Ascent of Women (19 page)

Dr. Sima Samar, who still fights like a lioness for women’s rights in Afghanistan, is the woman who defied the Taliban decrees to close her medical practice and shut down her girls’ schools. In spite of death threats she kept both the schools and her health clinics open. She became the first minister of women’s affairs when President Karzai took office in 2001 and subsequently became the first chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. Today she says, “The status of women is much better than it was during the Taliban time and even before that, during the mujahedeen government and the
previous regime as well. The women in the cities gained a lot of rights and have access to work, to information through the media and to job opportunities and health care. But in the rural areas it is still the same, particularly in areas controlled by the Taliban. Women are not allowed to get educated or to go to work; they might be allowed health care if the clinics have female staff, but they can’t raise their voices or exercise basic rights like freedom of movement, choice and speech.”

She says the question everyone needs to ask is, why should a man look at a woman as a sexual object rather than an equal personality? She described a conference she attended in Uruzgan province: “There were all these mullahs complaining that their people didn’t have access to education, to female teachers or doctors. I listened to each one complaining. I spoke last and said change needs to come from your own society. Who is going to be the lady doctor to deal with your wife and daughters if you refuse to send your daughters to school? Who will be the teacher to teach your girls? Your daughter’s mind is not smaller than mine. You respect me. I come from the same society as you. I am able to do the work. Your daughters can too.”

Afghanistan has been known as a country where being a woman is to be a target for religious extremists, an object of so-called cultural practices. It’s to be the child who is fed last and least, the one who is denied education. It’s to be sold as chattel, given away in a forced marriage as a child bride and used in any manner that benefits a father or brother.

The world has grown weary of a place that has taken so much in the way of troops and treasure, and the international community is making plans to leave. Rumours of a Taliban return to power are rife. But the Taliban have never been a large fighting force.
They could never go toe-to-toe with any military, which is why they resorted to suicide bombing and improvised explosive devices. Many Afghans see the Taliban as a menace and a throwback to the dark ages. Its support comes mostly from thugs and malcontents and the Pakistan secret service. The biggest obstacle to a Taliban return is the women, particularly the young women active in Afghanistan today.

As I’ve described in this book’s introduction, Young Women for Change (YWC) is challenging old customs and is growing dramatically. Recently fifty young men and women marched from Kabul University to the offices of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission carrying placards that called for women’s rights in the streets of Afghanistan and handing out pamphlets that explained their position about street harassment. Some bystanders were shocked by the brazen behaviour of the young Afghans, but the majority of onlookers accepted the pamphlets and joined the marchers.

In an initiative that suggests they are trying to inspire another Banksy, the iconoclastic British graffiti artist whose work is brilliantly displayed on the wall that separates Israel and the West Bank, YWC launched an art competition in January 2012 that invited artists to create posters to promote the organization’s causes. The rules stipulated that the work must embrace gender equality, women’s power, the peaceful campaign for women’s rights, the participation of women in society with a focus on the elimination of violence and street harassment. Such a contest would have been absolutely unheard of even a few years ago.

The resulting works were hung all over Kabul City, featuring such slogans as STOP THE VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN, DON’T BEAT ME, LET US GO TO SCHOOL, I WANT TO
GO OUTSIDE WITHOUT FEAR OF HARASSMENT and MORE THAN 75 PER CENT OF KIDS IN AFGHANISTAN FACE FORCED AND EARLY MARRIAGE. One of the male recruits of YWC, Zafar Salhei, said, “We printed 1500 posters and put them up in crowded places where people would see them. Our aim is to change the mind of people.” Some of the posters were damaged by critics who saw women’s rights as the work of the Devil; some were totally destroyed; but most stayed on the walls of Kabul’s buildings, sending out a message of change. Women and girls are seen in a different light in the Afghanistan of today. Not everyone is in favour, of course, but women like Dr. Samar and Commissioner Anwari continue to promote change, and the young generation is leaping at the opportunity.

~

Measuring the changes by wins isn’t always the best strategy. These women I’ve described fighting for change in the Middle East, in Swaziland and in Afghanistan know that it takes time to reform laws and attitudes, and patience too. But they also know that, at last, their voices are being heard, that the status quo is not sustainable and that victory is out there.

FIVE

Breaking the Cycle of Poverty

Equality for women and girls is … a social and economic imperative. Where women are educated and empowered, economies are more productive and strong. Where women are fully represented, societies are more peaceful and stable.

—UN S
ECRETARY
G
ENERAL
B
AN
K
I-MOON

T
he economist Jeffrey Sachs has a view of poverty and the economy that tips a lot of dismal thinking upside down. Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and adviser to the UN on Millennium Development Goals, whose aim is to reduce poverty, hunger and disease by 2015, he says, “If you treat the symptoms, your patient will die. If you treat the causes, you will save the patient.” Simple words. Profound truth.

One of the most remarkable examples of Sachs’s idea of treating the causes not the symptoms of poverty can be found with Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi banker, economist and founder of the Grameen Bank, an institution that has been providing microcredit—small loans to poor people possessing no collateral—since the mid-1970s. Yunus was among the first to see women as the way forward, the way out of the intractable cycle of poverty. And the success of his strategy of extending microcredit to women has become a legend. I was fortunate enough to hear the story first-hand at the State of the World Forum held in New York City in September 2000, where Yunus was a luncheon
speaker, along with former chief of the US defence staff Colin Powell. Powell went first.

A tall man, broad-shouldered and seemingly comfortable with the mantle of power he wore, Powell addressed a room of approximately fifteen hundred delegates. His remarks about the state of the world’s security almost exactly a year before 9/11 were well received with a round of polite applause. Then Yunus came to the stage. A short man wearing a Bangladeshi shalwar kameez, he required a step at the podium to be able to see his audience, and even then he was barely visible. Speaking conversationally in his characteristically soft voice, he quickly created a hush: people held their breath so as not to miss a single word. He told us he’d been working at a bank in Dhaka when he got the idea that ultimately launched the Grameen Bank. Each day on his way to work he walked by a group of women using bamboo to make stools and tables and trays. He and the women wished each other good-morning, sometimes commented on the weather, and the encounter soon became part of his daily routine. One day curiosity made him stop to speak to the women, which is how he discovered that they were paying a lender usurious fees for cash to buy their bamboo. At work that day, he suggested to his colleagues that the bank lend money to these women at an honest rate. They were dumbfounded. “Lend money to poor people? Unheard of. You’ll never get it back.”

Yunus pondered their reaction for a long time, and then he decided to lend the women the money himself. “I made a list of people who needed just a little bit of money. When the list was complete, there were forty-two names. The total amount of money they needed was $27. I was shocked.” He had figured out that the women were not only paying too much interest on the
loans but, worse, the arrangement they’d made included selling the finished product to the lender, who was grossly underpaying them. “I wanted to give money to people like these woman so that they would be free from the moneylenders to sell their product at the price which the markets gave them, which was much higher than what the trader was giving them.”

That was in 1976—it was the beginning. Soon he was lending money to poor men as well as poor women but discovered it was the women who paid back his loans in total and on time. His Grameen Bank stopped lending to men and became the lender to poor women—and a household word around the world. His philosophy: lend money to women and they will break the cycle of poverty; lend it to men and they will spend the money on themselves. “My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see.” Then he said, with characteristic understatement, “Poverty is unnecessary.”

He was speaking his truth: “We have created a society that does not allow opportunities for those people to take care of themselves because we have denied them those opportunities.” The prolonged applause he received spoke for the agreement that the delegates to the State of the World Forum had for the Yunus method of breaking the cycle of poverty.

In 2006, Yunus and his Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for developing microcredit into an ever more important instrument in the struggle against poverty. His methods were praised the world over, but some in Bangladesh resented a native son they believed was rising disproportionately in the ranks of the famous. In a highly controversial move, the government of Bangladesh fired him from his post as managing
director of Grameen Bank in 2011, claiming he had started it without proper permission and also asserting that Yunus, then seventy, had failed to retire on time. Yunus and his bank are appealing the decision.

In the meantime, his lesson lives on. Increasingly, economists see women as the solution to poverty. For example, the World Economic Forum Gender Gap Report shows that where the gender gap is nearest to being closed in a range of areas—including access to education and health care, economic participation and political participation—countries and economies are more competitive and prosperous.

~

The first-ever economic summit on women, sponsored by the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation organization (APEC), was held in September 2011 in San Francisco. Hillary Clinton, U.S. secretary of state, was the keynote speaker at the gathering, which drew the largest number of foreign diplomats to the city since 1945, when representatives of fifty nations had gathered there to sign the United Nations Charter.

The room was filled with the who’s who of the business of the economy, which many saw as a portent of the future of women. Hillary Clinton certainly did. She opened her address with this: “To achieve the economic expansion we all seek, we need to unlock a vital source of growth that can power our economies in the decades to come. And that vital source of growth is women. With economic models straining in every corner of the world, none of us can afford to perpetuate the barriers facing women in the workforce. By increasing women’s participation in the
economy and enhancing their efficiency and productivity, we can bring about a dramatic impact on the competitiveness and growth of our economies. Because when everyone has a chance to participate in the economic life of a nation, we can all be richer.”

Backroom strategists have long warned elected officials about the perils of being too honest, of daring to talk about issues that are controversial. But Clinton was fearless. She has always said the unsayable, whether talking about China’s high abortion rate of female fetuses during her trip to that country or, in Congo, claiming that conflict is better settled by women. She has also regularly employed a tactic unusual in a politician: citing concrete statistics to back up her claims. At the Economic Summit, she called for “a fundamental transformation, a paradigm shift in how governments make and enforce laws and policies, how businesses invest and operate, how people make choices in the marketplace.” She was taking a page from Muhammad Yunus’s book, writ large. “As information transcends borders and creates opportunities for farmers to bank on mobile phones and children in distant villages to learn remotely, I believe that here, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are entering the participation age, where every individual, regardless of gender or other characteristics, is poised to be a contributing and valued member of the global marketplace.” In essence, she said, “a rising tide of women in an economy raises the fortunes of families and nations.”

There are plenty of statistics to back up her claims. For example,
The Economist
reports that the increase in employment of women in developed countries during the past decade has added more to global GDP than China has. In the United States, a McKinsey study found that from 1972 to 2012 women went from holding 37 percent of all jobs to nearly 48 percent; in terms
of their contribution to the bottom line, they were punching well above their weight.

But Clinton also highlighted the realities that women face. “A web of legal and social restrictions limit their potential,” she said. She was referring to women who are confronted with a glass ceiling that keeps them from the most senior positions; women who don’t have the same inheritance or property rights as men, so they can’t inherit property or businesses owned by their fathers; women who are unable to have citizenship conferred on their children, which leaves the rights of the children in limbo. Some countries charge women higher taxes than men, deny women loans, prohibit them from opening bank accounts, signing contracts, purchasing property, owning businesses or filing lawsuits without the permission of a male guardian.