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.
two things: that anti-islamist video ‘Fitna’ and an internship in Kabul.
A former program director relayed on a message from his former student, there is an opening for an internship in development based in Kabul, Afghanistan for 2 months. I am tempted, and if only I can figure out what I could do to my ongoing degree in the 2 months that I am gone I would send in my application in a heartbeat. The prospect is exciting, though I wouldn’t have any inkling how I would eventually break the news to my parents. It is not the safety there that worries me so much, rather causing unnecessary worry to my parents.
An internship in Kabul would still be absolutely awesome.
On to the second topic, I just saw the much talked about ‘Fitna’ video on youtube. Of course such a movie is bound to provoke all sorts of reaction in my mind, for being a Muslim myself, I thought the portrayal of Islam and images used as representation of my beliefs was awful, disgusting, ethnocentric, and completely biased. I can sit here all night and write out all the debates that are going on in my head at the moment.
Yet when I saw one of the images of a man speaking segregating the differences between Jews and Muslims, it made me think of the causes of such a reaction. Could it be perhaps the classic story of the repressed retaliating against a supreme global power? Could it be an injustice undocumented towards Islam, and more closely his family that had resulted in this big insurgent of reaction.
It made me think, what had caused the woman to the voice that taught the 3 year old girl to think of Jews as apes and pigs. What drove her to do so? A reason that we can never understand or a mere blind faith of accepting what others told her when she was younger?
It made me think, development when left to reach such unequal heights becomes fertile breeding grounds for radical mentality. And do you blame them so? I don’t. Far from saying that it is okay to teach prejudices to 3 years children, I do not think the blame should be painted into such an ugly picture as that movie. There are other better ways to speak your mind, your opinions and your thoughts. Creating your own brand of prejudice is not one of them.
words of encouragement. thank you. i am back. although i was not sitting around waiting for someone to kick me with a comment, it’s just life commitments are starting to roll in and everything is moving in motion at the speed of light.
i have just came back from a trip to Sydney, and before that played host to a visiting friend who came from Melbourne. Development as a term, the thought of defining a developing country and a developed country has occurred to me is sometimes narrowly defined, and sometimes bogus-ly define. I’ll give you an example:
Melbourne friend: I have this co-worker who hails from America. He is so imbued with Americanism that he views everything else outside of America as Third World. The other day we were walking in front of the town hall in Melbourne and he said “you know, Australia is like a Third World country”
That’s the bogus definition.
Another was a conversation I overheard at the bus stop after doing my groceries. A university going boy talking to girl: And I went to all these Third World countries and they were all dirty and smelly and full of smoke. It was just bad.
That’s the narrow definition. And from the sound of it I didn’t think he had past anywhere further than his first year in Uni.
A lecturer from one of my subjects who hails from Tobago and Trinidad uses the word “developing countries”, “less developed countries” and “underdeveloped countries” interchangeably to mean countries that are other than the EU’s, North Americas, the Asian Tigers and Australia/NZ. I thought it was a little too simplistic of her at the level in which she is lecturing.
I quite like Andre Gunder Frank and the terms he uses in his discussions of the dependency theory; “metropolis” and “satellite” which are less discriminating and degrading than merely pointing at a country and saying “hey you, you are underdeveloped. let’s do something about this”
To me it’s like pointing to a stranger on the road and going “hey you are ugly!” right to their face. So do you blame ministries and local councils for being defensive when someone like Jeffrey Sachs drops by “less than 48 hours” and starts giving you a list of do’s and dont’s?
Yes, exactly.
I think as with the term ‘development’ (which one can go on for days debating about what it really means) LDCs, MDCs and all the other variations has lost its meaning. Barr the fact there are other cold, hard, rational way of drawing this division like through GDPs and other economic growth measures, I really do think it’s about time we do away with such condescending terms and re-evaluate the use of it in development.
I saw this photo in a national newspaper today after lunchtime. But it didn’t come with a newsfeed, so I jumped onto Google and did a simple search of “mud cookies” because that is what you see in that photo. A woman collecting dried mud cookies to be sold at the nearest market in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. Food prices are rising, thanks to the rising oil prices worldwide. That is not a suprise to anyone who has been keeping up with the news in the recent months. So intricate and interconnected are we in this world that for those who may benefit from the hike in oil prices, they are people on the opposite end who has to resort to dirt to stave off their hunger.
What are we doing wrong? Why are there still people mixing dirt, shortening and salt to make a decent meal?
But Jonathan Katz of International Business Times wrote:
“The mud has long been prized by pregnant women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium. But in places like Cite Soleil, the oceanside slum where Charlene shares a two-room house with her baby, five siblings and two unemployed parents, cookies made of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening have become a regular meal.”
Which got me thinking, maybe perhaps in our world eating dirt is something that requires a lot of imagination. Eating dirt is unthinkable.
But maybe for those in Haiti, it’s as normal as Malaysians having nasi lemak for breakfast. No?
There is always that question of what lead the people to choose dirt over other nutritional items like rice, maize and fruits. Perhaps unavailability of such kind of food in the region, which makes you think further, well that can’t be the problem, you can go to Singapore and dine on freshly flown fish from Japan caught on the same day.
And so there could only point to one thing. Purchasing power. Or the lack thereof. It’s not like we are not doing anything about hunger and poverty. There is the “Make Poverty History” campaign and the Global Fund which I was told in November last year had a total of $16b to go around. So then what are we still doing wrong to have people eat dirt, given our belief from their lack of choices, to keep themselves alive?
