Half the Sky

by Nicholas D. Kristof

  So we dealt with that, and finally the project looked very successful. The women were making a lot of money on their cassava. We were delighted. But because the women were making so much, the men came in and kicked the women out of the cassava fields. The tradition was that women raise staple crops, and men raise cash crops. And the men reasoned that if cassava was so profitable, it must now be a man’s crop. And so the men took over cassava, and they used the profits for beer. The women had even less income than when we started.

  So let’s freely acknowledge that Murphy’s Law plays a role in the aid world. Foreign assistance is difficult to get right, and it sometimes is squandered. Yet it is equally clear that some kinds of aid do work; those that have been most effective have involved health and education. In 1960, 20 million children died before the age of five. By 2006, that figure had dropped below 10 million, thanks to campaigns for vaccination, sanitation, and oral rehydration to treat diarrhea. Think about that: An extra 10 million children survive each year now, an extra 100 million per decade. That’s quite a success to weigh alongside the many failures of aid. Likewise, through his philanthropic efforts, Jimmy Carter has almost succeeded in wiping out guinea worm, an ancient parasite that has afflicted humans throughout recorded history.

  Or consider the $32 million that the United States invested over ten years in the global battle to eradicate smallpox. Some 1.5 million people once died annually from smallpox; since it was eradicated in 1977, about 45 million lives have been saved. That’s an astonishing total. And the United States recoups its $32 million investment in smallpox every two months, simply because Americans no longer need to pay to be vaccinated against it. Because of the money saved by eradication, that investment has yielded a 46 percent annual return in the three decades since smallpox was eradicated—a better investment than any stock in that period.

  Ann and Angeline

  Angeline Mugwendere’s parents were impoverished farmers in Zimbabwe, and she was mocked by classmates when she went to school barefoot and in a torn dress with nothing underneath. Teachers would sternly send her home to collect school fees that were overdue, even though everyone knew there was no way her family could pay them. Yet Angeline suffered the humiliations and teasing and pleaded to be allowed to remain in school. Unable to buy school supplies, she cadged what she could.

  “At break time, I would go to a teacher’s house and say, ‘Can I wash your dishes?’” she remembers. “And in return, they would sometimes give me a pen.”

  At the end of primary school, she took the nationwide sixth-grade graduation examinations and had the best score not only in her school, but in the entire district—in fact, one of the highest marks in the nation. Yet she could not afford to go to secondary school. She was inconsolable. Angeline was destined to be another farmer or village peddler, another squandered African asset. Local people have a saying for it: Those who harvest the most pumpkins are the ones who lack the pots to cook them. In other words, the brightest children are often born into families that lack the means to educate them.

  At that moment, though, Angeline’s career intersected with that of Ann Cotton, a Welsh woman—“very Welsh!” she says—trying to help girls in Zimbabwe. Ann has a finely tuned social conscience, nurtured as she grew up in Cardiff surrounded by family stories of mining and political struggle. She absorbed a passion for education and set up a center for schoolgirls with behavior problems. But her life found a deeper focus only after tragedy struck.

  After a smooth pregnancy, Ann gave birth to her second child, a daughter named Catherine. The baby seemed healthy, and they returned home from the hospital. When Catherine was ten days old, a midwife came for a routine visit to check on the baby. She told Ann to rush the child to the hospital, that her life was in danger. At the hospital, a team standing by with a mobile oxygen tent took Catherine and placed her inside.

  Catherine, it turned out, had a congenital lung defect. The alveoli, which transmit oxygen from the lungs into the blood, were not supplying her bloodstream with adequate amounts of oxygen. So the little girl’s heart and lungs were failing. For the next six weeks, Catherine lived in an oxygen tent. Ann, her husband, and her son more or less lived in the hospital, becoming close with many other young parents whose children were in danger.

  “Such agony!” Ann recalls. “I have never felt so helpless. As a mother I was powerless to help my daughter. It was the greatest pain I have ever experienced.” The doctors and nurses worked heroically to save Catherine’s life, but they couldn’t.

  “All we knew when she died was that we would honor her life and all she had taught us,” Ann says. But how to honor her wasn’t clear. Ann’s life was soon hectic with another boy and girl, for a total of three surviving children. Then Ann’s husband took a job in the high-tech industry in Boston, and since Ann couldn’t get a work permit under American visa rules, she enrolled in Boston University to study international relations. That revived her academic interests, and Ann later began a master’s program in human rights and education at the University of London’s Institute of Education.

  As part of her program, Ann set off on a three-week visit to a particularly poor part of Zimbabwe, to research the low school attendance rates there among girls. The conventional wisdom was that for cultural reasons, many African families resisted sending daughters to school, and Ann brought along stacks of questionnaires and notepaper to probe that resistance. She focused on a school in a village called Mola, talking to children, parents, and school officials. She quickly realized that the big challenge wasn’t culture, but poverty. Families didn’t have the money to buy books and pay school fees for all their children, so they gave preference to their sons because it was more likely that boys could use the education to get good jobs afterward.

  Ann was stirred by the determination of Zimbabwean girls to get schooling. She met two teenage sisters, Cecilia and Makarita, who had hiked sixty miles to Mola because it was cheaper than the school near their home. They invited Ann into the makeshift hut they had built, and they confessed that they didn’t know where the money would come from to attend school the next term. It all reminded Ann of her grandmother’s stories of Wales in harsher times, and it made her feel a kinship with these girls in the Tonga tribe in a remote nook of Zimbabwe. She imagined her own children enduring such deprivation.

  Ann Cotton reading to children in one of her schools in Zambia (Camfed)

  “I was confronted by a level of poverty I had never before seen,” Ann says. She promised the local people that she would find a way to support girls’ education. Village chiefs and school officials were enthusiastic, and they held a community meeting in which they pledged grassroots support for an initiative to educate girls—if Ann could help defray the costs.

  Upon her return to her home in Cambridge, England, Ann was obsessed by the memories of those girls she had met. She and her husband started their own fund and asked friends and relatives for donations to pay the school fees for girls in Mola, but that wasn’t enough. Ann is not an enthusiastic cook and had never done anything commercial, but she started making sandwiches and cakes at her kitchen table and peddling them in a stall at Cambridge Market, to raise funds for the girls. It was not a brilliant financial success: One freezing February day, Ann and two friends stood all day in the cold and brought back just £30.

  Ann managed to raise enough money that first year to send thirty-two girls to high school, and their parents followed through on their pledges to support their daughters and make sure they attended school faithfully. Two years later, Ann turned her efforts into a formal organization, the Campaign for Female Education, or Camfed. One of the first girls whom Ann supported was Angeline; she went on to high school and, to nobody’s surprise, performed brilliantly.

  Camfed has expanded from Zimbabwe into Zambia, Tanzania, and Ghana, and it has won honors for its successes, enabling it to raise more money and expand further. Camfed’s budget is still tiny compared to the big agencies—$10 million annuall
y—but it now helps more than 400,000 children attend school each year. Right from the start, Camfed had only local staff in each country. There’s a strong emphasis on ensuring that the community buys into the program, and it is a committee from the local community that chooses the girls who will get scholarships. Camfed staff review the decisions to make sure that there is no corruption. Moreover, Camfed has avoided the cult of personality that afflicts some aid groups. Camfed’s Web site is about the schoolgirls, not about Ann, and there isn’t a word about her baby Catherine, who inspired it all. We had to pry that out of Ann.

  These kinds of grassroots efforts usually achieve more than the grand UN conferences that receive far more attention. We highlight Camfed partly because we believe an international women’s movement needs to focus less on holding conventions or lobbying for new laws, and more time in places like rural Zimbabwe, listening to communities and helping them get their girls into schools.

  For Camfed, support for a child typically begins when she is in elementary school, as part of a broad program to support needy students. Then, when the girls graduate from primary school, Camfed offers a full support package for high school, including shoes and a uniform if necessary. If a student lives too far from a high school, Camfed helps arrange for her to live in a dormitory and covers the costs. Camfed also supplies sanitary pads and underwear to all the girls, so that they do not miss school during their menstrual periods.

  Ann and others have had to face the additional problem of sexual abuse by teachers. Particularly in southern Africa, some teachers trade good grades for sex: Half of Tanzanian women, and nearly half of Ugandan women, say they were abused by male teachers, and one third of reported rapes of South African girls under the age of fifteen are by teachers. “If a girl feels that if she goes and talks to the teacher in private, she’ll be fondled, then she’s not going to do well,” Ann says. She also notes that Westerners sometimes create problems by sponsoring scholarships to be awarded by teachers or the principal. The scholarship winners are sometimes the prettiest girls, who in return are expected to sleep with the principal. Camfed avoids this problem by having the girls selected by a committee, without giving a central role to the principal.

  Camfed supports its girls after they graduate from high school in starting a business or learning a skill such as nursing or teaching. Or, if they achieve sufficiently high grades, they are supported through college. Camfed has also started microfinance operations, and some of the girls are starting dairy farms or other businesses. Camfed alumni have also formed a social network, trading ideas and engaging in public advocacy on behalf of women’s rights.

  In Zimbabwe, for example, the graduates have banded together to call for tougher action against sexual abuse of girls. The graduates have also pushed to discourage routine virginity testing of teenage girls (a traditional practice to promote chastity), as well as campaigned against arranged marriages. In Ghana, a Camfed graduate named Afishetu was the only woman running in the district assembly elections in 2006—and she won. Now she has her eye on a seat in the national parliament.

  Perhaps the greatest surprise is that Camfed alumni have themselves become philanthropists. Even though their incomes are tiny by Western standards, they still support other schoolgirls. Ann says that Camfed’s high school graduates are each helping an average of five other girls at any one time, not counting their own family members, whom they also support.

  “They are becoming real role models in their communities,” Ann says. “It may be that the neighbor’s child can’t go to school because she doesn’t have a skirt, so she’ll provide that. Or maybe she’ll pay another girl’s school fees. This was something that we didn’t expect at all. It shows the power of education.”

  Speaking of role models and the power of education, Camfed Zimbabwe has a new and dynamic executive director. She’s a young woman who knows something about overcoming long odds and the impact a few dollars in tuition assistance can make in a girl’s life.

  It’s Angeline.

  * Larry Summers offers an example to emphasize the distinction between correlation and causation. He notes that there is an almost perfect correlation between literacy and ownership of dictionaries. But handing out more dictionaries will not raise literacy.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Microcredit: The Financial Revolution

  It is impossible to realize our goals while discriminating against half the human race. As study after study has taught us, there is no tool for development more effective than the empowerment of women.

  —KOFI ANNAN, THEN UN SECRETARY-GENERAL, 2006

  Saima Muhammad would dissolve into tears every evening. She was desperately poor, and her deadbeat husband was unemployed and not particularly employable. He was frustrated and angry, and he coped by beating Saima each afternoon. Their house, in the outskirts of Lahore, Pakistan, was falling apart, but they had no money for repairs. Saima had to send her young daughter to live with an aunt, because there wasn’t enough food to go around.

  “My sister-in-law made fun of me, saying, ‘You can’t even feed your child,’” Saima recalled. “My husband beat me up. My brother-in-law beat me up. I had an awful life.”

  Sometimes Saima would take the bus to the market in Lahore, an hour away, to try to sell things for money to buy food, but that only led her neighbors to scorn her as a loose woman who would travel by herself. Saima’s husband accumulated a debt of more than $3,000, and it seemed that this debt would hang over the family for generations. Then, when Saima’s second child was born and turned out to be a girl as well, her mother-in-law, a crone named Sharifa Bibi, exacerbated the tensions.

  “She’s not going to have a son,” Sharifa told Saima’s husband, in front of her. “So you should marry again. Take a second wife.” Saima was shattered and ran off sobbing. Another wife might well devastate the family finances and leave even less money to feed and educate the children. And Saima herself would be marginalized in the household, cast off like an old sock. For days Saima walked around in a daze, her eyes red, and the slightest incident would send her collapsing into hysterical tears. She felt her whole life slipping away.

  Saima in front of her remodeled home near Lahore, Pakistan (Nicholas D. Kristof)

  It was at that point that Saima joined a women’s solidarity group affiliated with a Pakistani microfinance organization called Kashf Foundation. Saima took out a $65 loan and used the money to buy beads and cloth, which she transformed into beautiful embroidery to sell in the markets of Lahore. She used the profit to buy more beads and cloth, and soon she had an embroidery business and was earning a solid income—the only one in her household to do so. Saima brought her eldest daughter back from the aunt and began paying off her husband’s debt.

  When merchants wanted more embroidery than Saima could produce, she paid neighbors to work for her. Eventually thirty families were working for Saima, and she put her husband to work as well—“under my direction,” she explained with a twinkle in her eye. Saima became the tycoon of the neighborhood, and she was able to pay off her husband’s entire debt, keep her daughters in school, renovate the house, connect running water to the house, and buy a television.

  “Now everyone comes to me to borrow money, the same ones who used to criticize me,” Saima said, beaming in satisfaction. “And the children of those who used to criticize me now come to my house to watch TV.”

  A round-faced woman with thick black hair that just barely peeks out from under her red-and-white-checked scarf, Saima is now a bit plump and displays a gold nose ring as well as several other rings and bracelets on each wrist. She dresses well and exudes self-confidence as she offers a grand tour of her home and work area, ostentatiously showing off the television and the new plumbing. She doesn’t even pretend to be subordinate to her husband. He spends his days mostly loafing around, occasionally helping with the work but always having to take orders from his wife. He is now more impressed with females in general: Saima had a third child, also a gir
l, but that’s not a problem. “Girls are just as good as boys,” he explained.

  “We have a good relationship now,” said Saima. “We don’t fight, and he treats me well.” And what about finding another wife who might bear him a son? Saima chuckled at the question: “Now nobody says anything about that.” Sharifa Bibi, the mother-in-law, looked shocked when we asked whether she wanted her son to take a second wife to bear a son. “No, no,” she said. “Saima is bringing so much to this house…. She’s an exemplary daughter-in-law. She puts a roof over our heads and food on the table.”

  Sharifa even allows that Saima is now largely exempt from beatings by her husband. “A woman should know her limits, and if not then it’s her husband’s right to beat her,” Sharifa said. “But if a woman earns more than her husband, it’s difficult for him to discipline her.”

  Saima’s new prosperity has also transformed the family’s educational prospects. She is planning to send all three of her daughters through high school, and maybe to college as well. She brings in tutors to improve their schoolwork, and her youngest child, Javaria, is ranked first in her class. We asked Javaria what she wanted to become, thinking she might aspire to be a doctor or lawyer.

  Javaria cocked her head. “I’d like to do embroidery,” she said.

  Saima is an unusually successful participant in the microcredit revolution sweeping the developing world. In place after place, markets and microlending are proving a powerful system to help people help themselves. Microfinance has done more to bolster the status of women, and to protect them from abuse, than any laws could accomplish. Capitalism, it turns out, can achieve what charity and good intentions sometimes cannot.