December 28, 2009 • 20 mins
In this episode, Cristen and Molly speak with the director for Program Impact at CARE USA. Over the course of numerous humanitarian efforts, CARE has found that improving the lives of women is a crucial part of alleviating poverty. Tune in to learn more.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the Reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to steph Mom Never Told
You from housetop works dot com. Hey, and well to
the podcast. This is Molly and I'm Kristen. Kristen. As
(00:20):
you know, we spent International Women's Stay together. Yes, we
went to the movie theater saw A Powerful Noise, which
is a really moving documentary about women in the developing
world and how they have overcome just tremendous obstacles in
their own community and become these inspirations both in the
community and worldwide. One story that particularly moved to me
(00:43):
was the story of Han, who's an HIV positive widow.
Her daughter and her husband died from AIDS, and rather
than just given to the stigma and discrimination of that
disease in her community, she formed a support group called
Immortal Flower, which gave people living with HIV a it's
a place for support. She went out into the communities
and did all this prevention awareness, gave out condoms and
(01:06):
really just a lot to dispel myths around the disease.
And the movie also focused on a woman who was
making an agricultural co op for other women and one
woman who worked on just getting girls and to school.
So the whole movie was about how empowering women really
can make a difference in the developing world. Yeah, and
this documentary was produced by a nonprofit headquartered here in
(01:30):
Atlanta called Care, which um began its mission by sending
care packages to soldiers overseas and really wanting to um
tackle the issue of worldwide hunger, and that has kind
of evolved over the years to focus more on the
issue of global poverty, and most recently Care has really
(01:50):
focused its efforts on women in developing countries and the
important role that they play in alleviating poverty and all
of the ripple effects from that. So Molly and I
thought that with the holidays coming up, and you know,
just the pro women topics that we talk about every
(02:10):
week here on mom stuff, what better tie in than
Care And they're here in our hometown. So we decided
to go and talk to someone at Care about the
work that they're doing and also the crucial role of
women in the developing world. Right, So we talked to
Malia Han, who's the director for a program Impact at
Care USA, and we're going to hear from her right
(02:31):
now on a little bit about what Care does and
its mission. Care does a very wide variety of of
of work UM. If in fact, if there's anything that's
cares trade market is that we work in almost all
the sectors UM. So we do everything from agriculture UM,
increasing productivity, providing you know, better inputs to farmers, to
(02:52):
governance UM, getting people more involved in local budget making
and politics, UM, to health, education and and all of that.
So for a very for a long time, Care was
known as the NGO that did very wide variety of
work UM. Lately, the focus of that work has started
(03:13):
to become, UM through our years of experience in the field,
that we need to focus on women UM, and the
work that women do and the position that women have
in society in order to really be effective in addressing poverty. Now,
the role of women in alleviating poverty has been in
the news quite a bit in the past year. In
(03:35):
two thousand nine, probably most notably with the release of
a book called Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristoph and
Cheryl wu Dunn Uh. You might know Christoph as a
columnist for the New York Times, and there's actually a
really great excerpt of this book UM on the New
York Times website, it's called The Women's Crusade, it stated
August nine, and it just goes into how if we
(03:55):
ever want to end poverty, women are the key to
doing that. That by empowering women in their communities and
by ending the human rights violations that are against them,
then we can make a real impact on poverty. And
that's an idea that is shared by CARE. And we're
going to hear a little bit right now about how
CARE came to realize that women were central to alleviating poverty.
(04:20):
Several years ago, CARES started a sort of internal process
of UM analysis which we we said that what we
have to do is really identify in each context the
underlying cause of poverty, like what's actually causing it, rather
than the symptoms of it that you know, poverty results
in in this level of income or this level of
(04:41):
access to health care. But rather than go into that
which we considered to be symptoms of poverty, we said
that there has to be reasons why poverty exists in
particular contexts, and and in starting to do that analysis
around the world, we came up with a few common
UM causes and the two most common causes, and it
(05:01):
didn't matter whether you were talking about Benin or Malawi
or Bangladesh. The two most common causes were um a
low status that women had in society and poor governance,
you know, just governance, structures, accountability of people in public offices,
et cetera. When when we identify those two, we said,
(05:23):
we have to go about and and really try to
understand what has CARES impact been in those areas. So
UM for the law and we chose women's empowerment first
UM and said we we would address governance after that.
And we we did a study that that that was
in twenty six countries, involved four or five hundred of
(05:43):
our own stuff and took place over four years in
which we said, let us look at how CARE has
actually been impacting or changing the lives of women, because
if if that is one of our underlying causes, then
that should be something that CARES really addressing. And we
we looked at that and discovered that in some of
our projects we really were about of our project, we
(06:06):
really were sustainably for the long term changing women's lives.
But we also discovered that in a lot of our
projects we're doing well. We were addressing whatever it is
that we we said we would. We were increasing enrollment
rates in schools, We were, you know, providing better healthcare.
We were say, creating more awareness around HIV or whatever
(06:28):
it was that we were doing, but we weren't really
changing the social positions of women. Women's lives and how
people viewed them were changing, and so we really sat
down and said why and how can we do it better?
And that's when UM A couple of years ago, CARE
came up with its on what we call theory of change.
How will we create social change UM in the lives
(06:51):
of the people we want to work with? And we
came to the conclusion that changing the lives of women,
the way they're viewed in society, the way they viewed themselves,
and the opportunities have is key to actually addressing poverty. Now.
As you can imagine, though, going in and really trying
to reach out to these women, UM isn't as simple
(07:11):
as just CARE walking in and setting up a program,
holding some meetings, throwing some funding dollars their way. These
are some real deep cultural issues that they are having
to tackle, and I mean some of the issues. Just
to give you an idea, UM we've got rampant sex trafficking,
child marriages, rape as a means of control, and infant
(07:34):
and maternal mortality. And just to give you an idea
of UM, some of the statistics UM. And this is
from the Nicholas Kristoff New York Times magazine UM article
that Molly referenced a few minutes ago. UM. He says,
in India, brideburning takes place approximately once every two hours
to punish you woman for an adequate dowry or to
eliminate her so a man can remarry. UM. In many countries,
(07:57):
if a man isn't able to pay a doll or,
he will rape a girl and therefore devalue her in
her community's eyes, so that her family essentially has to
give her away to this man because she's not going
to be marriageable anymore after she's been raped. UM. Another
study has found that thirty nine thousand baby girls died
annually in China because parents didn't give them the same
(08:20):
medical care and attention that boys received. UM. And about
a hundred and seven million females are missing from the
globe today. Right. And you know the statistics that really
struck me, Kristen, when both when I read this book
and in this article, is that in a country in
West Africa, Niger, a woman has a one in seven
chance of dying in childbirth. Eternal mortality is huge in
(08:42):
some of these countries, whereas in the United States you
have a one in forty eight hundred chance, in Ireland
one in forty seven thousand, six hundred, so one in
seven in Niger. Thing and um, talking about the issues
that are facing girl, it is not just women, but
you know very young girls. UM. About a hundred thousand
(09:04):
girls have been are annually kidnapped and trafficked into brothels
and held there against their will. And at one point UM,
as we'll talk about, UM, I think the next episode
a little more detail. UM. Nicholas Kristof actually went into
these brothels to talk to these women, UM, and actually
tried to to rescue a couple of them, which is
it was proved a lot more challenging than you might
(09:26):
think it would have been. Right now, all of these issues,
from sex trafficking to child marriage to bride burning, these
are all things that could make entire stuff. Mom never
told you episodes, and they might very well in the future,
but we don't want to dwell on them too much
in this episode, except to show that these are the
problems that organizations like care are trying to deal with
and what they all have in common according to all
(09:50):
these scholarships. But the whole reason this happens is because
women are second class citizens in other countries, right, and
it all links back as well to a cycle UH
of poverty globally. UH. The statistics show that disproportionately more
girls are kept out of school than boys. And then
you know, once they are basically betrothed into a marriage, UM,
(10:13):
they're still held a second class citizens and the cycle
just continues because they don't have control of their money,
and the husbands are less likely to set aside money
for their children's education than the wives are, and then
it's just going to continue for generations. And it's you know,
it's something as simple as that, if you have two
children and both of them get sick, these parents, even
(10:34):
the mothers, are more likely to spend the money on
medication for the boy as opposed to the girl. And
so the argument that's made over and over again by
UM people like Nicholas Kristof are that women just aren't
valued the way they are here and that that has
to change. Now that is a pretty massive change, which
is what um Molia Hans spoke about in the clip
(10:56):
we're gonna hear about right now, addressing social justice and
general no matter what, you know, the reason for people
being marginalized. UM. And you know, you've got a long
history in the United States, UM, if you look at
race relations in which you and then look at how
long it took to do that. UM. So definitely it's
it's much easier said than done. UM. But one of
(11:16):
the things that we we also realized, Karen, it's you know,
many many years of work UM in the different context
so out what you know, what people call the field
or the countries where we want to have the change
in UM, there was a realization that you have you
can't just address one part of a woman's life. You've
got to address multiple parts of a woman's life if
(11:36):
you really want to have long term change. So now,
Kristen talked UM a little bit before that clip about
how education can be central to really changing this perspective
in a community. And as Mila Hahn will will tell
us in future clips and in these ones that she
started to hint at, you've got to change everyone in
the community's viewpoint on women. You've got to change from
the very essence of what a community believes about how
(12:00):
women should be valued. And UM, to my mind after
reading the book and doing some research, it really comes
down to making sure that girls can get an education
when they're young, because if they stay in school, then
they're more likely and then then they're less likely to
get married at the age of you know, eleven or twelve.
That means they're not going to start having babies at
the age of twelve or thirteen. And it really just,
(12:22):
you know, has a tremendous impact on their life from
a very young age if they get that education. UM.
When Larry Summers, who was the Chief Economists of the
World Bank when he was holding that position, he wrote,
investment in girls education may well be the highest return
investment available in the developing world. So if you invest
in those schools that try and keep girls and boys
(12:44):
in school longer, then you're really making a change in
that community. Yeah and uh. In terms of jackling this
issue of global poverty, um Christof points out in his article.
He says that in many poor countries, the greatest unexploited
resource is an oil fields or veins of gold. Is
the women and girls who aren't educated and never become
a major presence in the formal economy because they are
(13:07):
never given those opportunities. And he also points out in
Half the Sky, Uh, that it's not just when we
talk about, you know, women being considered second class citizens
in a lot of these areas. It's not just the
men who are are holding the women back. It's also
the women themselves. Um. It's the women who are you know,
feeding their sons before their daughters. It's the mothers who
(13:28):
are taking their girls to be circumcised. It's you know,
And so I think it's important to um to realize
that it's the entire community, not just not just men,
you know, who need to be re educated as well.
So how do you re educate a community. I think
that for a long time, people in this country have thought,
you know, I'll make a donation. Um, that money may
(13:51):
go to let's say a woman who's trying to start
her own business. Um, she will then you know, get
some training, she'll turn all that money around and it'll
be great. She'll be one of those examples of the
women who can be in that movie But what I
like about care and I think that's one of the
reasons we have chosen to highlight them, is that they
know that it's not right and it's not fair to
just handle woman money and expect her to change her
(14:13):
entire community. And that is why um ms Han will
talk about in this next clip. One thing I want
to emphasize is that our approach is not the bootstrap approach, right.
It's kind of like saying to the woman, the poor,
illiterate indigenous women in the Andean region, or the you
(14:33):
know again, the illiterate mother of six in a small
landless you know, laborers and a village in Bangladesh, lift
yourself up by your bootstraps and here's some you know,
here's here's some training, and you can do it. Like
she can't do it. I mean, she can do things,
but there's so much a raid against that woman, um
(14:57):
that you know, expecting her to on top of her
workload in the house, workload in the field, everything else
that she has to contend with, we expect her to
take responsibility, um for her own change of circumstances is
really you know, it's it's unrealistic and it's it's not
fair either. Now it's very easy after hearing clips like
(15:19):
that and reading a book like Half the Sky, to
be like, yes, women stick them into every development project
you have, things will automatically get better. And that is
that's just not what happens. It's got to be. This
is why it's got to be such a community effort,
because Kristen, you have an example of what happens when
you just put a woman in a project without trying
to do anything about changing the mindset of that community, right,
(15:40):
because they can actually have unintended results that will UM
end up harming the women UM at the end of
the project, which of course is the opposite of what
these nonprofits and NGOs want and UM. An example from
Half the Sky UH talks about a u N project
in Nigeria to bring in UM strains of a widely
(16:03):
eaten root called cassava. And basically the un workers thought
if they brought brought these healthy strains of cassava and
then the the women could plant them and harvest them
and they'd be able to sell it and to make
UM more money. And so they did that, and these
women began um raising the cassava and they actually the
(16:25):
cassava took off the crop harvested, you know, a pretty
large yield, and they were able to make a lot
of money, which was fantastic. These women all of a
sudden had money on their in their pockets, but that
didn't make the men very happy. And so basically the
men then came in kicked the women out of the
cassava fields um and the men took over that cash
(16:48):
crop and as a result, they used the profits for beer,
and the women ended up having even less income than
before that u N project started. And so, you know,
I think it's a great example of a really good
idea with unintentionally bad results because you aren't addressing all
of the issues going on in the community that are
keeping these women in these communities in poverty, incorporating our
(17:11):
learnings around women's empowerment and what it takes too, for instance,
to really put in women's empowerment into an agricultural project,
not just incorperate women, so that you have a better project.
That's what I call the instrumental approach. You're using women
so that you recognize that women are you know, seventy
of the world's farmers. They provide the agricultural labor in
(17:34):
the world. So, how are you going to have a
successful agricultural project without talking to women. You're not. So
you talk to women, you get them involved, and you
use women to have higher yields. That's one way of
doing it right. What Care says is you can actually
involve women and have higher yields and actually make the
women's lives force. You can put higher demand labor demands
(17:56):
on them. You can switch from crops that are traditional
women's two crops that are traditionally commercial, which means that
women are providing the labor, but then don't have control
over the crops. The crops get sold by the men,
and then what do you do. But as far as
our culture is concerned, that will actually be a good
outcome because your productivity has gone up, your income has
(18:16):
gone up. Yeah, and so you can check it off
and say, hey, that was a great project. Um but
but but what Care says, we have to be very
careful about that. And there's but then there's ways of doing,
for instance, improving agricultural productivity while empowering women. And it
may be a longer, more complicated process, but that is
what we've got to do. Um So I think the
(18:37):
main threst of what we are going to be doing
over the next few years is making sure that in
all the different types of work we do, whether it
is a water project or its education or its maternal health,
that we're really and truly empowering women so that we
have longer lasting results. But we do have We have
identified three areas where we feel that CARE, through its
years of experience, has a particular model to offer. So
(19:02):
obviously Care has an incredibly huge goal to meet. It
probably seems insurmountable at times. I mean when I, you know,
just listening to Emilia talking about all these issues, I
think it's amazing that they have made as much progress
as they have right now, because, um, it is not
so simple to just go in as a nonprofit to
(19:23):
these foreign cultures, foreign societies and try to enact lasting change.
So how do they do it? And what are the
challenges that CARE faces wants to get into societies like
this While you're gonna have to tune in next time.
That's right, We're gonna do a two parter on Care
and women's issues. So in the next episode, just to
give you a little hint, as Kristin said, we're gonna
(19:45):
talk about how Care can go into communities and actually
change them from the bottom up and how that will
possibly help women all around the world. Yeah, but in
the meantime, if you do want to uh learn more
about CARES programs and and what the organization does, you
can head to their website. It's Care dot org, c
A r E dot org. And as always, if you
(20:09):
want to email me and Molly with your thoughts, feelings, opinions,
please feel free to send us an email. Our emails
mom stuff at how stuff works dot com. And as always,
you can check out our blog it's called how to
stuff and that and many other articles about poverty and
nonprofits and all that good stuff is on how stuff
(20:31):
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
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(20:54):
you
Brought to you by the Reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to steph Mom Never Told
You from housetop works dot com. Hey, and well to
the podcast. This is Molly and I'm Kristen. Kristen. As
(00:20):
you know, we spent International Women's Stay together. Yes, we
went to the movie theater saw A Powerful Noise, which
is a really moving documentary about women in the developing
world and how they have overcome just tremendous obstacles in
their own community and become these inspirations both in the
community and worldwide. One story that particularly moved to me
(00:43):
was the story of Han, who's an HIV positive widow.
Her daughter and her husband died from AIDS, and rather
than just given to the stigma and discrimination of that
disease in her community, she formed a support group called
Immortal Flower, which gave people living with HIV a it's
a place for support. She went out into the communities
and did all this prevention awareness, gave out condoms and
(01:06):
really just a lot to dispel myths around the disease.
And the movie also focused on a woman who was
making an agricultural co op for other women and one
woman who worked on just getting girls and to school.
So the whole movie was about how empowering women really
can make a difference in the developing world. Yeah, and
this documentary was produced by a nonprofit headquartered here in
(01:30):
Atlanta called Care, which um began its mission by sending
care packages to soldiers overseas and really wanting to um
tackle the issue of worldwide hunger, and that has kind
of evolved over the years to focus more on the
issue of global poverty, and most recently Care has really
(01:50):
focused its efforts on women in developing countries and the
important role that they play in alleviating poverty and all
of the ripple effects from that. So Molly and I
thought that with the holidays coming up, and you know,
just the pro women topics that we talk about every
(02:10):
week here on mom stuff, what better tie in than
Care And they're here in our hometown. So we decided
to go and talk to someone at Care about the
work that they're doing and also the crucial role of
women in the developing world. Right, So we talked to
Malia Han, who's the director for a program Impact at
Care USA, and we're going to hear from her right
(02:31):
now on a little bit about what Care does and
its mission. Care does a very wide variety of of
of work UM. If in fact, if there's anything that's
cares trade market is that we work in almost all
the sectors UM. So we do everything from agriculture UM,
increasing productivity, providing you know, better inputs to farmers, to
(02:52):
governance UM, getting people more involved in local budget making
and politics, UM, to health, education and and all of that.
So for a very for a long time, Care was
known as the NGO that did very wide variety of
work UM. Lately, the focus of that work has started
(03:13):
to become, UM through our years of experience in the field,
that we need to focus on women UM, and the
work that women do and the position that women have
in society in order to really be effective in addressing poverty. Now,
the role of women in alleviating poverty has been in
the news quite a bit in the past year. In
(03:35):
two thousand nine, probably most notably with the release of
a book called Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristoph and
Cheryl wu Dunn Uh. You might know Christoph as a
columnist for the New York Times, and there's actually a
really great excerpt of this book UM on the New
York Times website, it's called The Women's Crusade, it stated
August nine, and it just goes into how if we
(03:55):
ever want to end poverty, women are the key to
doing that. That by empowering women in their communities and
by ending the human rights violations that are against them,
then we can make a real impact on poverty. And
that's an idea that is shared by CARE. And we're
going to hear a little bit right now about how
CARE came to realize that women were central to alleviating poverty.
(04:20):
Several years ago, CARES started a sort of internal process
of UM analysis which we we said that what we
have to do is really identify in each context the
underlying cause of poverty, like what's actually causing it, rather
than the symptoms of it that you know, poverty results
in in this level of income or this level of
(04:41):
access to health care. But rather than go into that
which we considered to be symptoms of poverty, we said
that there has to be reasons why poverty exists in
particular contexts, and and in starting to do that analysis
around the world, we came up with a few common
UM causes and the two most common causes, and it
(05:01):
didn't matter whether you were talking about Benin or Malawi
or Bangladesh. The two most common causes were um a
low status that women had in society and poor governance,
you know, just governance, structures, accountability of people in public offices,
et cetera. When when we identify those two, we said,
(05:23):
we have to go about and and really try to
understand what has CARES impact been in those areas. So
UM for the law and we chose women's empowerment first
UM and said we we would address governance after that.
And we we did a study that that that was
in twenty six countries, involved four or five hundred of
(05:43):
our own stuff and took place over four years in
which we said, let us look at how CARE has
actually been impacting or changing the lives of women, because
if if that is one of our underlying causes, then
that should be something that CARES really addressing. And we
we looked at that and discovered that in some of
our projects we really were about of our project, we
(06:06):
really were sustainably for the long term changing women's lives.
But we also discovered that in a lot of our
projects we're doing well. We were addressing whatever it is
that we we said we would. We were increasing enrollment
rates in schools, We were, you know, providing better healthcare.
We were say, creating more awareness around HIV or whatever
(06:28):
it was that we were doing, but we weren't really
changing the social positions of women. Women's lives and how
people viewed them were changing, and so we really sat
down and said why and how can we do it better?
And that's when UM A couple of years ago, CARE
came up with its on what we call theory of change.
How will we create social change UM in the lives
(06:51):
of the people we want to work with? And we
came to the conclusion that changing the lives of women,
the way they're viewed in society, the way they viewed themselves,
and the opportunities have is key to actually addressing poverty. Now.
As you can imagine, though, going in and really trying
to reach out to these women, UM isn't as simple
(07:11):
as just CARE walking in and setting up a program,
holding some meetings, throwing some funding dollars their way. These
are some real deep cultural issues that they are having
to tackle, and I mean some of the issues. Just
to give you an idea, UM we've got rampant sex trafficking,
child marriages, rape as a means of control, and infant
(07:34):
and maternal mortality. And just to give you an idea
of UM, some of the statistics UM. And this is
from the Nicholas Kristoff New York Times magazine UM article
that Molly referenced a few minutes ago. UM. He says,
in India, brideburning takes place approximately once every two hours
to punish you woman for an adequate dowry or to
eliminate her so a man can remarry. UM. In many countries,
(07:57):
if a man isn't able to pay a doll or,
he will rape a girl and therefore devalue her in
her community's eyes, so that her family essentially has to
give her away to this man because she's not going
to be marriageable anymore after she's been raped. UM. Another
study has found that thirty nine thousand baby girls died
annually in China because parents didn't give them the same
(08:20):
medical care and attention that boys received. UM. And about
a hundred and seven million females are missing from the
globe today. Right. And you know the statistics that really
struck me, Kristen, when both when I read this book
and in this article, is that in a country in
West Africa, Niger, a woman has a one in seven
chance of dying in childbirth. Eternal mortality is huge in
(08:42):
some of these countries, whereas in the United States you
have a one in forty eight hundred chance, in Ireland
one in forty seven thousand, six hundred, so one in
seven in Niger. Thing and um, talking about the issues
that are facing girl, it is not just women, but
you know very young girls. UM. About a hundred thousand
(09:04):
girls have been are annually kidnapped and trafficked into brothels
and held there against their will. And at one point UM,
as we'll talk about, UM, I think the next episode
a little more detail. UM. Nicholas Kristof actually went into
these brothels to talk to these women, UM, and actually
tried to to rescue a couple of them, which is
it was proved a lot more challenging than you might
(09:26):
think it would have been. Right now, all of these issues,
from sex trafficking to child marriage to bride burning, these
are all things that could make entire stuff. Mom never
told you episodes, and they might very well in the future,
but we don't want to dwell on them too much
in this episode, except to show that these are the
problems that organizations like care are trying to deal with
and what they all have in common according to all
(09:50):
these scholarships. But the whole reason this happens is because
women are second class citizens in other countries, right, and
it all links back as well to a cycle UH
of poverty globally. UH. The statistics show that disproportionately more
girls are kept out of school than boys. And then
you know, once they are basically betrothed into a marriage, UM,
(10:13):
they're still held a second class citizens and the cycle
just continues because they don't have control of their money,
and the husbands are less likely to set aside money
for their children's education than the wives are, and then
it's just going to continue for generations. And it's you know,
it's something as simple as that, if you have two
children and both of them get sick, these parents, even
(10:34):
the mothers, are more likely to spend the money on
medication for the boy as opposed to the girl. And
so the argument that's made over and over again by
UM people like Nicholas Kristof are that women just aren't
valued the way they are here and that that has
to change. Now that is a pretty massive change, which
is what um Molia Hans spoke about in the clip
(10:56):
we're gonna hear about right now, addressing social justice and
general no matter what, you know, the reason for people
being marginalized. UM. And you know, you've got a long
history in the United States, UM, if you look at
race relations in which you and then look at how
long it took to do that. UM. So definitely it's
it's much easier said than done. UM. But one of
(11:16):
the things that we we also realized, Karen, it's you know,
many many years of work UM in the different context
so out what you know, what people call the field
or the countries where we want to have the change
in UM, there was a realization that you have you
can't just address one part of a woman's life. You've
got to address multiple parts of a woman's life if
(11:36):
you really want to have long term change. So now,
Kristen talked UM a little bit before that clip about
how education can be central to really changing this perspective
in a community. And as Mila Hahn will will tell
us in future clips and in these ones that she
started to hint at, you've got to change everyone in
the community's viewpoint on women. You've got to change from
the very essence of what a community believes about how
(12:00):
women should be valued. And UM, to my mind after
reading the book and doing some research, it really comes
down to making sure that girls can get an education
when they're young, because if they stay in school, then
they're more likely and then then they're less likely to
get married at the age of you know, eleven or twelve.
That means they're not going to start having babies at
the age of twelve or thirteen. And it really just,
(12:22):
you know, has a tremendous impact on their life from
a very young age if they get that education. UM.
When Larry Summers, who was the Chief Economists of the
World Bank when he was holding that position, he wrote,
investment in girls education may well be the highest return
investment available in the developing world. So if you invest
in those schools that try and keep girls and boys
(12:44):
in school longer, then you're really making a change in
that community. Yeah and uh. In terms of jackling this
issue of global poverty, um Christof points out in his article.
He says that in many poor countries, the greatest unexploited
resource is an oil fields or veins of gold. Is
the women and girls who aren't educated and never become
a major presence in the formal economy because they are
(13:07):
never given those opportunities. And he also points out in
Half the Sky, Uh, that it's not just when we
talk about, you know, women being considered second class citizens
in a lot of these areas. It's not just the
men who are are holding the women back. It's also
the women themselves. Um. It's the women who are you know,
feeding their sons before their daughters. It's the mothers who
(13:28):
are taking their girls to be circumcised. It's you know,
And so I think it's important to um to realize
that it's the entire community, not just not just men,
you know, who need to be re educated as well.
So how do you re educate a community. I think
that for a long time, people in this country have thought,
you know, I'll make a donation. Um, that money may
(13:51):
go to let's say a woman who's trying to start
her own business. Um, she will then you know, get
some training, she'll turn all that money around and it'll
be great. She'll be one of those examples of the
women who can be in that movie But what I
like about care and I think that's one of the
reasons we have chosen to highlight them, is that they
know that it's not right and it's not fair to
just handle woman money and expect her to change her
(14:13):
entire community. And that is why um ms Han will
talk about in this next clip. One thing I want
to emphasize is that our approach is not the bootstrap approach, right.
It's kind of like saying to the woman, the poor,
illiterate indigenous women in the Andean region, or the you
(14:33):
know again, the illiterate mother of six in a small
landless you know, laborers and a village in Bangladesh, lift
yourself up by your bootstraps and here's some you know,
here's here's some training, and you can do it. Like
she can't do it. I mean, she can do things,
but there's so much a raid against that woman, um
(14:57):
that you know, expecting her to on top of her
workload in the house, workload in the field, everything else
that she has to contend with, we expect her to
take responsibility, um for her own change of circumstances is
really you know, it's it's unrealistic and it's it's not
fair either. Now it's very easy after hearing clips like
(15:19):
that and reading a book like Half the Sky, to
be like, yes, women stick them into every development project
you have, things will automatically get better. And that is
that's just not what happens. It's got to be. This
is why it's got to be such a community effort,
because Kristen, you have an example of what happens when
you just put a woman in a project without trying
to do anything about changing the mindset of that community, right,
(15:40):
because they can actually have unintended results that will UM
end up harming the women UM at the end of
the project, which of course is the opposite of what
these nonprofits and NGOs want and UM. An example from
Half the Sky UH talks about a u N project
in Nigeria to bring in UM strains of a widely
(16:03):
eaten root called cassava. And basically the un workers thought
if they brought brought these healthy strains of cassava and
then the the women could plant them and harvest them
and they'd be able to sell it and to make
UM more money. And so they did that, and these
women began um raising the cassava and they actually the
(16:25):
cassava took off the crop harvested, you know, a pretty
large yield, and they were able to make a lot
of money, which was fantastic. These women all of a
sudden had money on their in their pockets, but that
didn't make the men very happy. And so basically the
men then came in kicked the women out of the
cassava fields um and the men took over that cash
(16:48):
crop and as a result, they used the profits for beer,
and the women ended up having even less income than
before that u N project started. And so, you know,
I think it's a great example of a really good
idea with unintentionally bad results because you aren't addressing all
of the issues going on in the community that are
keeping these women in these communities in poverty, incorporating our
(17:11):
learnings around women's empowerment and what it takes too, for instance,
to really put in women's empowerment into an agricultural project,
not just incorperate women, so that you have a better project.
That's what I call the instrumental approach. You're using women
so that you recognize that women are you know, seventy
of the world's farmers. They provide the agricultural labor in
(17:34):
the world. So, how are you going to have a
successful agricultural project without talking to women. You're not. So
you talk to women, you get them involved, and you
use women to have higher yields. That's one way of
doing it right. What Care says is you can actually
involve women and have higher yields and actually make the
women's lives force. You can put higher demand labor demands
(17:56):
on them. You can switch from crops that are traditional
women's two crops that are traditionally commercial, which means that
women are providing the labor, but then don't have control
over the crops. The crops get sold by the men,
and then what do you do. But as far as
our culture is concerned, that will actually be a good
outcome because your productivity has gone up, your income has
(18:16):
gone up. Yeah, and so you can check it off
and say, hey, that was a great project. Um but
but but what Care says, we have to be very
careful about that. And there's but then there's ways of doing,
for instance, improving agricultural productivity while empowering women. And it
may be a longer, more complicated process, but that is
what we've got to do. Um So I think the
(18:37):
main threst of what we are going to be doing
over the next few years is making sure that in
all the different types of work we do, whether it
is a water project or its education or its maternal health,
that we're really and truly empowering women so that we
have longer lasting results. But we do have We have
identified three areas where we feel that CARE, through its
years of experience, has a particular model to offer. So
(19:02):
obviously Care has an incredibly huge goal to meet. It
probably seems insurmountable at times. I mean when I, you know,
just listening to Emilia talking about all these issues, I
think it's amazing that they have made as much progress
as they have right now, because, um, it is not
so simple to just go in as a nonprofit to
(19:23):
these foreign cultures, foreign societies and try to enact lasting change.
So how do they do it? And what are the
challenges that CARE faces wants to get into societies like
this While you're gonna have to tune in next time.
That's right, We're gonna do a two parter on Care
and women's issues. So in the next episode, just to
give you a little hint, as Kristin said, we're gonna
(19:45):
talk about how Care can go into communities and actually
change them from the bottom up and how that will
possibly help women all around the world. Yeah, but in
the meantime, if you do want to uh learn more
about CARES programs and and what the organization does, you
can head to their website. It's Care dot org, c
A r E dot org. And as always, if you
(20:09):
want to email me and Molly with your thoughts, feelings, opinions,
please feel free to send us an email. Our emails
mom stuff at how stuff works dot com. And as always,
you can check out our blog it's called how to
stuff and that and many other articles about poverty and
nonprofits and all that good stuff is on how stuff
(20:31):
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, is it how stuff works dot com. Want
more how stuff works, check out our blogs on the
house stuff works dot com home page. Brought to you
by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are
(20:54):
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