I seem to be reading more serious books these days. I recently finished Melinda Gates' book: The Moment of Life - How Empowering Women Changes the World. I found it almost astonishing that it happened to echo the message of David Attenborough's book that I wrote about last week.
There are chapters dealing with topics such as maternal and child health, education, child marriage, women in agriculture, unpaid work, women in the workplace and women excluded from society. Each of these chapters tells stories of women the author has encountered in her work for the Gates' Foundation. She talks about aiming to lift people out of poverty at the start and then discovering that empowering women was the key to that. They resisted this initially, calling it 'mission creep' but eventually the penny dropped.
The stories don't just come from Africa or India, but from impoverished areas in the US, which I find appalling. Ignorance breeds ignorance wherever it happens.
One of the stories that stayed with me was about Patricia, a woman farmer in Malawi. While the rest of her family and village celebrated Christmas Day, she was meticulously planting her small field, because that was when the rains were predicted to come. Farmers need five things to succeed: good land, good seeds, time, knowledge and farming supplies. The barriers between these things and Patricia existed simply because she was a woman.
1. Up until recently women in Malawi could not inherit land. A law has been passed recently but the culture is slow to change. Paying rent for her plot was expensive and prohibited her being able to increase the size of her plot. It also stopped her investing in improving the land.
2. Her husband made the decisions about where the family's money was spent and she had no say so couldn't acquire farming tools that would make her work more productive or for other tools like cooking pots that would shorten her other work to make more time for farming.
3. Her husband also had the say over how she spent her time: collecting wood and water, cooking meals and washing up after, caring for the children. Any work to grow food for the family had to come after those tasks. Even had she the means to hire farm labour, the workers wouldn't like taking orders from a woman.
4. Even the quality and choice of seeds was influenced against her as a woman. Development organisations working to create seeds resistant to pests or to grow larger plants would speak with community leaders to get their input. Those leaders were always men who were most interested in crops they could sell, where Patricia wanted to grow nutritious crops to feed here children, like ground nuts (peanuts) or chick peas (garbanzo beans). And because the men didn't do the work in the fields, they never thought to tell seed developers to make tall plants: the women complained that harvesting short plants was hard on the back.
5. Giving useful information to women about farming is tricky. Few poor households have TVs so radio was thought to be the best option, except that women don't control the radio dial. Most men would not wish to listen to an educational programme and would select something more entertaining, Also, women are not allowed out of the house without the permission of their husbands. They will be beaten - and believe it to be justified - if they leave without permission. The solution in Ghana was to talk with men to encourage them to allow them to let their wives meet together in groups of ten or fifteen. 'so she could increase the family's income'. 70% of the world's poorest people make money from growing and selling food from their small plots of land. Making those plots more productive would give families more money.
Some time later, Gates attended a group meeting and was surprised when the group leader said
Raise your hand if - before you joined the self-help group - you could grow enough food to last your family the whole year.
Not a single hand went up. Then the leader said
Raise your hand if you had surplus to sell last year.
Almost every hand went up.
Patricia's solution was a bit different. A CARE organisation worked with couples and had them switch roles and role play. She was able to tell him to 'Do this, do this, do this, do this...' He came to realise that if she had no help in the household work then they would always be short of food. He became a more supportive husband and she finally had what she needed to succeed at her farming endeavours.
The book is careful to explain how empowering women also helps men: there is more food, children are healthier, there is perhaps money to educate their children which reflects well on the head of the family and, in one scenario, a man worked out that if helped his wife with the work - contrary to community expectations for men - his wife was happier and less tired and so their marriage bed was happier.
It is not just men who hold women down, but other women as well, particularly when it comes to female genital cutting (using the word 'mutilation' is derogatory and not conducive to discussing the issue with villagers). The consequences for individuals and for families aren't always obvious to people who blindly follow traditions and it is necessary to find ways to help them see the benefits of change.
Another surprise from Gates' book was that she tackles the role of religion in suppressing and damaging women. I've ended up buying the book, as I did Attenborough's book, to re-read and study.
My first choices for charitable giving have always been women's causes, particularly Planned Parenthood, women's refuges or homeless shelters for women. At the back of Gates' book is a list of causes she recommends, many of which she described their work in the book:
Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee
CARE
Family Planning 2020
Girls Not Brides
Kakenya’s Dream
Malala Fund
#MeToo Movement
Population Council
PRADAN
Saksham
Save the Children
Tostan
Gates Foundation
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