Mar 12

The Visible Issues with Invisible Children

Almost everyone these days has been talking about the viral video, “Kony 2012.”  The video is an attempt by the organization, Invisible Children, to bring awareness to Joseph Kony and his group LRA.  Kony, a Ugandan leader of the LRA, kidnaps young children, and turns them into child soldiers.  There is no denying the fact that Kony and the LRA have committed horrifying atrocities, and that he must be stopped by the international community.  However, it is important to understand how Invisible Children works, and what the organization is actually trying to accomplish.  Furthermore, due to the fact that many people do not know about Kony, the organization has gotten away with manipulating facts and information.

 

Many people wonder why it is important to know how an organization works or what exactly it is they are supporting.  The reason is plain and simple.  People think they are supporting a cause that directly aids people in Uganda, and they think they are supporting the best option in the world.  In the case of Invisible Children, I have spoken to numerous young people who think the group is an aid based organization that spends all its money on directly assisting children in Uganda.  However, the fact of the matter is that Invisible Children is not the organization that everyone is making it out to be.  Jedidah Jenkins, a member of Invisible Children, has already explained that “the truth of about Invisible Children is that we are not an aid organization, and we don’t intend to be.  I think people think we’re over there delivering shoes or food.  But we are an advocacy and awareness organization.”  Thus, it is obvious that Invisible Children is not trying to be an aid organization, and people have made the mistake of labeling it as such.  Of course, Invisible Children did not state this fact outright when its viral video came out, but nevertheless the facts are finally out.

 

Another criticism against Invisible Children is the fact that the organization supports the Ugandan army, UPDF, and military intervention in order to put down the LRA.  The UPDF has been known to commit its own atrocities, and is affiliated with the current Museveni government.  Museveni’s government has been criticized for working against human rights, intimidating political opponents, and has also been accused for squandering money as well as being corrupt.  Another issue that has been brought up against military intervention is the fact that in 2008 the United States, working with the UPDF and the Congolese army, started Operation Lightening Thunder to capture Kony.  Unfortunately, the operation failed, and the LRA targeted hundreds of villages where it killed thousands of people, and displaced even more.  Though Invisible Children says military intervention and the UPDF are the best options to combat LRA, there are clearly issues with both the army’s connections to the Ugandan government and the fact that failed military interventions tend to empower the LRA.

 

There is no question that Kony and the LRA are horrible, and have committed appalling crimes against humanity.  Invisible Children has succeeded in spreading awareness regarding Kony’s crimes, but it is time to promote sustainable and positive action in the region.  There are a plethora of local organizations like Human Rights Focus and Voix des Sans-Voix which work towards defending the rights of the Ugandan as well as Congolese people.  Both of these organizations have outlined ways to raise awareness while empowering the locals in order to help them defend their rights.  Invisible Children has definitely spread awareness through the United States, but it is important to know what exactly we are supporting when we talk about the organization.  Do you support military intervention or do you want to find another option?  Do you want to spend money on just awareness building or on aid as well? All of these questions and concerns are important to take in when supporting an organization.

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Mar 12

Will Bras End Sex Trafficking?

I recently read an article on the CNN Project Freedom website about a woman from Denver, Colorado who is trying to end modern day slavery, otherwise known as sex trafficking. Kimba Langas was a stay at home mom who, like most of us, began accumulating unwanted clothing, boxed in her garage, which she packed away and soon forgot about. Over time, she realized that she had collected a fairly large amount of bras that she wasn’t really sure what to do with. She thought about donating them, but worried that GoodWill or the Salvation Army might not want or accept used bras. Instead, she decided to start sending them to women living in rural African villages.

“Free the Girls” was created by Kimba and her pastor, whom was planning on moving to Africa to become a missionary. Soon after deciding to donate all of her own bras, Kimba started running the project from her home and accepting bras from all over the country. She would then ship them or ask friends going to Africa to pack them into an extra suitcase. Free the Girls quickly picked up and gained some awareness.

The point of the project was to put an end to sex trafficking. It was thought out and decided that the donations of bras would go to African girls whom had escaped this disgusting form of modern day slavery. The idea was that the girls would receive the bras and then be able to sell them at local markets in order to make a living; the bras would be providing these girls with jobs and financial support. In theory, the project seems good-hearted and well-meaning. However, I couldn’t help but notice some draw backs.

Free the Girls ended up receiving so many donated bras that they ran out of money to be able to ship them to Africa. The donations became so many, in fact, that it was going to cost well over six thousand dollars to transport the bras. To overcome this hurdle, Kimba and the rest of the team decided that they would start putting all of their efforts into raising the $6,500. Without the money, the African girls would not be able to have jobs.

I think that Free the Girls had a good idea that has not been fully developed. Providing jobs for sex trafficking victims will help the girls get back on their feet. Many of them, after all, have been slaves since they were kids. However, I do not think that providing them with bras to sell is the best way to go about this. I suggest the following: there is no need for any clothing to go to waste. Kimba had a good idea in gathering bras to provide to women; they are crucial and often unreasonably expensive. Simply giving them to girls, though, is not providing them with a solution to their problems. After all, these girls now have to rely on bra donations to stay afloat. If for some reason those donations do not come through (because of shipping costs, perhaps), the girls are back to square one. Instead of raising $6,500 to ship the bras, why not give them out to women in the United States, where the project is based, who cannot afford them? Like I said, I do not think that clothing should go to waste, and I have no doubt that there are countless women much closer to Kimba who would appreciate a bra. Secondly, rather than raising thousands of dollars to ship bras across the ocean, why not raise that money to provide the girls with job training? Instead of having to rely on someone on the other side of the world, they could be empowered to control their own future.

While I do support Free the Girls for their vision, a slavery free world, I do not see how enabling African girls to sell bras will help to reach that. Ending sex trafficking will take education and empowerment. Providing women with job skills and training will set the stage for increased awareness and knowledge of what their pasts were like, and potentially move us one step closer to a free world.

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Mar 09

Should International Education Comparisons Dictate our Future?

The Programme for International Student Assessment, or “PISA,” is an international study that made its first run in 2000. The purpose of the test is to compare results of 15 year old students around the world and to rank each country by how successful the students score. The test is distributed and analyzed every three years, with the most recent one having taken place in 2010.

Each time that PISA has been distributed and compared, the United States has scored significantly lower than China, Japan, Singapore, New Zealand, and Finland, among others. In fact, the US has been so unsatisfied with its student’s test scores that professionals are continuously being sent to countries that scored higher, in an effort to learn from their education systems. The US has sent so many people to Finland to analyze their schools and teaching methods that the Finns have begun charging fees for the opportunity.

The United States, among other countries that are not ranked highest in education, consider the test scores to be vital indicators of what the future of their country will be like. Essentially, they are worried that without top scoring students, the power that they hold today will not be present down the road. The United States has even compared the education comparisons to the Sputnik Space Race. The country claims to be doing all it can to improve the education system and climb up to the highest ranks.

There are multiple problems with the comparison scenario, though. First, PISA results are not analyzed to the full extent that they should be. The scores are compared by countries and show which ones have the top test results. In the most recent comparison, students in various Asian countries scored higher than those in the US. Because of that, the United States is considered to be below those countries by education system standards. However, the test results do not take into account the fact that the US actually has an extremely higher number of top achievers than any of those Asian countries. So while those countries might have a group of 100 teenagers who had perfect scores, the US would then have a group of 1,000 teenagers with slightly lower than perfect scores. Moreover, the number of immigrants in the US outweighs the amount in Japan and Finland, for instance. Due to this, while many test takers might have scored in the top percentile in their home country, they may take up the lower scores in the US because of the language barrier.

Additionally, PISA comparisons do not take into account the societal and cultural differences of each country. In the United States, much emphasis is put on extracurricular activities like band, athletics, or theater. In Singapore, on the other hand, some schools Continue reading

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Mar 09

Getting to Know the Romani

If I asked someone “who was a victim of slavery in the 1800s?” and “who suffered at the hands of the Nazi’s during the Holocaust?” the most likely answers would be African-Americans and members of the Jewish community, respectively. What most people do not know is that there is a group who lived through both of these troubling episodes during the history of mankind. That group is the Romani.

The Romani people, commonly known as Gypsies, are a group of men, women and children bound by an ethnic bond; a shared belief system, shared language and culture. They are nomadic and are scattered throughout the world; however, the largest concentrations of Romani are in Europe.

What is interesting about the Romani is that throughout history there have been movements to grant different vulnerable and exploited populations their inalienable rights.  These include the women’s and civil rights movements. However, the Romani have been persecuted and continue to be so despite the hundreds of years of recorded existence.

History books show that the enslavement of gypsies lasted from the 13th to 19th centuries predominantly in Eastern Europe and the Anatolian peninsula (modern day Turkey). Even after the abolishment of slavery, they were not allowed to migrate. Countries throughout the world, including the United States, forbade their migration inside their borders.

The persecution of the Romani reached a peak during World War II when they were persecuted by the Nazis.  During this period, their citizenship was taken away, they were subjected to violence, forced imprisonment in concentration camps and later murdered.

And while these incidents happened decades ago, the discrimination still occurs today.

Romani are consistently cast out and denied opportunities that others in the country where they have settled are given. Ethnic prejudice and discrimination are prevalent issues among the Romani populations. It is difficult for them to obtain work. This then forces them to live in areas that are undesirable and less likely to be occupied by mainstream society.

Many times this means living in a place without clean water, set apart from schools for the children and making them more prone to diseases. Diarrhea and dysentery are very common among Romani children. In Bulgaria where a sizeable number of Romani live, it is estimated that infant mortality among gypsy children to be six times higher than in the rest of the population.

So why does the discrimination continue? Often, the gypsy people are viewed differently due to their habits and lifestyles, including some practices such as child marriage, and cultural beliefs surrounding purity and death. Also, their traditions have not allowed them to seamlessly integrate into the society where they reside. This usually lead to them being shunned by the majority.

Even across the ocean, in the United States, Romani are misunderstood.  Con artists and fortune-tellers have been all coined gypsies because of their nomadic lifestyle. They are lumped along with this ethnic minority despite no other shared bond. Additionally, a common derogatory phrase in the U.S. is to “be gypped,” as in “I was gypped.”  In today’s culture it means that someone was robbed or taken advantage of by another.  I was not aware of the origin of the term and was very surprised to see it was taken from the word “gypsy.”

The lack of awareness of the Romani is vast.  The discrimination and prejudice is prevalent and because of their nomadic lifestyle they are living in communities throughout the world.  Because of their relatively small number, 2 to 12 million around the world, their needs as an ethnicity have been disregarded.  However, their place in history is marked by hundreds of years of maltreatment at the hands of many. Can’t this generation be the one to put a stop to it?

Much must be done. To begin, laws need to be passed affording protections to Romani, awareness and cultural sensitivity needs to be raised amongst the majority and public institutions providing services , and an overall anti-immigrant sentiment needs to be addressed.  We can’t erase history, but we can learn from it and try to prevent the reoccurrence of troubling events. What do you think? How can we begin to address the plight of the Romani? What would you do?

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Mar 09

Rural women: the road towards sustainable development

For the last two weeks the United Nations held the 56th Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). The CSW is the principal global policy-making body dedicated exclusively to women’s rights and gender equality. This commission meets annually for 10 working days. The principal outcomes of the commission are the agreed conclusion between member (45 countries with equal representation of each region of the world) states on a specific priority theme. The conclusion contains a list of best practices and recommendations for governments to promote women and gender equality. It also encourages private sector and civil society to act at a local, national and global level.

This year, the focus theme has been the empowerment of rural women. As a student interested in rural development, I was happy to hear  the focus theme for the CSW. However, I wondered why, in a world were 50% of the population now lives in cities (and the fraction or urban population is expected to continue growing), it is still important to consider rural women as a priority.

On the one hand, it seems natural to focus on rural women because the agricultural sector is major industry in many parts of the world, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia (in Sub-Saharan Africa it’s still around 60% for both men and women, in Southern Asia women’s participation in the agricultural sector is 60%). One the other hand, the female share of the agricultural labor force keeps increasing, due to the increase of men’s migrations to the urban areas. Even though half of our population keeps increasing, rural women are still major actors of our global economy.

Rural women have an economic and social potential that is often underestimated by the public and private sector. In the path towards sustainability, rural women have an important role to play. Particularly, empowering rural women creates the possibility of increasing food security and reducing poverty. However, it seems to me that this will not be an easy task. Education is the first difficulty to overcome. Empowering women must come from the grassroots level. Women must be aware of the inequalities they are living and they should be the ones to demand more rights. In my experience, often times rural women are not aware of the important role they play in society: increasing their awareness in an essential step to their empowerment.

Besides education (a requisite for women to be aware of their potential), in the rural areas women need more power in the decision-making processes. The gender gap in the rural areas is very important. In most countries, the share male vs. female of land titles is not equal. For example, although more women work the land in Sub-Saharan Africa, men own 80% of the land. This is partly due because many societies, laws and traditions bar the access of women from owning of inheriting the land (and overcoming this obstacle will require education). Women not having property rights is not only unfair; it is also economically unsustainable. They are the major workers of a plot of land, they are the ones that know how to maximize productivity and thus they know how to manage it better. Additionally, I am persuaded that in many indigenous populations the knowledge on agriculture and natural cycles is transferred between women, from generation to generation. In these cases, since women have special knowledge about their land, it is even more important that they become part of the decision-making processes (such as what to produce and when).

Finally, women lack access to the appropriate economic resources. Often times, women have no access to the appropriate resources to keep their business and their jobs. It has been claimed that the vast productivity difference between the yields of men and women exist not because women are less skilled but because they have less access to inputs such as improved seeds, fertilizers and equipment.

I think that empowering rural women will be an essential as well as necessary step towards sustainable development. To do this, we have to decrease the gender gap that exists in the areas that I mentioned above. Food security and poverty alleviation is a priority for governments and international organizations. It is time to realize that rural development, and in specific rural women’s empowerment, is a necessity in order to acheive the health or our society. The fact that the CSW focused on Rural Women is a benefit, but the discussion must lead to an implementation of the solutions.

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Mar 08

International Women’s Day and the Arab Spring

Today, March 8th, is International Women’s Day, and in honor of this event the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars released a special report on how women have fared in the Arab Spring.  They asked a variety of women to comment on the events, and a surprising number of them were not very positive.  Women played an essential role in the uprisings, but in many cases have been marginalized during the transitions.  This doesn’t mean that women have suffered during the transitions, but simply that it has been a process: progress has been made, but there is still a lot to be done.

Women were on the front lines during the revolutions, and there was no gender segregation among the demonstrators—men and women marched side by side, calling for change.  But as the transitions have progressed many women have found themselves pushed aside: only 9 women, for example, were elected to the new Egyptian parliament, and none in Kuwait.  This makes this region the only one in the world without a parliament that is at least 30% women.  Worse still, on the 2011 International Women’s Day female demonstrators were kicked out of the famous Tahrir Square in Egypt, where they went to protest the continued marginalization of women; they were beaten, subjected to virginity tests, and in some cases stripped by the military and men who had gathered to watch.

Many of the women interviewed for this project blamed the rise of traditional and religious-based politics for their current woes.  The resurgence of traditional Islamist groups and values has denied women their rights, says one of the women, while another argues that women’s role in public life has gone from marginalization during the old, repressive regimes, to rejection during the new, Islamist regimes. Despite all this, however, many of the other women, particularly those from the Maghreb region, were optimistic for the future.  A Tunisian politician, for example, points out that Tunisia was the first in the region to accept the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.

All of the women, however, seem to agree that it is too early to say how these uprisings will affect women’s rights, or even how they will affect the region as a whole; as one of the contributors wrote: “only when women achieve their rights can we say that the ‘Arab Spring’ has commenced.”  Women did, after all, play a major role in the protests, and so could continue to protest if they feel that their needs are not being met and they are being discriminated against or marginalized.  As the International Women’s Day protests last year showed, however, those protests may fall on deaf—and hostile—ears.  Still, the influence of grassroots activism will likely continue to empower people, and the excitement that surrounded the Arab Spring movements could also encourage women to continue the revolution.

I have attached a video below, an interview with Zainab Al-Suwaij of the American Islamic Congress and May Kosba of the National Conference on Citizenship, and I encourage you to watch it and consider what they have to say about the struggles Arab women continue to face.  I also encourage you to read at least some of the Wilson Center report—you don’t need to look through the whole thing, but at least read some of the comments in the spirit of International Women’s Day!  And then let me know what you think in the comments box.  Is there one statement in particular that you feel really resonates?

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Mar 07

Title IX and the Gender Gap Forty Years Later

National Girls and Women in Sports Day was held last month on February 1st, forty years after the passage of Title IX. For the past 26 years, people across the country have celebrated NGWSD and strengthened Title IX’s declaration, that no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance. Because of the installation of Title IX, girls have made leaps and bounds in the sports arena over the past four decades.

From 1972 to 2004, female high school sports saw an increase of 940%. During that time, NCAA varsity sports saw an increase of 456% in female participants. The gains that women’s sports have seen are obviously significant, and they affect the participants in ways that spill outside of the gym, pool, or track, and into their personal lives as well. We have all heard about the countless health benefits that pursuing an active lifestyle will bring, but I want to focus on another form of empowerment.

Women involved in sports reap a multitude of social benefits. Participation in a sport anytime throughout a girl’s life provides her with an increased enjoyment of freedom of expression; her opportunities for education and life experiences expand; her leadership, teamwork, and negotiation skills are heightened. Additionally, involving girls in sports has been shown to reduce prejudice against women. With this comes a more extensive social integration of women into the society, which increases networking, job opportunities, and social opportunities in general.

Moreover, the Wharton Business School conducted a study that showed how an increased opportunity in sports for women actually resulted in an increase of women in the labor force as well.  They found that girls who play sports have a higher chance of employment later in life and also receive wages 14-19 percent higher than girls who do not participate in sports. In other words, women in sports means women in business. Female sports participants have also been shown to be more active in negotiating their salary, something that women generally struggle to do. In fact, another study found that the passage of Title IX was associated with a 15% rise in females occupying traditionally “male” positions. One reason behind this is that sports builds endurance, both physically and mentally. There is always a goal set in any type of sport, and participants are taught to push themselves toward overcoming that barrier. These values and mindsets eventually mesh with other parts of athlete’s lives and enable them to achieve more professionally.

Unfortunately, even 40 years after Title IX took effect, a gender gap still exists in the United States. Women hold far fewer Continue reading

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Mar 06

Amnesty International Celebrates 50 years

On Sunday night, Amnesty International (AI) hosted their International Secret Policeman’s Ball. With expected fanfare and anticipation, the 3hr show had appearances by John Stewart, the Saturday Night Live cast, and musical artists such as Coldplay and Mumford and Sons. Celebrating it’s 50th year, this was the first time the event was held in the United States, and the organization continued with their tactic to emphasize the theme of the night “Free Speech” with comedic skits and facts about AI. Despite a few failed jokes along the way, they managed to share some facts and accomplishments of AI, and advocated for the continued discussion surrounding human rights abuses and the work they are doing around the world.

The three-hour show got me thinking about what big accomplishments they have succeeded in reaching in the past 50 years. And first, more importantly, what exactly is Amnesty International? How exactly does one go about releasing political prisoners in foreign countries?

Amnesty International advocates on behalf of a number of topics; such as torture, free speech, equal rights, and the release of political prisoners, among many others. From their “Mission” page, AI states that they use the tactics of research, action, and advocacy to work towards a “foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” In its beginning, AI was a group of visionary but ordinary citizens who wrote letters on behalf of political prisoners, enacting education and a call for action against the injustices being committed around the world. While now the membership has grown to over 3 million, and they have diversified the causes on which they advocate, their approach still remains the same.

 

I remember the first time I was exposed to AI was in high school and we were asked to write post cards to some foreign government about a political prisoner who was being wrongfully accused of slander. Now, I can’t remember who or where it was; but I remember having a feeling that I was taking part in something that was much bigger than I was. Before I continue with the successes of AI, I want to state that this ability to evoke such feelings of inclusion is one of the strongest points of AI. The ability for some young girl in Alaska to work with thousands of other ordinary people to try and change the life of someone in a far away country was, at the time, far beyond my scope of comprehension. I think that because AI has calculated how to cultivate and harness this power of mobility, this alone has helped them grow into one of the most powerful human rights organizations today.

 

On the company homepage, AI takes credit for a number of success stories from around the world. Most famously was the release of the Burmese political opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi after 15 years of house arrest for political activism. Along with Mrs. Suu Kyi, there have been countless other albeit less famous prisoners that AI have advocated on behalf of, resulting in their release. Without question these are admirable and monumental successes. However, I think it is also important to note that AI does not operate alone in these instances, so credit must be given to where it is due. After all, one look at the Wikipedia page for Mrs. Suu Kyi outlines how many other organizations were also advocating for her release, not least of all President Obama makes the list.

 

That being said, I argue that one of the greatest impacts that AI has had to date have been the advocacy for Continue reading

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Mar 05

Invisible Threat

About every three days it becomes necessary to take out the trash in my roommates’ and my kitchen.  And on this trip down the hall, we take our brown paper grocery bag full of recyclables.  We diligently separate out our plastics, making sure we do our small part to contribute to the recycling movement.  However, when I shut the door of the trash room, with our one lone bag of recyclables separated in an undesignated bin, I know deep down they’re about to just be combined with the rest of the trash.  I’ve searched nearby apartment buildings and asked friends about their recycling systems, but no one seems to be confident in their ability to recycle in their home.  So with no real outlet to place my plastics, I stick to the ignorance is bliss philosophy, hope for the best, and naively assume that someone will be responsible enough to keep my plastics from entering the trash heap.

Research is now finding our typical view of six-pack plastic rings strangling or choking fish in the ocean may not
be the biggest threat our plastic pollution is causing.  Science is finding that plastics do actually break down and at a pretty rapid rate.  The traditional view that it would take high temperatures and hundreds of years for plastic to disintegrate is now being undermined.  Plastics in the ocean are decomposing in cooler temperatures at much faster rates.  Big win for environmental activist groups?  Just the opposite.  The break down of plastics in the ocean releases dangerous chemicals into the water that are harming fish and have a great potential to harm humans as well.

The chemical bisphenol A or bpa has gotten a lot of attention in the last few years, with increasing labels for bpa free water bottles and baby food, consumers have started to become aware of the potential cancerous effects of the chemical contained in plastics.  Plastic was already threatening sea species with 44% of seabirds consuming plastics in the ocean, and up to two hundred and sixty marine species eating plastic, usually mistaken as other sea creatures, such as plastic bags for jellyfish.  Now, marine life faces a new invisible threat with the chemical pollution that is spreading throughout their habitat.

Determining the harmful effects of solid plastics in the ocean has always been a challenge, but now, with the Continue reading

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Mar 02

The Missing Piece: Where Are Women in the Rio+20 Development Puzzle?

The Rio+20 Summit has been generating lots of buzz lately, although the international meeting is not until this summer.  Fellow bloggers Julia and Katherine have discussed, at different lengths, the history and preparation of this year’s summit.  There are seven key categories up for discussion during the three-day event:  Jobs, energy, cities, food, water, oceans, and disasters.  I propose that there is a crucial area of discussion missing from the conversation, and that is the piece of the puzzle where women belong in long-term environmental sustainability issues.  Twenty years ago, at the conclusion of the first Rio Summit, members concluded that women have a “vital role” to play in managing and developing the environment, which requires them to participate to the fullest extent in order to achieve developmental sustainability.

This meeting will be an important first step towards the design of the development framework in a world after the Millennium Development Goals have expired.  Why, then, were issues concerning girls and women left out of the outcomes Zero Draft?  Lakshmi Puri, Deputy Executive Director of UN Women has also spoken up, like many other leaders of female-focused organizations and initiatives to comment that “there is a need to better reflect and strengthen references to gender equality and women’s empowerment in the entire text of the Outcome Document.”

Many economic experts have testified to the fact that women play a huge role in the economic environment, through the formal, and especially in the informal economy, where they play a huge role in the informal agricultural sector worldwide, including Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia, and Latin America.  The informal economy is largely characterized by and made up of people who are not on any official payroll and are generally self-employed, such as some farmers and vendors. The role of women in the informal agricultural economy should be an obvious reason to take into consideration the role of women and jobs.  In case it isn’t obvious, however, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has reported that results of some studies find that agricultural output in Sub-Saharan Africa could increase by as much as 20 percent if gender inequalities were overhauled.  Finally, the World Bank has also indicated that several steps are necessary to repair gender equality and development, by addressing certain key priority areas, such as closing gender gaps in human endowments, promoting women’s access to economic opportunity, closing gender gaps in voice and agency, among other things.

Because closing the gender gap in the jobs sector is crucial to further and sustained development, it is also extremely important to continue to invest in education, enforced rule of law for ownership and resource rights and access, and to promote greater decision-making and political representation of women.  These issues are all explicitly or implicitly tied to the current Millennium Development Goals for 2015 and will without a doubt be similarly linked to the anticipated Sustainable Development Goals which will come into existence soon after.  Currently, women make up only 1 percent of landowners all over the world, despite playing such a major role in agricultural employment.  Including gender as part of the discussion at Rio+20 will allow for the specific inclusion of women to have more rights, equal rights, in land ownership and other issues regarding governance and rule of law.  It would also allow for women to cultivate their land, and cultivate greater opportunities, for themselves, their families, and their communities.  It would decrease poverty and increase health.

Indeed, planning for sustainable development, and progress of any kind, must account for equality between the sexes, as women share a greater proportion of many burdens of poverty, disaster, and disease worldwide. By addressing education and other inalienable rights, women will be more likely to succeed, and when women succeed, so do their families.  This has been well documented by the World Bank as well, including in their 2012 World Development Report.  In short, when women have access to education, they have better health outcomes for themselves, which in concert with increased knowledge ultimately leads to better health outcomes for their children.  Women are more likely than men to invest in their own communities and invest their finances in family needs, such as healthier foods, education, and medicines.   Again, the health of women and children are explicit goals for 2015, and will be targets for improvement in the new development framework.

 

More information on the inclusion of gender and women in the Rio+20 Summit is available here.

 

 

Flickr photos courtesy MREBRASIL and CIMMYT

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