” in the words of a Chinese saying, yet that’s mostly an aspiration:
in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women
marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are
disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and
chaos. There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE
that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight
global poverty and extremism. That’s why foreign aid is increasingly
directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women
and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution.
Critics of foreign aid argue that there’s no correlation between aid and economic growth. The authors offer a more nuanced take.
Helping people is far harder than it looks. Aid experiments often go
awry, or small successes turn out to be difficult to replicate or scale
up. Yet we’ve also seen, anecdotally and in the statistics, evidence
that some kinds of aid have been enormously effective.…In general, aid appears
to work best when it is focused on health, education and microfinance
(although microfinance has been somewhat less successful in Africa than
in Asia). And in each case, crucially, aid has often been most
effective when aimed at women and girls; when policy wonks do the math,
they often find that these investments have a net economic return. Only
a small proportion of aid specifically targets women or girls, but
increasingly donors are recognizing that that is where they often get
the most bang for the buck.
The article also suggests that better educated and more powerful women can decrease extremism and terrorism.
It has long been known that a risk factor for turbulence and violence
is the share of a country’s population made up of young people. Now it
is emerging that male domination of society is also a risk factor; the
reasons aren’t fully understood, but it may be that when women are
marginalized the nation takes on the testosterone-laden culture of a
military camp or a high-school boys’ locker room. That’s in part why
the Joint Chiefs of Staff and international security specialists are
puzzling over how to increase girls’ education in countries like
Afghanistan … Indeed, some scholars say they believe the reason
Muslim countries have been disproportionately afflicted by terrorism is
not Islamic teachings about infidels or violence but rather the low
levels of female education and participation in the labor force.
And finally, one of the article’s most controversial passages. The writers have lived in developing countries and interviewed extensively for the book, so they’re not just pulling this out of the air—although I’ve never before seen anyone write about their observations of poverty this frankly.
WHY DO MICROFINANCE organizations usually
focus their assistance on women? And why does everyone benefit when
women enter the work force and bring home regular pay checks? One
reason involves the dirty little secret of global poverty: some of the
most wretched suffering is caused not just by low incomes but also by
unwise spending by the poor — especially by men. Surprisingly
frequently, we’ve come across a mother mourning a child who has just
died of malaria for want of a $5 mosquito bed net; the mother says that
the family couldn’t afford a bed net and she means it, but then we find
the father at a nearby bar. He goes three evenings a week to the bar,
spending $5 each week.Our interviews and perusal of the data
available suggest that the poorest families in the world spend
approximately 10 times as much (20 percent of their incomes on average)
on a combination of alcohol, prostitution, candy, sugary drinks and
lavish feasts as they do on educating their children (2 percent). If
poor families spent only as much on educating their children as they do
on beer and prostitutes, there would be a breakthrough in the prospects
of poor countries.
