Ascent of Women (21 page)

Gowramma credited public pressure for slight revisions to the rules she and her neighbours lived with. They used to have to remove their sandals and the men also had to remove their shirts in the presence of the landlord. They couldn’t ride bicycles on the same street as Hindus. At one time, they could be whipped if
they happened to step into the shadow of a member of the upper caste. After the rules changed, she said, an upper-caste person would give a Dalit food as long as it was on a separate plate, one that the Hindu family didn’t have to touch.

But Dalit women still suffer sexual exploitation cloaked as “religious” ritual. Outlawed practices, such as
Bettale Seve
, nude worship, which allows upper castes to strip Dalit women and men and parade them naked through the streets, still happen. So does devadasi, the Hindu practice that in part sacrifices a young girl’s virginity to the gods to satisfy the wants of village chiefs and ward off evil spirits and bad omens.

While she was getting her sons ready to go to the Dalit-only school they attend in the village, I asked Gowramma how she untangled this injustice for her children. “I tell them, ‘You are a human being. God has not created people to be upper or lower caste. It’s people who have divided society. So, don’t you feel inferior. Go to school, study well so you can get a good job.’ ”

After the boys left for school, she sounded less optimistic. “It’s so hard,” she said quietly while breastfeeding Dikshitra. “We work so hard, get such low income, have no money for good food. We need to change this.”

As the baby drifted off to sleep in her arms, I was reminded of
A Fine Balance
, Rohinton Mistry’s novel about India’s untouchables, whose theme is how narrow is the distance between hope and despair. For Dalit women such as Gowramma, hope and a growing demand for justice may be the only way out of despair. It’s easy to dismiss a poor woman and her two cows as a minor problem, one that won’t solve the food shortages or human rights atrocities that the Dalits suffer. Spending time with Gowramma made it abundantly clear that it is crucial to change
the rules so that a woman can milk her cows and sell the milk to people who need it and can afford to pay for it. Allowing a woman such as Gowramma to sell her milk is the way to turn poverty into production.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that if women had the same access to productive resources as men, they could increase yields on their farms by 20 to 30 percent. This increase could raise total agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5 to 4 percent and reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 12 to 17 percent, or up to 150 million people.

Isobel Coleman sees a core economic argument here. “When you invest in women and girls, it’s the best way to break cycles of poverty. Poor states aren’t necessarily failed states. But it’s difficult to emerge as a peaceful functioning stable country when living in dire straits of poverty.” Her advice: “Invest in women and girls—break negative cycles and create positive cycles that would benefit the women and girls and country as a whole at a macro-economic level.”

While it’s an economic issue, Coleman says, it’s also a human rights issue. “When women are sold, bartered, neglected, aborted as baby girls, all sorts of bad things are happening in those countries—it’s a real marker for the health of the civil society, the political life, the core of the nation. Countries that stone young women or have high levels of honour crimes, or don’t allow women to take part in the social fabric, or vote, or participate as equals have a whole range of problems, the role of women being the most obvious. Women are half the population. These aren’t women’s issues, they are core economic issues, security issues, human rights issues”

The surest path to the eradication of poverty is the economic empowerment of women, who make up the majority of the world’s poor. Studies done by the International Center for Research on Women in Washington, D.C., claim that discriminating against women is economically inefficient; that national economies lose out when a substantial part of the population cannot compete equitably or realize their full potential. Gowramma’s story is ever more meaningful in the face of data that say women who are economically empowered contribute more to their families, societies and economies. They invest income in their children, which is the definition of sustainable development.

Koraro is a village in Ethiopia that was selected as a Millennium Village by Jeffrey Sachs and his Millennium Goals team to demonstrate how a little outside help could lift a village out of poverty. The Earth Institute and the UN Development Program kicked in the funds to jump-start Koraro from hardscrabble poverty—rampant malaria, no schools, no health clinics, food shortages—to development, complete with a local school, a clinic and much-improved agriculture. Although they have a distance to travel before becoming self-sustaining, Sachs credits the girls in the village with showing how the empowerment of women can lead to success for the entire village. Each year, a dozen girls were given scholarships to attend secondary school in another town. The classes included instruction in skills that led to jobs as plumbers, electricians and to improved farming techniques. Education changed their lives. Exactly as Sachs had predicted, the girls married later, had fewer children and those children are healthier. When he visited the village in 2010, he sat in the classroom while the first wave of graduates talked to primary schoolchildren about the value of getting an education. Sachs believes that these
young women will improve Koraro’s education level and create new jobs along the way.

~

That was the sort of successful experiment that caught the attention of Margot Franssen, a businesswoman who brought the Body Shop franchise to Canada. “When women aren’t included in the conversation, in equal rights, when they don’t have the whole menu of opportunity, it affects the entire world. We need to invest money in women and girls so they can sit at the table and bring their voices to the table. We need the men too.”

She believes that too many people, from government representatives to corporate bosses, still simply don’t get it; they don’t understand the big picture—how important it is to invest in women and girls. “People believe if you buy someone a cow you settle poverty. If you have a shelter built that’s the end of violence. That’s like saying, ‘We have an emergency ward so we don’t need the hospital.’ People like simplistic solutions but we need to look at this in a more holistic manner.”

Franssen became the co-chair of an organization called Women Moving Millions (WMM) for precisely that reason. “In my life of dealing with business and commerce and funding women and girls,” she says, “I discovered that just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s moral, and just because it’s moral doesn’t mean it’ll be put into law. No amount of laws will make women strong. We need to step in and give them a voice.” WMM funds women in impressive numbers and at significant levels: millions of dollars. Women of means in Canada and the United States pledge $1 million each to fund organizations that are moving
women into a world of self-sufficiency. Franssen gave her pledge money to the Canadian Women’s Foundation (CWF), an organization whose motto is “the power of women and the dreams of girls,” so it can research, fund and share the best approaches to ending violence against women, moving low-income women out of poverty and building strong, resilient girls.

WMM started in 2007 with a goal to raise $150 million for the advancement of women and girls. Franssen remembers, “Everyone said you’re crazy, you’ll never make it. By 2009, when the rest of the world was falling to pieces, we had raised $185 million. Now we’re realizing we should be thinking billions. It’s not about us deciding where the money will go, it’s us saying if you really want to invest well, give your money to an organization that promotes women and girls.”

She supports CWF because she’s seen that it makes a significant difference in the lives of women and girls. When, for instance, it funded Aboriginal women in Winnipeg, Manitoba, who wanted to become carpenters, it was unheard of that women would join the union of carpenters in the province. Even while they were apprenticing, the women feared they’d never get jobs. With CWF funds over a five-year period, they put together a co-op carpenter company and hired themselves out. In short order, all thirteen newly qualified female carpenters were fully booked. They eventually disbanded the co-op but only to go on to work for developers and renovators, having built careers for themselves. The cost of helping these women was a fraction of what it would have cost the state to subsidize them with social assistance.

“Through CWF, we fund the most marginalized people in our society,” says Franssen. “One woman in Niagara Falls, Ontario,
who had been abused by her husband was out on her own without work and wondering how to make ends meet when she came to us with a plan. She knew how to preserve food and was making jellies and jams. We funded her. She’s now the CEO of Niagara Presents, a hugely successful company that hires women who come from the same situation as she was in.”

There’s another CWF initiative that draws particular attention among businesswomen in Toronto. The foundation released the plan as an IPO (initial public offering) and invited women to join. Here’s how it works. The organization’s research established that it takes $2500 to launch a woman out of poverty, much less than the cost of paying welfare over her lifetime. So CWF set a goal to raise $2500 from each participant to launch twenty-five hundred women out of poverty. It became a wildly successful program, pitched each year by Margot Franssen, who stood up in front of about a thousand women at one of those ghastly early-morning breakfast fundraisers and begged: “Come on—it’s $41 a month on your Visa. That’s less than a pedicure.” CWF met its goal in three and a half years, raising more than $6 million. Franssen says, “Women are looked at as a problem. We need to look at them as an asset—their inner strength, intuition, their smarts and their ability to nurture and see into the future. I believe that things are changing for women and girls. The last decade has shown us that. We’re becoming a bigger voice and are using that voice.”

Speaking of the corporate women who come to those CWF breakfasts, research shows a correlation between the number of women on boards and higher corporate profits. One analysis found that companies with more women board directors outperform those with the least by 66 percent return on invested capital,
by 53 percent return on equity, and 42 percent return on sales. Another study indicates that one-third of executives reported increased profits as a result of investments in employing women in emerging markets.

In the United States, the productivity gains attributable to the modest 11 percent increase in women’s overall share of the labour market over the past forty years, as documented in the McKinsey report mentioned above, accounts for approximately one-quarter of the country’s current GDP. The dollar amount is more than $3.5 trillion—more than the GDP of Germany, and more than half the GDPs of China and Japan.

There’s no shortage of sobering statistics that present a strong moral case that funding women is smart economics. For example, women produce nearly 80 percent of the world’s food, but receive less than 10 percent of agricultural assistance. Even
The Economist
is on board: an editorial written in April 2006 said, “Forget China, India and the Internet: economic growth is driven by women.”

~

Some of the most heart-wrenching and seemingly impossible cases in the poverty file are being handled by innovative women—some of them octogenarians who bring new meaning to necessity being the mother of invention. These are the grandmothers in sub-Saharan Africa who were called on to care for their sons and daughters who had HIV/AIDS; when their children succumbed to the disease, they became the guardians to the next generation—their own grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Stephen Lewis, once the UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, says,
“This is the redefinition of the family. An entire generation is missing—the one that keeps the economy going. We don’t know what impact that will have.”

I went back to the Kingdom of Swaziland in May 2010 to meet some of these women who are trying to turn the economy in their own lives around, and to witness an extraordinary event called the Gathering.

The streets of Manzini swayed with their presence; curb to curb for block after block they marched—more than 2000 women hoisting placards demanding pensions, voices ululating and chanting “
Viva Go Gos
” (the Swazi word for “grandmothers”). They came from thirteen African countries and Canada (where Lewis had alerted First World grannies to the needs of African grannies) for the Gathering, which started as a passionate and persuasive call for change and became the birth of a movement to empower older women.

Much of a generation—the sons and daughters of the women marching—had been wiped out by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The African grandmothers are tasked with raising their orphaned grandchildren—getting up for 2:00 a.m. feedings and pleading with teenagers to keep their curfews at a time when they thought the anxiety of child rearing was behind them. They were joined by Canadian grandmothers there to bear witness, express solidarity and gather evidence that would describe the needs of these African grannies back home in Canada so they could raise money to lighten their burden.

Most of the Canadian women cut their teeth on protests that demanded social change. As they marched down the streets of Manzini, they reminded me of marchers who followed Pete Seeger, Doris Anderson, Martin Luther King and Harvey Milk.
This is what it takes to launch a movement; these kinds of marches for peace, for women’s rights, for civil rights and gay rights invariably lead to change. “We aren’t simply a collection of retired teachers and nurses and social workers,” said Leslie Starkman, sixty, a delegate from Toronto, “we’re boomers and hippies and activists.” Working for change is in their DNA.