Half the Sky

"IN THE 19TH CENTURY, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape."

Thus begins this weekend's piece in the NY Times Magazine by Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and his wife, journalist Sheryl WuDunn. Their article, entitled "The Women's Crusade," takes on the crucial issue of women's rights around the world. They've just written a new book, "Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide." (This title is based on a Chinese proverb which says that "Women hold up half the sky.")
Below are several quotes from their article that hit home with me on subjects near and dear to my own heart.

Also, be sure to check out this video on the NY Times site. Kristoff narrates a five minute slide show highlighting the issues he delves into in the magazine piece.

His last words?

"Women and girls aren't the problem. They're the solution."

Ok, here are the quotes.

Microfinancing and women:

"...Saima signed up with the Kashf Foundation, a Pakistani microfinance organization that lends tiny amounts of money to poor women to start businesses. Kashf is typical of microfinance institutions, in that it lends almost exclusively to women, in groups of 25. The women guarantee one another’s debts and meet every two weeks to make payments and discuss a social issue, like family planning or schooling for girls. A Pakistani woman is often forbidden to leave the house without her husband’s permission, but husbands tolerate these meetings because the women return with cash and investment ideas.
Saima took out a $65 loan and used the money to buy beads and cloth, which she transformed into beautiful embroidery that she then sold to merchants 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."

Does this story sound familiar to any of you fair traders out there? I can think immediately of several groups we order from that work primarily with women (Sari Bari, Freeset, Hope for Women...)

Female mortality rate:
"Girls vanish partly because they don’t get the same health care and food as boys. In India, for example, girls are less likely to be vaccinated than boys and are taken to the hospital only when they are sicker. A result is that girls in India from 1 to 5 years of age are 50 percent more likely to die than boys their age. In addition, ultrasound machines have allowed a pregnant woman to find out the sex of her fetus — and then get an abortion if it is female.The global statistics on the abuse of girls are numbing. It appears that more girls and women are now missing from the planet, precisely because they are female, than men were killed on the battlefield in all the wars of the 20th century. The number of victims of this routine “gendercide” far exceeds the number of people who were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century."

Death in childbirth:

"Another huge burden for women in poor countries is maternal mortality, with one woman dying in childbirth around the world every minute. In the West African country Niger, a woman stands a one-in-seven chance of dying in childbirth at some point in her life. (These statistics are all somewhat dubious, because maternal mortality isn’t considered significant enough to require good data collection.) For all of India’s shiny new high-rises, a woman there still has a 1-in-70 lifetime chance of dying in childbirth. In contrast, the lifetime risk in the United States is 1 in 4,800; in Ireland, it is 1 in 47,600. The reason for the gap is not that we don’t know how to save lives of women in poor countries. It’s simply that poor, uneducated women in Africa and Asia have never been a priority either in their own countries or to donor nations."

Human trafficking and modern-day slavery:
"In the developing world, meanwhile, millions of women and girls are actually enslaved. While a precise number is hard to pin down, the International Labor Organization, a U.N. agency, estimates that at any one time there are 12.3 million people engaged in forced labor of all kinds, including sexual servitude. In Asia alone about one million children working in the sex trade are held in conditions indistinguishable from slavery, according to a U.N. report. Girls and women are locked in brothels and beaten if they resist, fed just enough to be kept alive and often sedated with drugs — to pacify them and often to cultivate addiction. India probably has more modern slaves than any other country."

Show Some Respect

Bono thinks Africa deserves more credit than it gets. The ever-cool U2 frontman tells us why in his recent New York Times column, highlighting President Obama's trip this week to Ghana.

I was especially interested in Bono's column because World Next Door stocks lots of products from Ghana, and works extensively with Global Mamas, a Ghana-based group that makes beautiful batiked clothing and bags.

Here are a few highlights/excerpts from Bono's piece:

"Quietly, modestly — but also heroically — Ghana’s going about the business of rebranding a continent. New face of America, meet the new face of Africa.
Ghana is well governed. After a close election, power changed hands peacefully. Civil society is becoming stronger. The country’s economy was growing at a good clip even before oil was found off the coast a few years ago. Though it has been a little battered by the global economic meltdown, Ghana appears to be weathering the storm. I don’t normally give investment tips — sound the alarm at Times headquarters — but here is one: buy Ghanaian."
...
No one’s leaked me a copy of the president’s speech in Ghana, but it’s pretty clear he’s going to focus not on the problems that afflict the continent but on the opportunities of an Africa on the rise. If that’s what he does, the biggest cheers will come from members of the growing African middle class, who are fed up with being patronized and hearing the song of their majestic continent in a minor key.
I’ve played that tune. I’ve talked of tragedy, of emergency. And it is an emergency when almost 2,000 children in Africa a day die of a mosquito bite; this kind of hemorrhaging of human capital is not something we can accept as normal.
But as the example of Ghana makes clear, that’s only one chord. Amid poverty and disease are opportunities for investment and growth — investment and growth that won’t eliminate overnight the need for assistance, much as we and Africans yearn for it to end, but that in time can build roads, schools and power grids and propel commerce to the point where aid is replaced by trade pacts, business deals and home-grown income.

...

President Obama plans to return to Africa for the World Cup in 2010. Between now and then he’s got the chance to lead others in building — from the bottom up — on the successes of recent efforts within Africa and to learn from the failures. There’s been plenty of both. We’ve witnessed the good, the bad and the ugly in our fraught relationship with this dynamic continent.

...

Africa is not just Barack Obama’s homeland. It’s ours, too. The birthplace of humanity. Wherever our journeys have taken us, they all began there. The word Desmond Tutu uses is “ubuntu”: I am because we are. As he says, until we accept and appreciate this we cannot be fully whole."

More on Fighting Sex Trafficking

Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times is one of my favorite reporters/columnists. He consistently examines difficult global and local issues, and does a phenomenal job of drawing attention to issues that might otherwise be forgotten or ignored. Not only does he write about these issues, but he travels regularly to all corners of the globe, and brings a unique, firsthand perspective to the topics he covers.

This week, he is answering readers' questions for The Times. Here's a query concerning whether it is possible to end sex trafficking. I thought his answer was worth sharing.

Q. How in heaven's name can sex trafficing of young women and girls be halted? It is outrageous that all over the world such abuse continues.
— Dr. James D. Fett

A. The crucial step to end sex trafficking, as with ending traditional slavery in the 19th century, is to shine a light on it. Once people are aware of it, then public pressure builds to end it. So it's important to build a movement to call attention to the abuses, and a number of organizations on left and right are doing that.
One of the impediments, however, is the distrust between left and right. They often disagree about what should be done with prostitution by consenting adults, and so they spar over that — instead of focusing on the huge common ground, the shared belief that no 14-year-old should be kidnapped and forced by a pimp to have sex with customers. My view is that we should focus on the common ground, because if the two sides can work together there'll be far more progress on eliminating child prostitution.
I've seen that progress is possible. In Cambodia, when I first reported on this subject, 10-year-olds were being sold openly to the highest bidder. These days, brothel-owners can go to jail for trafficking in girls, and so they're more careful about keeping younger girls and about keeping them against their will. One brothel owner I interviewed many times over the years found that her profit margins were eroding, and the risk of going to prison was rising, so she closed the brothel and opened a grocery store instead. That's what needs to happen on a broader scale.