As I’ve described in this book’s introduction, Young Women for Change (YWC) is challenging old customs and is growing dramatically. Recently fifty young men and women marched from Kabul University to the offices of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission carrying placards that called for women’s rights in the streets of Afghanistan and handing out pamphlets that explained their position about street harassment. Some bystanders were shocked by the brazen behaviour of the young Afghans, but the majority of onlookers accepted the pamphlets and joined the marchers.
In an initiative that suggests they are trying to inspire another Banksy, the iconoclastic British graffiti artist whose work is brilliantly displayed on the wall that separates Israel and the West Bank, YWC launched an art competition in January 2012 that invited artists to create posters to promote the organization’s causes. The rules stipulated that the work must embrace gender equality, women’s power, the peaceful campaign for women’s rights, the participation of women in society with a focus on the elimination of violence and street harassment. Such a contest would have been absolutely unheard of even a few years ago.
The resulting works were hung all over Kabul City, featuring such slogans as STOP THE VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN, DON’T BEAT ME, LET US GO TO SCHOOL, I WANT TO GO OUTSIDE WITHOUT FEAR OF HARASSMENT and MORE THAN 75 PER CENT OF KIDS IN AFGHANISTAN FACE FORCED AND EARLY MARRIAGE. One of the male recruits of YWC, Zafar Salhei, said, “We printed 1500 posters and put them up in crowded places where people would see them. Our aim is to change the mind of people.” Some of the posters were damaged by critics who saw women’s rights as the work of the Devil; some were totally destroyed; but most stayed on the walls of Kabul’s buildings, sending out a message of change. Women and girls are seen in a different light in the Afghanistan of today. Not everyone is in favour, of course, but women like Dr. Samar and Commissioner Anwari continue to promote change, and the young generation is leaping at the opportunity.
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Measuring the changes by wins isn’t always the best strategy. These women I’ve described fighting for change in the Middle East, in Swaziland and in Afghanistan know that it takes time to reform laws and attitudes, and patience too. But they also know that, at last, their voices are being heard, that the status quo is not sustainable and that victory is out there.
FIVE
Breaking the Cycle of Poverty
Equality for women and girls is … a social and economic imperative. Where women are educated and empowered, economies are more productive and strong. Where women are fully represented, societies are more peaceful and stable.
—UN SECRETARY GENERAL BAN KI-MOON
The economist Jeffrey Sachs has a view of poverty and the economy that tips a lot of dismal thinking upside down. Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and adviser to the UN on Millennium Development Goals, whose aim is to reduce poverty, hunger and disease by 2015, he says, “If you treat the symptoms, your patient will die. If you treat the causes, you will save the patient.” Simple words. Profound truth.
One of the most remarkable examples of Sachs’s idea of treating the causes not the symptoms of poverty can be found with Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi banker, economist and founder of the Grameen Bank, an institution that has been providing microcredit—small loans to poor people possessing no collateral—since the mid-1970s. Yunus was among the first to see women as the way forward, the way out of the intractable cycle of poverty. And the success of his strategy of extending microcredit to women has become a legend. I was fortunate enough to hear the story first-hand at the State of the World Forum held in New York City in September 2000, where Yunus was a luncheon speaker, along with former chief of the US defence staff Colin Powell. Powell went first.
A tall man, broad-shouldered and seemingly comfortable with the mantle of power he wore, Powell addressed a room of approximately fifteen hundred delegates. His remarks about the state of the world’s security almost exactly a year before 9/11 were well received with a round of polite applause. Then Yunus came to the stage. A short man wearing a Bangladeshi shalwar kameez, he required a step at the podium to be able to see his audience, and even then he was barely visible. Speaking conversationally in his characteristically soft voice, he quickly created a hush: people held their breath so as not to miss a single word. He told us he’d been working at a bank in Dhaka when he got the idea that ultimately launched the Grameen Bank. Each day on his way to work he walked by a group of women using bamboo to make stools and tables and trays. He and the women wished each other good-morning, sometimes commented on the weather, and the encounter soon became part of his daily routine. One day curiosity made him stop to speak to the women, which is how he discovered that they were paying a lender usurious fees for cash to buy their bamboo. At work that day, he suggested to his colleagues that the bank lend money to these women at an honest rate. They were dumbfounded. “Lend money to poor people? Unheard of. You’ll never get it back.”
Yunus pondered their reaction for a long time, and then he decided to lend the women the money himself. “I made a list of people who needed just a little bit of money. When the list was complete, there were forty-two names. The total amount of money they needed was $27. I was shocked.” He had figured out that the women were not only paying too much interest on the loans but, worse, the arrangement they’d made included selling the finished product to the lender, who was grossly underpaying them. “I wanted to give money to people like these woman so that they would be free from the moneylenders to sell their product at the price which the markets gave them, which was much higher than what the trader was giving them.”
That was in 1976—it was the beginning. Soon he was lending money to poor men as well as poor women but discovered it was the women who paid back his loans in total and on time. His Grameen Bank stopped lending to men and became the lender to poor women—and a household word around the world. His philosophy: lend money to women and they will break the cycle of poverty; lend it to men and they will spend the money on themselves. “My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see.” Then he said, with characteristic understatement, “Poverty is unnecessary.”
He was speaking his truth: “We have created a society that does not allow opportunities for those people to take care of themselves because we have denied them those opportunities.” The prolonged applause he received spoke for the agreement that the delegates to the State of the World Forum had for the Yunus method of breaking the cycle of poverty.
In 2006, Yunus and his Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for developing microcredit into an ever more important instrument in the struggle against poverty. His methods were praised the world over, but some in Bangladesh resented a native son they believed was rising disproportionately in the ranks of the famous. In a highly controversial move, the government of Bangladesh fired him from his post as managing director of Grameen Bank in 2011, claiming he had started it without proper permission and also asserting that Yunus, then seventy, had failed to retire on time. Yunus and his bank are appealing the decision.
In the meantime, his lesson lives on. Increasingly, economists see women as the solution to poverty. For example, the World Economic Forum Gender Gap Report shows that where the gender gap is nearest to being closed in a range of areas—including access to education and health care, economic participation and political participation—countries and economies are more competitive and prosperous.
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The first-ever economic summit on women, sponsored by the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation organization (APEC), was held in September 2011 in San Francisco. Hillary Clinton, U.S. secretary of state, was the keynote speaker at the gathering, which drew the largest number of foreign diplomats to the city since 1945, when representatives of fifty nations had gathered there to sign the United Nations Charter.
The room was filled with the w
ho’s who of the business of the economy, which many saw as a portent of the future of women. Hillary Clinton certainly did. She opened her address with this: “To achieve the economic expansion we all seek, we need to unlock a vital source of growth that can power our economies in the decades to come. And that vital source of growth is women. With economic models straining in every corner of the world, none of us can afford to perpetuate the barriers facing women in the workforce. By increasing women’s participation in the economy and enhancing their efficiency and productivity, we can bring about a dramatic impact on the competitiveness and growth of our economies. Because when everyone has a chance to participate in the economic life of a nation, we can all be richer.”
Backroom strategists have long warned elected officials about the perils of being too honest, of daring to talk about issues that are controversial. But Clinton was fearless. She has always said the unsayable, whether talking about China’s high abortion rate of female fetuses during her trip to that country or, in Congo, claiming that conflict is better settled by women. She has also regularly employed a tactic unusual in a politician: citing concrete statistics to back up her claims. At the Economic Summit, she called for “a fundamental transformation, a paradigm shift in how governments make and enforce laws and policies, how businesses invest and operate, how people make choices in the marketplace.” She was taking a page from Muhammad Yunus’s book, writ large. “As information transcends borders and creates opportunities for farmers to bank on mobile phones and children in distant villages to learn remotely, I believe that here, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are entering the participation age, where every individual, regardless of gender or other characteristics, is poised to be a contributing and valued member of the global marketplace.” In essence, she said, “a rising tide of women in an economy raises the fortunes of families and nations.”
There are plenty of statistics to back up her claims. For example, The Economist reports that the increase in employment of women in developed countries during the past decade has added more to global GDP than China has. In the United States, a McKinsey study found that from 1972 to 2012 women went from holding 37 percent of all jobs to nearly 48 percent; in terms of their contribution to the bottom line, they were punching well above their weight.
But Clinton also highlighted the realities that women face. “A web of legal and social restrictions limit their potential,” she said. She was referring to women who are confronted with a glass ceiling that keeps them from the most senior positions; women who don’t have the same inheritance or property rights as men, so they can’t inherit property or businesses owned by their fathers; women who are unable to have citizenship conferred on their children, which leaves the rights of the children in limbo. Some countries charge women higher taxes than men, deny women loans, prohibit them from opening bank accounts, signing contracts, purchasing property, owning businesses or filing lawsuits without the permission of a male guardian.
These strictures have to change, Clinton argued, for reasons of survival: “When we liberate the economic potential of women, we elevate the economic performance of communities, nations and the world.”
She cited a Goldman Sachs report that shows how reducing the barriers to female labour force participation would increase America’s GDP by 9 percent, increase the eurozone’s by 13 percent and Japan’s by 16 percent. The same report claims that unlocking the potential of women by eliminating the gender barrier in the workplace would improve economies, including those of China, Russia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and South Korea.
It seems to be working in the United States. In her book The Richer Sex, Liza Mundy, an award-winning Washington Post reporter, refers to “breadwomen” as the new normal and says that, today, 40 percent of American women earn more than their male partners. She estimates that within a generation this percentage will grow, until for the first time in human history women will earn more than men. She charts not only why this is inevitable, but also why it is a state much to be desired, by both women and men, because to quote from her subtitle, “the New Majority of Female Breadwinners is Transforming Sex, Love and Family.”
Research on women and the economy shows that women save more money than men, that they use their money to feed and educate their children, and as a result their families are healthier and better educated. But in many countries such statistics fall on deaf ears. Despite Jeffrey Sachs’s analysis that the status of women and the economy are directly linked, there are countries, such as India, where the economy is red hot and the status of women deeply unacceptable. India can boast that some of its most prominent people are women political leaders and bankers and investment company chief executive officers. But as Isobel Coleman cautions, “Look at the local village level, where women are bought and sold like chattel, honour crimes are promulgated by local unelected leaders, female fetuses are aborted at high rates. There’s little value on the girl child or on women.” Indeed, a country that’s now described as an economic powerhouse can be medieval in its social practices.
Hardest hit among India’s women are the Dalits, formerly called untouchables. In 2004, I went to India to research an article about how those women were managing in the midst of the fastest-growing economy in the world. What I found was the intractable face of poverty. I started my quest in a village near the bustling city of Bangalore. There in southern India, I met a woman named Gowramma and saw first-hand how the cycle of poverty is reinforced.
It’s the water pumps that I remember most powerfully. Soon after I arrived, Gowramma walked me to a roadway that was maybe a hundred metres from her home and explained how that dusty dirt road, which she did not dare to cross, separated her from the water she so badly needed for her six-month-old baby daughter, Dikshitra. On the other side of the road, in the village of Etangur, there was a tap in every house with fresh cool water twenty-four hours a day. On Gowramma’s side, there were three water pumps for two hundred families. The water was turned on every three days. That was not enough for her needs, so when the pumps weren’t running, she had to risk the two-kilometre walk to another village that would allow her to have water, a walk that took her past jeering men who threatened her with rape and worse.
The word dalit is Sanskrit and means “broken people.” Like two hundred million Dalits in India, Gowramma lived outside the mainstream Hindu society, according to the abusive unwritten rules that have governed her people for centuries. The caste system in India is the largest hierarchical system in the world today with roots that trace back to between 1500 BCE and 1000 BCE. The idea and practice of ranking people according to their caste still exists in many countries in Southeast Asia, including Japan, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal, but the vast majority of untouchables live in India, a country where birth status condemns almost 20 percent of the population to poverty and abuse.
In Indian society, Hindus are stratified into four varna, or caste categories: the Brahmin, the priestly caste; the Kshatriya, warriors; the Vaisya, trading and artisan caste; and the Sudra, manual labourers. The rest of the population is outcaste—literally untouchable to the four castes.
Just forty kilometres from Bangalore, the centre of India’s high-tech industry and often referred to as Silicon Valley East, Gowramma and her daughter were living in appalling conditions. She was forbidden to walk on the street of the Hindu village across that road, enter the temple, drink from the same well as the upper caste or even eat the same food. She and her kind could not hold marriage processions or carry their dead on the streets as part of a funeral. Village flourmills would not provide service to them. Like many other Dalits in India, Gowramma’s family was kept by the upper caste as bonded labourers. They were forced to do jobs such as cleaning latrines and removing dead animals, sometimes with their bare hands, as they rarely owned gloves. In some villages in this state of Karnataka, Dalit girls as young as seven and eight were designated as the village concubine. To defy this ancient system was to invite brutal re
venge from the higher castes.
Police files are full of atrocities. In 1995, Bhanwari Devi, a worker in the Women’s Development Program in Rajasthan, reported the child marriage of a one-year-old girl to the authorities and was gang-raped by friends of the man she accused. When she reported the rape, the police said she was too old and unattractive to merit the attentions of young men and ignored her case. When she finally managed to get charges laid, the judge acquitted her rapists, reasoning, “Since the offenders were upper-caste men, including a Brahmin, the rape could not have taken place because an upper-caste man could not have defiled himself by raping a lower-caste woman.”
When I was there in October 2004, a thirty-eight-year-old woman from Keela Urappanur village in Madurai district spurned the advances of an upper-caste man and was forced by a mob to drink excrement mixed with water. Then the crowd threw a bucket of excrement on her children, who were watching. In another incident that October, a sessions judge in Uttar Pradesh murdered a Dalit and wasn’t even suspended from his duties, never mind charged. He continues to function as a judge.
In India, you’re born into your caste; it’s predetermined and immutable. Although the minority populations of Christians, Muslims and Buddhists are considered outside the system, everyone else’s caste is stamped on their school ID card, which is then used for identification, education and job applications. If you’re born a Dalit, you die a Dalit.
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