* * *
I. These restrictions were not just bureaucracy in action: Afghanistan was still an active war zone, and many of our task force projects demanded significant security support. There was at least one instance I can recall when the security needed to protect a construction team cost more than four times the costs of labor and materials.
Story 30
Women May Be Key, but Don’t Ignore Men
My father never told me that I would someday find that many—maybe most—of my wisest and most insightful friends, colleagues, and advisors would be women. He didn’t have to tell me that. I saw the deep respect he had for my mother and also for so many other brilliant and accomplished women.
My mother gave me a dramatic lesson about the lack of respect many women live with, although, as usual, she was crafty about it. She didn’t give me a speech. She asked if I’d like to go on a trip to Mexico with her.
I was still in high school. My trip to Prague had been my first adventure outside the United States, and this would be my second. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I’m sure it was nothing like what we ended up doing.
My mother had become active in a number of projects designed to help poor women in the developing world and wanted to visit an area she was supporting. We flew to San Diego and then drove south across the border to Tijuana. There was no sightseeing, although I recall that I had a startling sense of being in a foreign country. People dressed differently, they spoke differently, they even seemed to move around on the streets differently: gathering to talk and sit outside in groups. It was one thing to fly for many hours and land somewhere foreign; I remember it seemed odd to be able to drive from a place like San Diego and change cultures so fast.
Tijuana was obviously poor, and we drove to an area away from the shops and cantinas. There were lots of people on the streets, and we went into a house in a long row of many homes. My mother explained that we were going to speak with individual women about their situations, but we needed to be low key about it.
There was someone from the organization translating, but I sat apart from her, and I don’t remember the individual women or what they said. My mother said little. She listened intently and asked a few questions. She’d hug the women as they left. But my sharpest memory was how scared they seemed. They came and went individually, and I remember that they did not stand together outside or join their friends afterward. Some were upset when they spoke to my mom. This behavior confused me. If we were here to help, why were these women so afraid to be seen talking with us?
My mom explained that many of these women lived with husbands who might hurt them if they were even aware of the meeting. Many of them had five or six children they were having trouble feeding, but in this culture, the men considered it a sign of machismo to father a lot of children. The women were turning to this organization for advice about family planning, to try to limit their future pregnancies, but this topic was a great taboo to talk about in public.
This trip was only the second time I was aware of seeing real fear on a number of adults’ faces. In Prague, I’d seen the protesters beaten by the police, and I had observed the nervous looks of people on the street when soldiers stopped them. But in Mexico, I saw a different kind of fear. The violence these Mexican women suffered wasn’t the result of an invasion, it was a fact of life, embedded in this culture—as it is to some degree in most cultures. Including ours, I would later learn. These women lived with the constant threat of violence from within their own family, a danger they had to navigate around every day.
I have never witnessed or experienced violence in my own family or in friends’ families. This experience with my mother and my later travels have taught me, however, that domestic violence often plays a role in situations where food security is an issue. When resources are scarce, food is power. Interfere in the balance and exchange of any kind of power in a community—even within a family—and you can unleash conflict and violence.
AIMING TO EMPOWER WOMEN IS NOT ENOUGH
Stories about women’s empowerment in the developing world have become a lot more common in recent years. This is an area where my brother’s NoVo Foundation and ours overlap, particularly in postconflict areas. We share the belief that to create lasting positive change we have to help women and girls develop lifelong skills and attain assets. This also means contributing to their communities’ needs so that the community supports their efforts. We are committed to working on preventing violence against girls and women, and partners such as CARE have been involved in a global effort to specifically promote engaging women in development. There are many examples of microcredit programs that can help improve a family’s standard of living by loaning money to women to create small businesses or buy new seeds in order for them to be able to sell some of their surplus and send their children to school. Ritu Sharma, cofounder and president of Women Thrive Worldwide, has coined an addendum to the old adage “If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime.” Ritu points out: “If you teach a woman to fish, everybody eats.”
I get it. I agree. As former secretary of state Hillary Clinton said often, “Women eat last and eat least.” Women are powerful targets for many kinds of development programs because they tend to focus on an entire community’s needs—food, health, and education—not just their own. I have seen this tendency over and over. I have seen mothers in refugee camps forgo food in order to feed their children. When our foundation has sponsored training focused on improving agriculture, I know it always is more successful when women are part of the process. Whenever I meet with farmers and propose to help fund special training, I always say right away that I want to make sure the community sends both a man and a woman. We have found that is the best way to ensure that the training is most effective in reaching every farmer in a village or community.
In many areas I have visited, village savings programs work well. Women control the savings, make loans, and can respond to emergencies. Photo: Howard G. Buffett
For many years, agricultural assistance resources were aimed at men, even though women represent at least half the farmers in the developing world. So I am pleased that there is more equity these days. But if you think I’m leading up to a “however,” you are right. Often what you won’t find are organizations admitting that it is not so simple as saying that if you target women, these programs will work. There are a lot of breakdowns here as well. There are many examples of training programs, microcredit projects, savings associations, cell phone–based credit plans, and other ideas aimed solely at women that have failed or even had disastrous consequences.
It’s not politically correct to talk about this failure, but while acknowledging the potential of women is good, it’s not the same as improving conditions for women. Women still face inequality and little or no legal protection in many areas of the world. I am convinced that domestic violence represents an overlooked and toxic undertow in many areas struggling with food insecurity. One-third of all women around the world experience domestic violence, and many experts believe the number is even higher in Africa. I’ve had the sickening experience of asking a man translating my conversation with some women farmers in an East African village why so many of them were missing their front teeth. He made a fist, feigned a punch, and laughed, as if to say, “What a silly, obvious question!”
Those of us working in development need to pay attention to this attitude. Slogans aside, when you teach a woman to fish, she may go home and feed everybody—and then get beaten up because her husband is resentful and feels threatened by her newfound knowledge. Or he’s angry or jealous about her new access to money or her plan to pay school fees with it instead of letting him get his hands on it. At other times resources are wasted designing a program in which the women would love to be involved, but, fearing a violent reaction from their husbands, they don’t want to risk showing up.
NGOs around the world know that improving conditions for wome
n is more complicated than it’s sometimes portrayed, but often they don’t want to talk about those details. Those downcast eyes and embarrassed reactions I’ve seen in the field extend to the corner office. Organizations admit that they don’t want to be seen as promoting “women’s rights” or interfering in local customs and culture. They figure that if they focus on measurable impacts such as crop yields and microloan repayments, they will be welcomed by the (often largely male) leadership of a community as economic enablers, not as meddling do-gooders. Gender issues scare people. NGOs go into communities in the developing world where, frankly, just like here in the United States, it seems impolite to talk about domestic violence.
As with a lot of problems, if it stays hidden and unspoken, it will remain unresolved. And, in an odd way, it is disrespectful to men if we degrade their roles in their community. I once had a conversation with some men in Afghanistan, in which they talked about how after their wives were trained in food processing and began bringing home more money, their marriages and relationships improved. Our exchange was a little stiff because of the need for an interpreter, but they were very up front about this when I probed. One man said he had begun to better appreciate his wife’s contributions and realized that he should show her more respect.
When Women Thrive’s Ritu Sharma travels, she forces herself to live on the local equivalent of one US dollar a day. That might mean that she has to choose between buying pain reliever for a headache or eating dinner, or between buying phone minutes or some clean water. I like that Ritu is willing to be frank about her experiences, and what some people find surprising is that she is a strident advocate for organizations addressing gender issues in development, not just focusing on women.
“We can’t ignore men. Women’s empowerment targeted at women only without helping men too can backfire on the women,” Ritu explains. “We need NGOs to get on board with empowerment of everybody in the community. So many development projects fail because of this. They can’t figure out why the women aren’t coming, or why they are dropping out, or why the program is not reaching its goals. But talking about this is taboo. They say, ‘We can’t do this. We can’t force women’s rights on men.’ It’s not about that. We think most of the men are good people, but you have to help them get on board.
“One common mistake is when NGOs go in with a plan and don’t ask the women in advance what they need or how to design the program. They can tell you. Women understand their communities and how they work. We have our own cultural mindset and projections, and too often we don’t take the time to ask them what is appropriate in their village. Corporations call this market research, but if the development community doesn’t take the time to do it, then the project fails, and they don’t want to talk about why.”
DON’T ASSUME, ASK
I agree with Ritu. Sometimes the mismatch is the result of donor demands or a program design that is well intentioned but ignorant of local customs and lifestyle. For example, a microcredit program to finance a business where women make and sell crafts may bring a big jump in a family’s income and seem like a great idea. And in many places it is. However, in some situations and cultures the participant’s husband takes that money and buys another wife! You can imagine how after that has happened once or twice, there might be a sudden drop in enthusiasm from local women.
It is important for development organizations to tell the truth in case studies so that we don’t keep following one another over cliffs like lemmings and then scratch our heads wondering why what worked in Pakistan failed in Togo, or why a savings association that began with great energy and enthusiasm lost its main organizer and members gave up on it. We can’t just fall back on terms such as “poor communication” or “lack of engagement of community leaders,” we have to speak more honestly. If a woman in a savings association got beaten up because she kept money on account instead of bringing home the cash, we need to figure out how to deal with that head-on. To make the program work, perhaps we need to educate men about savings associations and give them a role in the plan. We need to find a way to make them see that this approach can help the entire family.
What puts a damper on more honest assessments by development organizations is the possible fallout for fundraising or the threat to other forms of support if a program is seen as having been poorly designed. Ritu appreciates the larger dynamic that keeps these stories covered up. “It’s risky to talk about failing,” she reflects. “There are always people out there who want to kill aid. Publishing details about a failed project can give them ammunition to do that. There are organizations working on being more transparent about their failures, even though it makes them nervous.”
There are many variations on gender inequality around the world. It’s just in this century that some countries have begun to address domestic violence and women’s rights in their legal systems. Prior to 2007, for example, domestic abuse in Sierra Leone was not even against the law. Women had no control over what happened to them in their own homes. Only in 2010, with the approval of its new constitution, did Kenya begin allowing women to own land and extending other rights, including the power to leave abusive marriages.
I had the pleasure of taking my mother to Ghana in 2002. The trip was organized by World Vision, and we were visiting a village where, in preparation for our visit, the chief had ordered Ghanaian clothing made for my mother and me so that we could join in a traditional dance. One of my fondest memories is watching my mother mix and dance so happily with the people in this village; she had a gift for instantly making other people feel comfortable and important no matter where she went. But on the trip we also heard stories of how difficult life could be for older women and widows in some villages, and that affected her. My mother was concerned about that and urged me to pay attention to people of every age and both sexes when I was figuring out what kinds of programs to work on.
One of the few opportunities I had to return the enormous amount my mother had given me was to take her to Ghana. Photo: Howard G. Buffett
DON’T DUCK THE TRUTH—OR EXCLUDE MEN
There is progress for women in the developing world on many fronts, but there needs to be much more. It’s a good sign that more and more women are holding political office in Africa. More countries are beginning to codify legal protections for women, including land rights. In the meantime, however, if our food-security initiatives are going to have the desired effects we seek, we have to ask men and women to help us design and implement these programs.
I don’t believe that any woman values violence as a revered cultural tradition. Violence is a human rights violation. The degree to which some women believe they must tolerate it, or teach their daughters to tolerate or manage it, is a product of circumstances, not preference. Given the enormous potential women have to improve their own communities, these inequities limit the whole community’s potential. Educating and enfranchising everyone has to be part of a good plan. Ritu explains: “You may have a good credit program available, but a woman’s husband won’t allow her to borrow money because he does not understand it. Nobody taught him how it works. That’s why we talk about empowering men and women, understanding the different gender roles in a given culture so we can work with everyone effectively.”
I attended an event taking aim at domestic abuse in Burundi, a landlocked country situated between Rwanda, DRC, and Tanzania. An NGO was conducting a role-playing exercise attempting to educate local men that women deserved respect and that everyone’s life —men’s and women’s—would be better if men stopped abusing their wives. The approach made sense to me. The organizers said that taking the abuse out of the shadows and having men experience a performance together created a different attitude among them. Instead of being singled out, this format created a shared learning experience and made domestic violence less socially accepted. It exposed the suffering of women without identifying specific men as weak. It made them feel stronger for showing respect. I was impressed, and I went out in the field
where the demonstration was under way and helped out. I acted out a drunk man talking about how it was still important to respect my wife, and it didn’t make me more of a man to hit her.
This approach is aimed at the unique elements of a culture without giving up on the more universal value that no woman should have to resign herself to domestic abuse as a condition of where she lives. As Ritu explains, “Sometimes the narrative around women today is, ‘Let’s invest in women and girls because we get a better return on that—we improve child survival rates, raise the age of first pregnancies, and get higher economic productivity.’ That’s all true, but what sometimes gets lost in that is that the women’s advancement is a goal in and of itself.” We have to ask questions and address domestic violence and gender roles in communities. Ignoring those factors can sabotage otherwise promising development ideas.
Story 31
Souped-Up Yields from Stripped-Down Tools
We have an open-air shed on our Ukulima Farm in South Africa where we park the agricultural equivalent of muscle cars: tractors, bulldozers, and other big iron. We shipped most of this equipment to Ukulima when we were trying to determine what farming methods would be most helpful in trying to coax higher yields out of food crops on the African continent, as well as figure out what constraints commercial farmers there face. With 9,200 acres and twenty-one center-pivot irrigation systems, we built a sophisticated farming operation. We also sent over some agronomists and experienced farmhands to oversee it.
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