Community-based financing in Cambodia

“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. 

The other night, CNN carried an interview with Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn about their new book “Half the Sky”. The New York Times ran a lengthy excerpt in ‘The Women’s Crusade’.

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.

This is fascinating. Though the reality has been there for a terribly long time, it took until recent years to rise to the public radar.

After we married in 1988, we moved to Beijing to be correspondents for The New York Times. Seven months later we found ourselves standing on the edge of Tiananmen Square watching troops fire their automatic weapons at prodemocracy protesters. The massacre claimed between 400 and 800 lives and transfixed the world; wrenching images of the killings appeared constantly on the front page and on television screens.

Yet the following year we came across an obscure but meticulous demographic study that outlined a human rights violation that had claimed tens of thousands more lives. This study found that 39,000 baby girls died annually in China because parents didn’t give them the same medical care and attention that boys received — and that was just in the first year of life. A result is that as many infant girls died unnecessarily every week in China as protesters died at Tiananmen Square. Those Chinese girls never received a column inch of news coverage, and we began to wonder if our journalistic priorities were skewed.

A similar pattern emerged in other countries…

Of course, because it’s a deeply rooted in many cultures on multiple continents.

Carolyn Moynihan analyzed this “discovery that women are the world’s greatest unexploited resource”.

Education is a basic human right, and the opportunity to be gainfully employed is essential for all women who need to support themselves or their families. Ideally, that would include all young women, to increase their freedom in choosing a path in life and to remove the temptation — particularly dangerous in poor countries — of trading in sex.

It is a fair guess, though, that most women in the developing world will see their education and paid work primarily as an investment in the family — either the one they already have or the one they hope to have. Marriage and motherhood are still basic aspirations of the vast majority of the world’s women, whether they live in Kenya or Kentucky.

She does a good job pointing out the flaws in some otherwise outstanding advocacy….especially the emphasis on birth control and “reproductive rights” as a key component of women’s ‘empowerment’, which “fundamentally changes relationships in the family.” 

So the question arises: What is the ultimate vision of the new women’s crusade? Is it one that values all the potential of women, including their crucial role within the family? Or is it one that wants to subordinate women and the family to an economic and geopolitical agenda?

It depends on the organization, because all kinds of people are working to give opportunities to women.

I encountered another one a day or two after seeing the CNN interview and Caryolyn Moynihan’s article. It’s in the current Wall Stree Journal Magazine, the story of how Ford Modeling Agency heiress Katie Ford has turned her attention and energy to the global anti-trafficking cause.

Her interest in the cause began last year, when a representative of the United Nations called to ask if she would participate in a women’s leadership group that was studying human trafficking. “I said, ‘I can’t come talk about it, because I don’t know anything about it!’ ” Ford recalls. “But I went, and after two hours, I knew why I was there. The way people traffic across borders is parallel to the way we recruit models.”

Ford had planned to start a philanthropic foundation dedicated to preserving indigenous cultures…Instead, she immersed herself in learning about human trafficking, which, she realized, was a cause that perfectly matched her skill set. “The target age is 14 to 24, and so it’s similar to modeling,” Ford says. “I knew how to reach that market.” She continues, “It was the feeling of: There but for the grace of God… The girls who came to us could have been those girls.”

And in seeing all this, I recalled an inspiring radio interview I did on an outstanding business enterprise that empowers the poor in the little-known venture of microfinance.

…and it’s one of the best ‘good news’ stories you almost never hear in the media.

Fortunately and happily, that has started to change.