Archive for category: Women and Female Empowerment

information and Stories about woman and female empowerment.

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Single Mothers and Poverty in Latvia

Latvia is a country with one of the widest income gaps in the European Union. This gap was expanded by the global economic crisis, which caused income levels in the country to decline by 19%. The IMF confirms that the economic recession very severely damaged the economy of Latvia. According to the Fund, “the richest 20 percent of the population (in Latvia) earn seven times more than the bottom 20 percent.” The IMF warns that these adverse conditions put Latvians at a higher risk of poverty.

The Baltic Center for Investigative Journalism notes that the country does not provide adequate government-funded support for its poor. In fact, the small Baltic nation spends less on social welfare programs than any other European Union member state. For example, when compared to her northern neighbor Estonia, which spends 40% more per capita on social protection programs annually for the poor than Latvia, the lack of poverty-reduction programs from the Latvian government is quite conspicuous.

One of the most “at risk” groups in post-recession Latvia are single mothers. The cost of living has increased over the last few years, due in a large part to changes in tax policies which caused the price of heat and water utilities to rise significantly. The Baltic Center’s report highlights the struggles of a single mother living in Saldus, a town in western Latvia, trying to make ends meet in a small apartment with her two young children.  The mother can’t afford to buy or run a refrigerator, so the family lives off of a meager subsistence of room temperature dry foods and water. The tiny apartment also does not have a shower, so the children are forced to wash in the gym locker rooms at the primary school, a school where they attend classes with no supplies because their mother doesn’t have the money to buy them.

The plight of single mothers in Latvia has prompted many of them to leave the country. The income provided from a minimum wage job in Latvia is simply not enough to support a woman with one or more children, even in the smallest of living spaces. The mother in the Baltic Center article earns only three euros a day and has been forced to ask her friends for donations to keep her family afloat. Three euros a day is hardly enough money for a single, childless woman to survive in a developed country, let alone a mother responsible for a family.

As the Latvian government comes out of the recession, politicians should propose welfare programs for single mothers living below the poverty line. Failure to confront this critical social issue will only result in increased emigration and a more extreme wealth gap.

– Josh Forgét

Sources: Baltica, The Washington Post
Photo: Baltica

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Malala Proves Education is Key to Empowerment

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Malala Yousafzai is a young education rights campaigner from Pakistan. Malala will soon be celebrating her 16th birthday, a miracle after she was shot by extremists for her outspoken beliefs on education. Malala will celebrate her birthday by traveling to the United Nations where students from more than 80 countries will join her.

Malala and the other young activists will be assembled to call for global education for everyone in the world. She and the other young diplomats believe that education is a right for all – one of the Millennium Development Goals, and a vital component of the path to global citizenship. This belief is well founded in the fact that universal compulsory education represents a future that the world wants. Malala was the first person to sign on to a new worldwide petition calling for urgent action to ensure the right of every child to safely attend school. The petition serves as an initial step in focusing the UN agenda on education.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon supports Malala’s mission to bring education to the world. He states that education is an essential step in a world without poverty, violence, discrimination, and disease. He also recognizes that in order to achieve these objectives, the global society needs to continue pushing forward. The secretary general recognizes that we, as a global society, have made progress on this issue, however, there is much more work to be done. Ban expresses that no child or woman should have to consider going to school as an act of bravery.

Ban states that too many girls around the world are subjected to extremist threats for trying to obtain an education. The benefits of educating women in developing countries have been proven time and time again. Ban explains that when women and girls are educated, a society develops at a more rapid pace than without their education. Additionally, education increases future earnings for women, allowing them to provide their families with additional resources, over time, lifting them out of poverty.

If education is key to empowerment as the path to economic stability and development, why is it so widely contested in many developing countries? The answer lies in fear. If we as a global community continue to fear education for all, we will fail to grow as a global economy. More steps must be taken to ensure each child has access to education.

-Caitlin Zusy
Source: Huffington Post, UN News Center
Photo: Stanford Bookhaven

What it’s Really Like to be a Woman in India

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India has two faces. The first is the one we can see in Bollywood movies: beautiful actresses, extravagant costumes and dances, romantic scenarios, love. The second is closer to reality. Women forced into marriage because their parents cannot support them, waves of femicides, sexual harassment – a few examples on a long list. So, between the romanticized image of women and that of women as victims of society, what is it really like to be a woman in India?

Among the G20 nations, a 2012 poll by the Thomson Reuters Foundation ranked India as the worst place to live for women. Why? In a highly religious and strictly stratified society, women have the lowest status, without a doubt.

In traditional Indian society, women are perceived as inferior to men. Mere housewives, they are expected to stay at home, bear children, and take care of household chores. Most women, even nowadays, are forced into marrying a husband that their family chooses. Furthermore, although female literacy rates have increased, only 65.46 percent of women could read and write in 2011 as compared to 82.14 percent of men. This 16.68 percentage-point gap can be attributed to the traditional view that women do not need to go to school.

This patriarchal mindset is still deeply embedded in Indian mentalities. Even before their birth, women are the victims of discrimination due to the hefty dowry the girl’s family must give the husband’s family upon her marriage. Because women cannot inherit from their families, parents have a strong sex-selection bias towards boys to ensure the survival of their descendant line, triggering waves of femicides. Indeed, femicide has been a great plague in India. Research conducted by economists Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray found that nearly 2 million women are missing in a given year, due to female foeticide and girl killings.

Despite this appalling observation, femicide was only officially recognized as gender-related killing on March 15 of 2013, during the 57th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). For the first time, governments are urged “to implement or strengthen national legislation in order to punish such killings of women, and girls” according to the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women). For the first time, femicide is seen as a crime in itself, and governments ought to “end impunity by ensuring accountability and the punishment of perpetrators of such crimes and reparation for the victims”.

The CSW resolution arrives in a time of social turmoil after the gang rape and subsequent death of a 23 year-old medical student on a New Delhi bus. The wave of rape protests that occurred in New Delhi after this incident spread across Asia, with demonstrations in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh. But these protests did not end sexual harassment in India: in April 2013, a 5 year-old girl in New Delhi was raped and tortured for 40 hours before dying.

But it is really the recent scandal involving an American tourist gang-raped by three men in Northern India that drew more widespread international attention to the issue. In the face of these deplorable incidents, women across India and beyond have been mobilizing for their cause, and the heightened international awareness offers hope that Indian women can look forward to a better future.

– Lauren Yeh
Source: BBC, UN Women, Reuters, Guardian
Photo: JNM Journal

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Best and Worst Places to be Women

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One of the Millennium Development Goals is to promote gender equality throughout the world. This is because it has been proven that empowering women often leads to the empowerment of communities. The education of women is key to progress, for a number of reasons.

An annual report by the NGO Save the Children has shed light on a disturbing reality. Through a measurement of life expectancy, education, use of contraception, wages and political power, the organization measured the best and worst places in the world to be a woman. Overall, the results are mostly unsurprising, but show the complexity of the problem of gender inequality. Much progress has been made, but much work is still left to do.

Unsurprisingly, this year Western Europe and Scandinavia top the list of best countries to live with the countries of Finland, Sweden and Norway, followed by Iceland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Spain, Belgium, Germany and Australia. At the bottom of the list, the worst places to be a women include the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Yemen, Somalia, Niger, Chad, Afghanistan, Mali, Eritrea, Sierra Leone and Madagascar.

Though countries like India and South Africa have received significant media coverage for the levels of sexual violence their female populations suffer, they are surprisingly high up on the list. South Africa has an impressive 60% of its population using modern contraceptives and 41% of its government seats held by women. India is significantly less well off, but still beats countries such as Singapore and Korea, with an encouraging life expectancy rate and close to half the population on contraceptives.

What this shows is the multifaceted nature of discrimination; it is not manifested solely in sexual violence, but in a myriad of ways which -– though they may not be as visible -– can be similarly devastating to a women’s physical and mental well-being.

One thing that does stand out is that the link between poverty and gender discrimination is clear. The list correlates surprisingly well as a ranking of wealth as well as status. It is not exact; other factors such as culture and religion play a large role. But all of the top-ranking countries are developed and established, while all of the bottom-ranking ones have many citizens struggling to eke out an existence.

At times, some think of foreign aid as the solution to a given problem — food for hunger, relief for a disaster, supplies for education. But the truth is that foreign aid, successfully delivered, contributes to development which has far reaching implications. Encouraging the development of countries, no matter what way, opens opportunities for its citizens in far more than one area. If we are to fight gender discrimination, we must also fight poverty, one of its root causes.

– Farahnaz Mohammed

Source: Foodtank, The Independent
Photo: Visit Europe

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Pro Mujer International 101

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Pro Mujer International is a development and microfinance organization helping women in Latin America. They provide financial, health, and human development services to help women break the cycle of poverty. Pro Mujer equips women with the tools and resources necessary to build their own livelihoods through microfinance, business training, and health care support.

Pro Mujer is motivated to affect change in Latin American society. They understand the conditions of income disparity and gender inequality. They believe that when women are given the tools to lift themselves out of poverty, they will also lift their families too. According to Pro Mujer, women are more likely to reinvest in their families to provide education, healthcare and to improve living conditions.

The organization is committed to a client-focused approach that actively seeks results. They strive for integrity, transparency, solidarity and they work to maintain commitment to human development. Pro Mujer was founded by Lynne Patterson and Carmen Velasco in 1990 in Bolivia. Their vision for an organization to help lift women from poverty has today become one of Latin America’s premiere development and microfinance organizations for women. Pro Mujer has since been able to allocate over $1 billion in small loans and services including empowerment training, preventive health education and primary healthcare services.

Examples of the financial services provided by Pro Mujer include small business loans, education and housing loans, savings accounts, and life insurance. Their business and empowerment training programs teach women to be more economically independent and informed decision makers as well as teaching basic financial literacy, and empowerment training on domestic violence, communication and leadership skills. Additionally, Pro Mujer is able to provide healthcare assistance including pre and post natal monitoring, family planning, and sexual and reproductive health services to name a few.

Pro Mujer’s current CEO is Rosario Perez. Perez began her career in private banking where she was charged with leading multinational businesses and teams and executing organizational transformations. She is now responsible for Pro Mujer’s portfolio of more than US $100 million and 1,700 employees. Her employees serve more than 2,547,000 clients in Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru.

– Caitlin Zusy

Sources: Pro Mujer, Mastercard Worldwide

Apne Aap: Helping Women Worldwide

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22 women from Mumbai’s red light district who had a vision of a world where no woman can be bought or sold joined together to form Apne Aap. In its founding stages, Apne Aap provided women a safe place to meet, mend clothing, sleep, and receive mail. Throughout the years, it has grown into an influential organization that now provides self-empowerment programs to women and girls trapped in prostitution in Bihar, Delhi, and West Bengal.

Sadly, all of the founding members have passed away from hunger, suicide, and AIDS related complications, serving as an important reminder of the need to empower women in India. Today, Apne Aap provides women and girls safe places to access education, improve their livelihood options and receive legal rights training. The organization reaches more than 15,000 women and girls and is continuing to fight to keep women and girls from being treated as commodities.

Apne Aap is working to increase choices for at-risk girls and women. The organization follows two Ghandhian principles perpetuating resisting violence to the self and others and upliftment of prostituted girls and women.

The leader of Apne Aap, Ruchira Gupta, has led a career focused on highlighting the link between human trafficking and prostitution laws. She also lobbies policy makers to shift the blame from the victims to the perpetrators. Gupta has achieved international acclaim for her humanitarian work and was awarded the 2009 Clinton Global Citizen Award and the Abolitionist Award at the U.K. House of Lords as well as an Emmy for her documentary titled “The Selling of Innocents,” which inspired the creation of Apne Aap. Gupta has widely challenged the belief that slavery and prostitution are inevitable.

Gupta works vigorously to change Indian trafficking laws. She wants to see the Indian anti-trafficking law known as ITPA be amended and to focus more heavily on the responsibility of the perpetrators and not the girls and women. She advocates for enhanced prosecution of traffickers, procurers, pimps, brother owners, managers, and other groups responsible for the proliferation of human and sex trafficking in India. Gupta’s work and the work of Apne Aap provide meaningful and invaluable services to women and girls trapped in the prostitution industry in India.

– Caitlin Zusy 
Source: Apne Aap, Ruchira Gupta
Photo: Change Her World

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The Trickle-Up Solution to Global Poverty

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The Trickle Up aid foundation is turning traditional conceptions of foreign aid on its head, saying that, “investing in individuals at the grassroots level is the most powerful antidote to extreme poverty.”

Attempts to address global poverty have typically originated in large, global corporations whose tactics have been to give foreign aid or to invest in business at the highest level of society in the assumption that benefits from newfound societal organization and prosperity would “eventually trickle down to the rest of the population.”

Glen and Mildred Robbins Leet, the founders of Trickle Up, however, rejected this model as the only way to help the world’s poor, maintaining that the foreign aid money given to developing countries often got lost in corruption at the top societal levels, never quite reaching the country’s poorest members that needed the help most.

Thus, Trickle Up sought a change. Glen and Mildred believed in individuals’ power to create lasting change for themselves, and started a program in which they gave $100 grants to ten people in developing countries, urging them to launch their own microbusinesses.

Along with the small sum of money, the Leets’ model also provided basic business ownership training to their fund recipients, The Trickle Up method relies on the idea that humans feel empowered when they feel trusted and encouraged.

Trickle Up primarily focuses on women as agents of change because they believe that if women have equitable access to and control over resources, a country’s economic development will follow

Trickle Up’s website provides ample information about understanding the program’s ideology, the grant system, and rural poverty itself in an attempt to spread awareness and invite action. By empowering the world’s poor directly, Trickle Up is building a much-needed foundation for a human-rights driven and economically stable developing world.

 – Alexandra Bruschi

Source: Trickle Up
Photo: Life

Women, Pakistan, and Int. Trade

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The U.S. Agency for International Development operates a program in Pakistan focused on increasing the participation of women in international trade. The program recently celebrated its second crop of graduates.

According to the agency, the Women in Trade (WIT) program is part of USAID’s PakistanTrade Project, which represents a commitment to Pakistan to help boost economic growth, education and other areas to help ensure a future of stability and prosperity for the country. WIT is a mentorship and management training program that launched in 2011.

Through WIT women trainees (both graduates and post graduates) have access to three months of management training experience in the private sector with companies that are involved in importing and exporting goods to and from Pakistan. WIT gives the women trainees a monthly stipend for the training.

According to USAID research released in March 2011, women represented just 10 percent of the staff hired by private sector, international trade focused firms in Pakistan. Women’s participation rates in Pakistan’s formal economy are low in general. An estimated fewer than one third of the 31 million women in Pakistan who are of working age are considered economically active. And more than half of the women who are part of the workforce are either unpaid family helpers or low-skilled workers.

Through WIT trainee participants have worked with large international firms, including Target and Li $ Fung (a major apparel supplier). One of WIT’s goals is to help more women explore careers in international trade sourcing, marketing, product design, product development and supply chain management.

WIT launched as a one year program in 2011 with 17 graduates. For the second round of the program WIT placed 57 trainees, 48 of whom completed the full three months of their training by the end of 2012. Thirty-three percent of the WIT trainees in the 2012 cohort have also been fully employed as a result of their participation in the program.

– Liza Casabona

Source: USAID Business Recorder
Photo: Gender Concerns

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Varkey GEMS Fights for Global Education

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Despite the importance of global education, donor agencies and major developed countries have decreased their federal budgets and funding. Developing countries like India are working hard to get children into school and are increasing enrollment rates, but the fact remains that attendance rates and general accessibility to education in developing countries are lower than they should be.

Vikas Pota, CEO of Varkey GEMS Foundation, interprets this as “a major setback for children all over the world”, and states that “we need innovative solutions to make sure children have the opportunity to attend school”.  The Varkey GEMS Foundation attempts to imrove the standards of education for underprivileged children, with one of their major goals being to impact 100 underprivileged children for every child enrolled in a GEMS school. In order to ensure that “every child has a chance to prosper”, the foundation provides scholarships and leadership development, as well as builds schools throughout the developing world. Another core goal of the foundation is to promote gender equality and provide for girl’s and women’s education as well.

At the launch of the foundation in December 2010, Bill Clinton had this to say, “There will rarely be people who launch something with so much potential to lift the hopes and spirits and dreams of children as this Foundation has done tonight. The benefits from an educated child will affect not only the child itself, but his or her family and the wider community… the world is depending on it”. By focusing on education of underprivileged children, it is the hope of Pota and of the foundation that those children will be able to lift themselves from poverty into a life of better opportunities and independence.

Pota believes that the biggest crisis we face in education “is that of not investing enough in our teachers”. Over the next ten years, the foundation hopes to train over 250,000 teachers globally, with the help of government aid. Another problem is that the majority of aid to basic education is not allocated to the lowest income countries where the most aid is needed. Pota calls for collective responsibility and action, which starts with the citizens. Calls to congress people and legislators are the most effective way to show support, and will increase the likelihood that budgets for education-based aid will increase.

– Sarah Rybak
Source: Huffington Post, Gems Education
Photo: A Celebration of Women

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Violence Against Women is Global Health Epidemic

Violence Against WomenPhysical or sexual violence against women is causing a global health problem of “epidemic proportions,” according to a new study released by the World Health Organization on June 20.

The report, “Global and regional estimates of violence against women: prevalence and health effects of intimate partner and non-partner sexual violence,” was released in partnership with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the South African Medical Research Council. According to the report, more than 1 in 3 women globally are impacted by physical or sexual violence. The perpetrator of such violence is usually an intimate partner: it affects an estimated 30 percent of women worldwide.

The new study compared this violence in high-income countries with that in other countries. The study found that 23.2 percent of women living in high-income countries experience intimate partner violence, as compared with 36.6 percent in Africa, 37 percent in the Eastern Mediterranean region, and 37.7 percent in South-East Asia.

“These findings send a powerful message,” said Margaret Chan, director-general of WHO. “We also see that the world’s health systems can and must do more for women who experience violence.”

The report looked at the impact of violence on both the physical and mental health of girls and women, including broken bones, pregnancy-related complications, impaired social functioning, and mental problems.

Other findings on the health impacts of intimate partner violence were staggering. The report found that 38 percent of all women who were murdered were killed by their intimate partners. Women who experienced this were twice as likely to have alcohol-use problems and were 1.5 times more likely to acquire syphilis, chlamydia or gonorrhea. In some regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, those women were also 1.5 times more likely to acquire HIV.

The report called for a major scaling up of violence-prevention efforts by addressing social and cultural factors that could be impacting the prevalence of violence. It also called for better health care for women experiencing it. Simply teaching health workers how to respond to violence could be helpful, the report noted.

The report pulled data from dozens of regional and national studies for the first time. By using regional data it was also able to highlight regional patterns. For example, women in Africa are almost twice as likely to experience violence as women living in lower and middle-income countries in Europe.

– Liza Casabona

Source: World Health Organization, The Guardian
Photo: The Guardian