The teacher grew puzzled, since Tinashe was a poor student in class but always handed in perfect homework. Finally, the teacher noticed that the handwriting was different for homework and for class assignments, and whipped Tinashe until he confessed the truth. Then the teacher went to the children’s father, told him that Tererai was a prodigy, and begged for her to be allowed to attend school. After much argument, the father allowed Tererai to attend school for a couple of terms, but then he married her off at about age eleven.
Tererai’s husband barred her from attending school, resented her literacy, and beat her whenever she tried to practice by reading a scrap of old newspaper. Indeed, he beat her for plenty more as well. She hated her marriage but had no way out. “If you’re a woman and you are not educated, what else?” she asks.
Yet when Jo Luck came and talked to Tererai and the other young women, Jo kept insisting that things did not have to be this way. She kept saying that they could achieve their goals, repeatedly using the word “achievable.” The women caught the repetition and asked the interpreter to explain in detail what “achievable” meant. That gave Jo a chance to push forward. “What are your hopes?” she asked the women, through the interpreter. Tererai and the others were puzzled by the question, because they didn’t really have any hopes. Frankly, they were suspicious of this white woman who couldn’t speak their language, who kept making bewildering inquiries. But Jo pushed them to think about their dreams, and, reluctantly, they began to think about what they wanted. Tererai timidly voiced her hope of getting an education. Jo pounced and told her that she could do it, that she should write down her goals and methodically pursue them. At first, this didn’t make any sense to Tererai, for she was a married woman in her mid-twenties.
There are many metaphors for the role of foreign assistance. We like to think of aid as a kind of lubricant, a few drops of oil in the crankcase of the developing world, so that gears move freely again on their own. That is what Heifer International’s help amounted to in this village: Tererai started gliding along freely on her own. After Jo Luck and her entourage disappeared, Tererai began to study frantically, while raising her five children. She went away to her mother’s village to escape her husband’s beatings. Painstakingly, with the help of friends, she wrote down her goals on a piece of paper: “One day I will go to the United States of America,” she began, for goal one. She added that she would earn a college degree, a master’s degree, and a PhD—all exquisitely absurd dreams for a married cattleherder in Zimbabwe who had less than one year’s formal education. But Tererai took the piece of paper and folded it inside three layers of plastic to protect it, then placed it in an old can. She buried the can under a rock where she herded cattle.
Then Tererai took correspondence classes and began saving money. Her self-confidence grew as she did brilliantly in her studies, and she became a community organizer for Heifer. She stunned everyone with superb schoolwork, and the Heifer aid workers encouraged her to think that she could study in America. One day, in 1998, she received notice that she had been admitted to Oklahoma State University.
Some of the neighbors thought that a woman in her thirties should focus on educating her children, not herself. “I can’t talk about my children’s education when I’m not educated myself,” Tererai responded. “If I educate myself, then I can educate my children.” So she climbed into an airplane and flew to America.
At Oklahoma State, Tererai took as many credits as she possibly could and worked nights to make money. She earned her degree and then returned to her village. She dug up the tin can under the rock and took out the paper on which she had scribbled her goals. She put checkmarks beside the goals she had fulfilled, and buried the tin can again.
Heifer International offered Tererai a job, and she began work in Arkansas—while simultaneously earning a master’s degree part-time. When she earned her MA, Tererai again returned to her village. After embracing her children and relatives, she dug up her tin can and checked off her most recently achieved goal. Now she is working on her PhD at Western Michigan University, and she has brought her five children to America. Tererai has finished her course work and is completing a dissertation about AIDS programs among the poor in Africa. She will become a productive economic asset for Africa, all because of a little push and helping hand from Heifer International. And when she has her doctorate, Tererai will go back to her village and, after hugging her loved ones, go out to the field and dig up her can again.
There is a broad scholarly literature about social movements, and experts have noted that one of the most striking changes in recent years has been a surge in female leadership. The civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements may have been the last such major efforts in the United States that were overwhelmingly male in their top ranks. Since then, women have led such diverse efforts as Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the pro- and anti-feminist movements. While women still lag in political, corporate, and government positions, they dominate the civil sector in much of the world. In the United States, women now lead Harvard, Princeton, and MIT, as well as the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. The groups in the National Council of Women’s Organizations represent 10 million women. The same pattern is evident abroad. In South Korea, women hold 14 percent of the seats in the National Assembly but lead 80 percent of the country’s NGOs. In Kyrgyzstan, women don’t hold a single seat in parliament but run 90 percent of the NGOs.
In the nineteenth century, wealthy American women disdained the women’s suffrage movement, instead contributing generously to men’s colleges and schools, and to churches and charities. Often, rich women were strikingly generous to institutions that openly discriminated against women. The women’s suffrage movement was thus forced to raise money mostly from sympathetic men. Likewise, in recent decades, wealthy American women haven’t been particularly generous toward international women’s causes, but there are signs that that may be beginning to change. American women are now playing an increasingly important role in the philanthropic world, and “women’s funds” that support women and girls are booming. There are now more than ninety in the United States alone.
So the time is ripe for a new emancipation movement to empower women and girls around the world. Politicians should take heed: In the United States, a 2006 poll found that 60 percent of respondents said that “improving the treatment of women in other countries” was “very important” for American foreign policy (another 30 percent said it was “somewhat important”). The movement should adhere to these principles:
Strive to build broad coalitions across liberal and conservative lines. This makes practical results far easier to achieve.
Resist the temptation to oversell. The humanitarian community has undermined its credibility with its exaggerated predictions (journalists joke that aid groups have predicted ten of the last three famines). Research about women tends to come from people who care passionately about justice and gender, and who have convictions before they begin their studies. So be cautious about the findings. There’s nothing to be gained by exaggeration.
Helping women doesn’t mean ignoring men. For example, it’s crucial to fund the development of vaginal microbicides, creams that women could apply to protect themselves from HIV without their partners knowing. But it may help women just as much if boys and men are circumcised, for that slows the spread of AIDS and reduces the chance that men will infect their partners.
American feminism must become less parochial, so that it is every bit as concerned with sex slavery in Asia as with Title IX sports programs in Illinois. It is already making good progress in this respect. Likewise, Americans of faith should try as hard to save the lives of African women as the lives of unborn fetuses. In short, all of us need to become more cosmopolitan and aware of global repression based on gender.
If there were a fifth principle, it would be: Don’t pay too much attention to the first four. Any movement needs to be flexible; it should be relentlessly empirical and open to dif
ferent strategies in different places. For example, we’ve repeatedly described educating girls as the single best way to lower fertility, improve children’s health, and create a more just and dynamic society. But as we were writing this book, two new studies pointed to another approach to revolutionize fertility and gender in the villages: television.
One study, by an Italian development economist, Eliana La Ferrara, examined the impact of a television network, Rede Globo, as it expanded in Brazil. Globo is known for its soap operas, which have huge and passionate followings and whose main characters are women with few children. It turns out that when the Globo network reached a new area in Brazil, in the following years there were fewer births there—particularly among women of lower socioeconomic status and women already well along in their reproductive years. That suggested that they had decided to stop having children, emulating the soap opera characters they admired.
A second study focused on television’s impact on rural India. Two scholars, Robert Jensen of Brown University and Emily Oster of the University of Chicago, found that after cable television arrived in a village, women gained more autonomy—such as the ability to leave the house without permission and the right to participate in household decisions. There was a drop in the number of births, and women were less likely to say they preferred a son over a daughter. Wife-beating became less acceptable, and families were more likely to send daughters to school.
These changes occurred because TV brought new ideas into isolated villages that tended to be very conservative and traditional. Before TV arrived, 62 percent of women in the villages surveyed thought it was acceptable for husbands to beat wives, and 55 percent of women wanted their next child to be a son (most of the rest did not want a daughter; they just didn’t care). And fully two thirds of the women said they needed their husband’s permission to visit friends.
Then, with television, new ideas infiltrated the villages. Most of the popular cable television programs in India are soap operas set among middle-class families in the cities, where women hold jobs and come and go freely. Rural viewers came to recognize that the “modern” way is for women to be treated as human beings. The effect was huge: “introducing cable television is equivalent to roughly five years of female education,” the professors report. This doesn’t mean that we should drop programs to send girls to school and instead settle for introducing cable television to villages full of wife beaters, for these findings are tentative and need to be replicated elsewhere. But as we have argued, a movement for women must be creative and willing to learn and incorporate new approaches and technologies.
The movement’s agenda should be broad and enveloping, while focusing on four appalling realities of daily life: maternal mortality, human trafficking, sexual violence, and the routine daily discrimination that causes girls to die at far higher rates than boys. The tools to address these challenges include girls’ education, family planning, micro-finance, and “empowerment” in every sense. One useful measure to help foster these is CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination. It was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1979, and so far 185 countries have become a party to it; the United States continues to refuse to ratify it, because of Republicans’ concerns that CEDAW could nibble away at American sovereignty by surrendering authority to an international convention. Those concerns are absurd. In addition, the UN should have a prominent agency to support gender equality (there is one in theory, UNIFEM, but it is minuscule). The United States should have a separate cabinet department that oversees all foreign aid and development issues, as Britain does, and this department should emphasize the role of women.
Yet ultimately, as we’ve shown, what will change the patterns of life in an African village is less likely to be CEDAW or a new American cabinet position, and more likely a new school or health center in that village. It’s fine to hold UN conferences on education, but sometimes it does more good to allocate the money to projects on the ground. We would like to see a grassroots campaign bringing together feminist organizations and evangelical churches and everyone in between, calling on the president and Congress to pass three specific initiatives. Ideally these would be coordinated with similar efforts from Europe, Japan, and other donor countries, but if necessary they could start as American projects.
The first would be a $10 billion effort over five years to educate girls around the world and reduce the gender gap in education. This initiative would focus on Africa but would also support—and prod—Asian countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan to do better. The aim would be not just to fund new schools, with DONATED BY THE AMERICAN PEOPLE written on the sides, but to experiment with finding the most cost-effective ways to support education. In some countries that may be providing school uniforms to girls from poor families, or deworming communities, or providing scholarships to the best-performing girls, or helping girls manage menstruation, or supporting school lunches, or extending Mexico’s Oportunidades program to Africa. These approaches should be rigorously tried on a randomized basis, and assessed by outside evaluators, so that we can determine which are most cost-effective.
The second initiative would be for the United States to sponsor a global drive to iodize salt in poor countries, to prevent tens of millions of children from losing approximately ten I.Q. points each as a result of iodine deficiency while their brains are still being formed in the uterus. As we discussed in the chapter on girls’ education, female fetuses are particularly prone to impaired brain development when the mother’s body lacks enough iodine, and so girls would be the major beneficiaries. Canada already sponsors the Micronutrient Initiative, which supports iodization of salt, but there is far more work to be done—and it is appalling that so many girls will suffer irreversible brain damage when by one estimate a mere $19 million would pay for salt iodization in the countries that still desperately need it. This iodization campaign would thus cost very little, and it would underscore that for all the criticisms of foreign aid, there are still some methods that are cheap, simple, and highly cost-effective. Iodizing salt may not be glamorous, but it gets more bang for the buck than almost any form of foreign aid.
The third initiative would be a twelve-year, $1.6 billion project to eradicate obstetric fistula, while laying the groundwork for a major international assault on maternal mortality. Dr. L. Lewis Wall, the president and managing director of the Worldwide Fistula Fund, has drafted with Michael Horowitz, a conservative agitator on humanitarian issues, has drafted a detailed proposal for a campaign to end fistulas. The plan includes the construction of forty fistula centers around Africa, as well a new institute to coordinate the campaign. This is one of the few areas in reproductive health that unites Democrats and Republicans, and it would cast a spotlight on the need for better maternal care generally. The campaign would showcase the opportunity to help some of the world’s most forlorn young women, deepen obstetric skills in Africa, and generate the energy to take subsequent steps to tackle maternal mortality.
These three steps—campaigns to fund girls’ education, to iodize salt to prevent mental retardation, and to eradicate fistula—would not solve the problems of the world’s women. But action on these three measures would raise the underlying issues higher on the international affairs agenda, and would illustrate solutions to the problems. Once people see that there are solutions, they will be more willing to help in myriad other ways.
The more Westerners the movement reaches, the better. But the most effective supporters will donate not only their money but also their time, by volunteering on the front lines. If you care about poverty you must understand it, not just oppose it. And understanding poverty comes from spending time observing it directly.
In talking about sex trafficking, we mentioned Urmi Basu, who runs the New Light shelter for trafficked women in Kolkata. Over the years we’ve steered several Americans to volunteer at New Light, teaching English to the children of prostitutes, and they find it pretty overwhelming at first. One of those
we introduced to Urmi was Sydnee Woods, an assistant city attorney in Minneapolis who wasn’t finding everything she wanted in life from her job. She asked her boss for a ninety-day unpaid leave to go to India to work at New Light, and he flatly said no. So Sydnee quit, sold her home, and moved to Kolkata. She found it a very rough adjustment, as she put it in an e-mail to us:
It took me about 6 months to actually admit to myself that I hate India (well, Kolkata, at least). Truly I absolutely loved New Light—the children, the mothers, the staff, the other volunteers, Urmi. But I hated everything else about being in Kolkata. I found it extremely difficult being a single, black American woman there. I was constantly met with suspicion—not so much due to my color, but because I was not married and was often by myself (in restaurants, at the mall, etc.). The staring was emotionally exhausting and I don’t think I ever truly got used to it.
Chastened that our advice had produced such a painful experience, we asked Sydnee if that meant that she regretted having gone. Would she recommend such an immersion to others? Moments later a very different e-mail arrived:
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