Monday’s salon on “Empowering Women and Girls in the Developing World” was a big success.
As I milled about the bar at Norwood Club, I said hello to a few of our guests. Constance DeCherney, associate director of new media at Planned Parenthood sat at the bar chatting with Michael Short, a dealer at Sperone Westwater art gallery about the strange saga of Annie Leibovitz’s financial meltdown. I said hello to filmmaker Peter Mattei and shook hands with Terry Culver of Global Nomads Group. Before long, I was introducing myself to Gabrielle Bernstein, a motivational speaker, author, and life coach who is president and founder of a social network called HerFuture.com and her friend Kelsea Brennan, who blogs for HerFuture.com (and also works in ad sales).
What drew them to this particular JANERA salon? I wondered. Gabrielle said the topic of investing in women and girls’ education resonated with her, since she spends her days helping to empower highly-educated women; she was interested in finding a way for these women to partner with less fortunate women in the developing world. As she spoke, I suddenly realized I’d just read about Gabrielle and her uncanny ability to manifest her goals in the Sunday Styles section.
Before long, Ann Cotton, the British founder and executive director of Camfed (the Campaign for Female Education) arrived. Brooke Hutchinson, the director of Camfed USA, introduced us to Cotton, who has very busy week before her. Not only was she speaking the following night at President Clinton’s dinner, but she is slated to speak on a panel later in the week at the Clinton Global Initiative. She is not a woman who tires easily.
I asked Brooke about Penelope Machipi, the resilient young woman from northern Zambia who stars in a movie about her own life called “Where the Water Meets the Sky” (produced by Camfed and co-directed by Ann’s daughter Helen Cotton) and who just won the Goldman Sach’s Global Women Leaders Award in San Diego. The award includes a $25,000 grant for Penelope to reinvest in her community in Samfya, Zambia. Penelope, who lost both her parents to AIDS when she was 14, is also—thanks to Camfed—a graduate of Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Women program, which trained her in Information Technology. (She has already started an IT lab in Samfya.)
“She’s very analytical,” said Ann, with obvious pride. “She’s only 22 and she’s got this incredible wisdom. It really was a cathartic process, making the film.” She apparently gave a moving speech at the Goldman Sachs summit in San Diego.
On my way upstairs I saw our second speaker, Sheryl WuDunn, the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist who with her husband, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff, reported on the Tiananmen Square massacres in 1989. The two have a brand-new book out called Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.
Educating women and girls is a no-brainer to most of us: teaching a girl a marketable skill gives her freedom from poverty and the ability to make a living without resorting to prostitution or worse. Also, and unsurprisingly, education has a salubrious effect on population growth: a girl who has four years of primary school has one fewer kid than her peers.
WuDunn started the discussion by asking Cotton the first (provocative) question: “What if you build the schools but the teacher doesn’t show up?”
“There needs to be a major investment in teacher training,” replied Cotton.“It’s true, you can buy good grades in some of these communities,” she said, referring to the practice of bribery (and in some instances, sexual favors). Yet, encouragingly, communities are rising up in protest when they see their girls and women being hurt or mistreated, said Cotton.
One of the most revealing moments of the evening was when Ms. WuDunn admitted that she and her husband had to relinquish some of their journalistic distance while reporting “Half the Sky.”
“Journalists are taught to be balanced, distanced, and so on,” said WuDunn. “It’s very hard to walk away from what we saw. We are journalists, but after all—we are human beings.”
One of the things that kept her going as she reported this book, witnessing atrocities such as sex trafficking, acid attacks, and obstetric fistulas, was that alongside evil, she also saw the good in people. “Women are part of the solution,” she said.
Cotton seconded WuDunn’s sentiment: “There is a real commitment to education among mothers. It’s very touching to me that women especially show such support when girls are sent to school.”
(A video of the entire discussion will be available on FORA.tv next Tuesday; we will post it on the JANERA.com home page.)
The question and answer session began with a pointed question from a woman in the back of the room named Kelly Hoey, who is on the board of two area non-profits that help women and girls who have either been victims of domestic violence (inMotion) or who are trying to exit the commercial sex industry (Girls Educational & Mentoring Services). After thanking the speakers, she asked WuDunn, “So how do we get more men in the room?”
Janera and I had wondered this same thing when the RSVPs began to trickle in: about 80% of the guests for this particular event were female.
Sheryl’s reply was telling. First, she said, there are obviously men who care about these issues—“in fact, one co-wrote this book with me,” she said. (The dozen or so men in the audience seemed to be nodding in solidarity.) And WuDunn and Kristoff are working to get the book’s message(s) out to a mainstream audience with a huge social action campaign (see here) using gaming techniques.
“But frankly, on a practical level, investing in women and girls just makes sense,” said Sheryl. She pointed out that even Larry Summers (“male of all males”), when he was chief economic adviser at the World Bank, said, “Investment in girls’ education may well be the highest-return investment available in the developing world.”
When guests finally dispersed around 8PM, they were left with a two-pronged call to action: make a direct micro-loan to a woman or girl in the developing world (through Kiva.org) or donation to Camfed.org (or one of the many other fantastic organizations doing important work in Africa and elsewhere) and get the message out—to men and women—that helping a girl get an education is the best thing you can do to fight poverty, disease, and the inequality of the genders worldwide.
By Hannah Wallace
