It is pretty clear that we cannot rely on politicians to make a difference to the wretched lives of the millions living in poverty in Africa and Asia, so we had better search elsewhere.
When we consider the state of the world we may feel that, with all our modern conveniences, life is getting better, give or take a few economic upsets. They will always happen: for every boom there will be a correction, if not always a bust. When we were told the world was looking into an economic abyss in 2009 because of bank failures, commentators were forgetting history. There have been only two years since 1934 when no US bank failed (2005 and 2006), and 1,000 closed during 1988 and 1989,1 yet somehow we survived. Yes, the financial sector in the UK generates a large share of our Gross Domestic Product, but it only employs 10 per cent of the workforce so I suspect we will pull through. Profits rise and fall, businesses rise and fall – that is the harsh law of economics. But for millions living in abject poverty in Africa and India the times of boom pass them by. They never had anything, and unless someone speaks up for them they never will. This is not a case of let’s be nice to the poor for a change. What is happening on these continents will have an impact on us all. We profess great concern for the environment, but we seem slow to admit that population and environment are inextricably linked. Environment is population, economy is population, social collapse is population, and population is women because men have never taken responsibility for family planning. There are 6.7 billion of us already, with another 2 billion plus predicted by 2050, and we have all got to be fed and watered – that’s the simple link. All humanity is connected.
If we cannot be persuaded to help those less fortunate than ourselves out of charity and aid, and it is perfectly plain from the Geldof and Bono comments that we are not, then at least we might think of helping them because it could lead to greater profits.
But before we deal with the solution, let me explain the problem in outline. I explore the facts in more detail later – it doesn’t make pleasant reading. First, let’s look at Africa, where there seems to be an inability to manage growth and development as easily as politicians amass wealth and power. There is talk of debt reduction, commissions on the future of Africa and so many major initiatives, but where does the money actually go? Who has it helped? The money does not reach the people for whom it was intended, that’s for sure. So while 14 per cent of the $59 billion was said to have been pledged, I doubt whether even a tiny fraction of that aid reached the poorest in the remote rural villages.
What is life really like in Africa and the Indian sub-continent, particularly for the women? In short, it is horrifying. Quite apart from the crimes perpetrated against women – rape, beatings and all other forms of abuse by their attackers – there is also the brutality of the culture meted out by those closest to them. Female genital mutilation is widespread as is inadequate (or no) access to obstetric or gynaecological care. In northern Nigeria, for example, a hundred thousand women are suffering from fistula because they were sold as wives as soon as they reached puberty, became pregnant immediately and gave birth. There is nobody there to help them with the childbirth, and labour can last for four or five days – in itself unimaginable in a western country. Invariably, that baby is stillborn and the mother’s internal organs are split. Without treatment, which would be 90 per cent successful in the West, they are condemned to the pain and humiliation of incontinence. It is estimated that 300 million women in developing countries have illnesses stemming from pregnancy and childbirth.2 The figures may well be worse, as facts are difficult to find in the culture of silence compounded by stigma and shame.3 The concept of post-natal depression is commonly rejected,4 and yet the evidence suggests that maternal mental health is a critical and largely ignored factor in the ability of a newborn child to thrive, particularly in low-income countries.5
What do the men do? They throw their wives out on the streets and find another one. Women are totally replaceable. If they get too old, their husbands just take another. The terrible irony is that men never seem to think that they are too old. At the end of 2008, Britain’s Channel Four TV ran a gruesomely graphic documentary about child brides in northern Nigeria. Despite the central government passing the Child’s Rights Act in 2003, forbidding marriage before a girl is 18 years old, it seems that every state is allowed to interpret the law according to its own customs and traditions. Only one state in northern Nigeria adopted the act, and then it replaced ‘18 years’ with ‘puberty’. Nearly half of all girls are married by the age of 15, usually to older men. The documentary showed a grizzled old man in his eighties grinning with delight as he explained that he had recently married a child of around 12 because, apparently, he needed a fertile wife. There then followed in harrowing detail the effects of fistula – one young woman had suffered from it twice and lost six babies. The reporter interviewed a group of men squatting under a tree, and about half knew of wives dying in childbirth. One imam sitting in front of his copy of the Qur’an said that there was nothing in the holy book to prevent a man even marrying a child of one year, provided the marriage was not consummated before she was physically or psychologically able. The argument seemed to be that it was in the girl’s own best interest, as she then avoided the temptation of pre-marital sex.6
Don’t look for leadership from the top in the matter of multiple brides. Some kings and heads of state set such bad examples, taking several wives at the same time in some macabre droit de seigneur –King Mswati III of Swaziland, the last remaining absolute monarch in the world, had 14 wives by the time he was 40 years old. His father had 70 when he died.
Thirty per cent of women in the caring sector are believed to be HIV positive because they get raped. In South Africa rape is endemic. If you look at sub-Saharan Africa, women are raped not only by strangers but by members of the family, even church leaders and teachers, people in positions of trust. In that kind of situation, effectively half the population is being treated as sub-human by the other half. But you can’t have 50 per cent of the population regarded as inferior while the other 50 per cent think only about themselves and still expect daily life in their countries to improve. How can we change the mindset of a place like Pakistan, where there are communities such as the Qambrani Baloch, where it is tradition to marry off – sell, I would call it – their daughters upon reaching puberty, who might be as young as 12? Girls are discouraged from going to school and seeking employment.
Is there going to be some miracle? I don’t think so. I don’t believe in miracles. It will need something drastic and original to make a difference – something that has never been tried, and to me it is quite obvious that the one untapped resource is precisely these poor women. They have had nothing since the day they were born; even in childhood, as girls, they would be expected to look after the boys who, from an early age, seem to be trained not to do anything. In that situation, the only untried resource is woman – someone with infinite skills, fortitude and patience, in short a caring workforce that doesn’t drink, or fight, or gamble.
By contrast, when we look at India we have an incredible picture. Business was booming until 2008, with Indian companies buying up the great names of the western world, companies that have almost come to symbolise the West, like Jaguar the car manufacturer. There is a great deal of focus on India. Isn’t it amazing how well she is doing? Indeed, it is. Indians have always been clever, natural entrepreneurs, and it is wonderful to see how the country is progressing.
But while the rich are getting so rich that it would make Croesus blush, what is happening to the rest of the country? There is a middle level, if not exactly middle class, who are benefiting from the boom times: the milkman who might once have come on foot now arrives on a scooter; even servants to the wealthy are getting bigger perks. But as you might expect, the poorest of the poor in the outlying rural communities are getting even poorer. According to the Global Hunger Index 2008,7 India has more malnourished people than any other country in the world – 200 million are hungry. It reported: ‘Despite years of robust economic growth, India scored worse than nearly 25 sub-Saharan African countries and all of South Asia, except Bangladesh.’ This is in a country that is self-sufficient in food grains and yet, in monetary terms, three quarters of the nation’s 1.2 billion people live on 30p a day.
Every year the government sets aside billions of pounds for poverty alleviation. But how much actually reaches the poor? I was at a conference recently and suggested that perhaps only 10 per cent trickled all the way down. I was quickly corrected and told that it was more like 5 per cent. This is the depressing picture of India today where, if you talk about poverty, the poorest of the poor are always the women, because whatever resources are available go to the men. It is the unspoken rule that boy is king and man is emperor. The women eat last, having fed first the husbands, then the children, and often there is not much left for them. The girl child may also be malnourished as she too comes second.
There is plenty of evidence about the neglect of girls. The curse of the dowry hangs over women, and it really is a curse. When a girl is born, she is immediately regarded as a burden of debt on the family. A boy is an asset. The girl will not bring anything into the family: quite the contrary, her parents will have to pay a boy to marry her in the form of the dowry; it may be outlawed today, but it is still normal practice. It is an appalling concept to have to buy a man for your daughter. After marriage, life is no better as she becomes a virtual slave without rights or say in any decision. Little wonder, then, that we hear about the appalling practice of female foetus killings, the abortion of perfectly healthy female babies. Just like the dowry, it is outlawed; just like the dowry, it is still practised, especially among the more afflue nt.
We have talked for 40 years or more about how education will change everything. Once a girl is educated, everything will be fine. But no one has explained how education will come into the lives of these women. Very often, if there is enough money to send a child to school, it will be the boy who gets preference, not the girl. The girl will stay at home, helping to care for the younger children or tending to the household, so we continue to perpetuate the position of man versus woman. A wife gets ill and dies. Good, we can get more money from a new dowry and another woman. Women are not worth much: the concept of a cared-for life partner is not the norm. Of course, there are many marriages where the men do look after their wives, but even then men do not consider women as they do fellow men.
The slightly surprising point is that this attitude runs right through society in the whole of the sub-continent. People say times are changing, and point to the fact that Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister of India, or Benazir Bhutto became Prime Minister of Pakistan, or Khaleda Zia became Prime Minister of Bangladesh. But they would never have achieved those high positions without their family background and their fathers or husbands holding high office before them. Sonia Gandhi, a reluctant entrant into political life, won her election in 2004 although she turned down the post of Prime Minister. Let’s be frank – it is dynastic.
Today some will point to the appointment in India of Pratibha Patil as the first woman President of India as an example of how women can achieve high office, a victory over widespread discrimination. I wonder. Simply choosing a woman because it suits the government’s agenda does not do the cause of women any good. The previous incumbent, Dr A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, was too strong-willed for the politicians, a scientist and a visionary. He stood up for himself, and if he disagreed with a policy he would say so. When his term of office was over, they needed someone they could control. Who better than a woman without a track record? This is not a reflection on Pratibha Patil’s integrity, just an acknowledgement of the reality that she was generally unknown and without a notable background in public life.
Yes, there are women in minor ministerial positions, but if you talk to them privately they will say that they are treated differently from the men, who almost gang up on them making life, even for someone as important as a government minister, very hard. Occasionally, there is a one-off, as with a lady called Mayawati Kumari. Known just as Mayawati, she is uniting India’s ten mainly regional opposition parties. In the 2007 elections in Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in India, she upset the political status quo when her Bahujan Samaj Party won an outright majority. Not only is she a woman, but she is also from the so-called Untouchables caste, and has been dubbed ‘Queen of the Dalits’. The Congress Party, who have traditionally enjoyed the support of the country’s 160 million Dalits,8 are worried – so too is the main Hindu-nationalist opposition party, the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party.)
India and Africa will be considered more closely, but let me just touch here on the whole question of HIV. There are many monogamous women in the villages who are infected with HIV. The only person who could have infected them is their husband, but they are not allowed to go to the clinics because everyone will then know that their husband is infected. It is accepted that men should be allowed to sleep around. Many of them are lorry drivers, who move about the country, often going with a woman wherever they stop for the night. By contrast, if a woman has illicit sex she would probably be killed. The UN accepts that 70 per cent of the HIV-infected people in the world are women, not men, and that surely tells its own story.
My argument is not that I can change the sexual habits of men overnight, but that if women are given the opportunity to earn a little money they can take better care of themselves. I don’t even want to try to get men to behave better towards their wives. I am a realist. But in helping women to look after themselves, I can see a clear social and commercial advantage. Don’t just take my word for it. In its Gender Equality and Growth Evidence and Action report, published in February 2008, the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) highlighted evidence which clearly showed that ‘societies that increase women’s access to education, healthcare, employment and credit and that narrow differences between men and women in economic opportunities increase the pace of economic development and reduce poverty’.
I think it is obvious from even this briefest of snapshots that life for women is intolerable, so what is in it for business? We are now global operators. Businesses are not just local to cities or even countries: many of the major ones have links and operations around the world. Employers who wield such international influence should look at their core business, examine exactly what they do and study their supply chains. Their business may reach ten times the number of people they employ directly and, in view of that impact, there may be instances where women could be employed or even be more suited to the work than the men. One has to accept that there is certain employment for which women are not well equipped, but not much: when you see women carrying bricks up and down ladders on building sites, their babies sleeping in the dust and all this in the heat, cold and rain, then you have to accept that they are tough. They have to be to survive. Many have to live on site, finding shelter in pipes or whatever is there. So it is important to see how, not if, a woman can fit into the business. It requires positive thought and a little lateral thinking, otherwise it would be too easy to say there isn’t a slot. Businesses are international and constantly evolving: why should it be so difficult for part of that evolution to include women? It may be possible to create a new workshop which would increase business and help the women at the same time. If corporations, large and small, start working along these lines, then change will happen and it will be sustainable. I have no doubt that the concept will snowball once the benefits become apparent, and once the momentum begins there will be no stopping it, because it is logical.
What are the obstacles? There is always a fear of change, and businesses are showing that fear. They are reluctant to look seriously at this option because they fear that they will be accused of discriminating in favour of women. That is one of those notions trotted out when you don’t want to try anything to help women. But think of the discrimination against women down the centuries, some of which we have already considered: even if there were discrimination in favour of women, it would not be such a bad thing. The health of a nation would be improved, thereby also improving the quality of future employees because they would be better educated. You would uplift humanity, and that cannot be achieved unless women are uplifted too.
Inertia is a common excuse. If the business is running along fine as it is, why change anything? The problem is too big – is it really worth the effort? I would reply to this: what about the Millennium Development Goals? Every major nation has signed up to the MDGs, and business is not exempt. But what has anyone been seriously doing to achieve those goals? You can’t just throw money at them. There has been so much debt reduction in Africa, but where is the evaluation of what this has delivered? It is no good pouring more money into the already engorged Swiss bank accounts – you have to know where the money is going.
Will it work? I have no doubt; and there are some examples we can point to already, albeit largely NGO-led. One of the biggest and best known is the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), a development organisation founded by Fazle Hasan Abed in 1972 – an idea that slowly began to form in his mind following the 1970 cyclone. He explained that he felt uncomfortable abandoning the victims once the emergency relief work was over: ‘We felt that we could not walk out on these people leaving them to their own devices to fend for themselves. We felt that we needed to commit ourselves to the long-term development of rural Bangladesh – in the provision of education, healthcare, family-planning services, building organisations for the poor – and empower them to demand services from the state. We needed to develop new avenues and work opportunities for our poor people, particularly for our women.’9
That initial effort has been broadened to tackle long-term poverty. BRAC’s website says: ‘Our unique, holistic approach to poverty alleviation and empowerment of the poor encompasses a range of core programmes in economic and social development, health, education, and human rights and legal services. Today, BRAC is the largest southern NGO and employs more than 100,000 people, the majority of which are women, and reaches more than 110 million people with our development interventions in Asia and Africa.’
Also in Bangladesh, we have the innovative work of Professor Muhammad Yunus and his concept of micro-credit. He created the Grameen (Village) banking system, extending credit to the world’s poor. Most of the seven million plus beneficiaries to date are women. The first loans Yunus issued were for the equivalent of £14.50 to 42 women in Jobra, a village near Chittagong University in Bangladesh, where he came up with the idea while professor of economics. His lateral thinking broke the rigid mould of conventional banking, which would not allow the poor to get credit without some form of guarantee. It also broke the pernicious stranglehold of local money-lenders who charged exorbitant interest rates.
But even innovative ideas such as micro-credit have a saturation point, so we have to look for new ideas. You can keep going the NGO route, and the NGOs will keep helping, but unless global businesses start playing their part there can be no real progress. My proposal is to start at the top with the truly international operators, in the belief that medium- and small-sized businesses will follow their lead. Put simply, what we want to do is to move towards a situation where women are actually producing goods, and businesses are providing opportunities for work in return for wages and profits.
I believe now is the hour. There has never before been a time when business has had such an enormous role in world affairs. Business can be flexible while governments are rigid and bureaucratic, and consequently slow to respond. Furthermore, there has never been a time when so many major issues have come together at one time: environment, HIV, poverty, energy resources, the economy. If you don’t include half the world’s population in the solution process, nothing will change. The British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, said on his return from a trip to Africa that women were the agents of change. I have been visiting projects in Africa, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal for the past 17 years and I have not the slightest doubt that women are the agents of change – possibly the only agents of change.
Why am I so convinced? The answer is simple: most women have nothing. When you have nothing, everything, however small, is important. If, as a man, you are brought up from day one to think of yourself as a superior being and everything is available to you, why should you bother to make any effort? Your food will always be there when you come home from work; you will be able to beat your wife if you are angry about something or rape her whenever you feel like it. You can infect her with HIV. What is missing from your life as a man? But what has the woman got? Absolutely nothing, and it is precisely this that makes her so valuable as an agent of change for any business. As soon as you give a poor woman an opportunity, she seizes it with both hands. This is what all NGOs and charities have found. Not only will women make the change happen, but they will do it within weeks, not months or years, if you allow them to generate just a small amount of income for themselves. If you think by sitting women down to teach them literacy you will help, you are wrong. They will not be interested because it has no relevance to their lives; it doesn’t provide immediate food for the family, it doesn’t help them buy a shirt for their child, it doesn’t help them buy medicine to treat infection.
Let me give just one small and very real example. I saw a project where the women were given some embroidery work. Everything they made was sold at special markets. I could tell the reaction. I don’t need an interpreter, and could speak directly to these women. They were so upbeat. They had a purpose in life, whereas before they lived without hope. They told me that they used to have to beg their husbands for even one rupee to buy a sweet for their child; now they can provide it themselves. The change in the women was obvious. They wore brighter clothes, they looked happy and well. And their happiness was infectious. The biggest potential obstacle, of course, was the husbands, but before long there was a grudging acceptance from them that life was getting better. The whole family was better dressed and better fed. You can’t really beat your wife for that.
Lest I am misunderstood, this is nothing to do with women’s equality or rights or empowerment. Those things will come in due course, and it is not for me to push such an agenda because that would certainly lead to conflict. I want to improve the way women live and, through that, improve the lives of their families, including their husbands.
This is not about the modern approach to women’s empowerment; in fact I do not actually agree with that because empowerment in that sense is about creating something for yourself. Such ideas are unsustainable and unrealistic in these circumstances. However, it is clear that if you set women on the road to income generation – economic empowerment rather than personal empowerment – then they will become aware of these other matters in due course, but it is up to them to seek it and not for outsiders to promote or push it.
In India they are learning about rural development ministries, and the importance of the role of village councils and what they can do for themselves. That works well because it is not about a western notion of empowerment. Many women have started taking an interest in what is happening in their local government but it is patchy. If women have aspirations for politics, this is where it should begin, working through the ranks and not being given a family leg-up on the ladder.
So in short, what is the solution I am proposing? I want business to start a series of sustainable initiatives targeting women which will be profitable to the company and generate income for the poor. It is not a five-year plan and it is not about governments promising money that will never reach the neediest. I am looking to the most successful global businesses that have the influence to make this crucial change come about. I have more faith in the ability of go-getters and entrepreneurs to provide the solutions which work best for them. They are the people used to getting results and they are profit-driven. I accept that it might require some lateral thinking, but change only comes about by thinking smartly and differently, not by doing more of the same.
Education and literacy are fine for the future, but for now this is just a dream. The best part of the changes I am proposing is the immediate impact they will have on the women, their children and the company’s bottom line.
1 Mark Perry, Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan.
2 WHO, 2005.
3 Zurayk, H., Khattab, H., Younis, N., El-Mouelhy, M., and Fadle, M. Concepts and measures of reproductive morbidity, Health Transition Review, 3(1), 17—40, 1993.
4 UK All Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development and Reproductive Health, October 2008.
5 Patel, V. and Kirkwood, B. Treating maternal depression with community health workers. The Lancet, 372, 868—9, 2008; Prince, M., Patel, V., Saxena, S., et al. No health without mental health. The Lancet, 370, 859—77, 2007.
6 Channel Four News — Unreported World. Nigeria: Child Brides Stolen Lives by Ramita Navai, 2008.
7 The Global Hunger Index was produced by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in collaboration with Germany’s Welthungerhilfe and Concern Worldwide and released on World Hunger Day (16 October 2008).
8 Sudras or Dalits were the lowest in the Hindu caste hierarchy and treated as untouchables — even looking at them was considered unlucky by the three higher castes: the Brahmin, Kshatriya and Vaishya. The caste system was formally abolished when the Constitution of India was adopted on 26 January 1950.
9 Asian Enterprise, Summer 2008.