Spot'd(evelopment)

Warren Buffet’s NoVo foundation is working on changing the world. By donating $45 billion over the duration of 3 years to the Girl Effect. It’s worthwhile to sit around for a few minutes watching the embedded video and have a thought about this effort to equip women with some micro loan so they could buy a cow which would grow into a herd which will result in clean water for the village and produces domino effects of reduced HIV transmission and increased respect by the men, enough for them to invite members of the opposite sex to attend the often ‘all-men’ tribal councils.

I have been taught to be skeptic. And this shiny vision of Girl Effect produces no different effect on me other then.. skepticism.

And this is why I don’t think giving women cows in developing world would not work to change the world completely:

• women in developing world are very much still dictated by religious, cultural and social norms which often includes an almost complete submission to the husband’s wishes and requests. What does this mean? It means if you give a cow to a woman and if she isn’t empowered enough to say NO to her husband, the cow will either be sold off to the market and the money used for gambling/drinking/start-up money to the man’s business which if it ends up failing brings the woman back to square one
• Similarly, if the system works in such a way that the woman receives some micro loan to buy the cow, the money might not even reach the market before the man has access to it.
• community based development that is gender bias towards women may in paper appear great but as all those theories of Gender in Development, Women and Development and most recently Gender Mainstreaming say, if you exclude men from participating in project design chances are the intended outcome will never materialize
• If micro loan is the way to go, Grameen Bank will still be the all glorified catchword even as we speak today. and if in fact Grameen Bank micro-credit system should have worked, there will no need for Buffett to hand over his $45 billion for this purpose.

With that said, hats off to Nike Foundation and Warren Buffett for producing an impressive and catchy marketing tool to spread the word on women disadvantaged status in the developing world (but don’t we already know that?). Perhaps are a time where the world is in dire need of any change, any replicated version of past development efforts is welcomed.