“Women aren’t the problem. They’re the solution”

When I was still a copyeditor at a business-economics research institute in the mid-1990s, I read an article in The Economist that looked at countries around the world in various stages of development and which asked why they were as developed (or underdeveloped) as they were. I still remember the startling (for me) and startlingly simple path to development the piece found: send your women to school. Apparently, the more educated women are (and by extension, the better their state in society), the more developed that country was and could be.

That insight came back to me again when I came across this article in the New York Times (from August 2009) on the plight of women around the world. The writers point to a growing realization that "focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. . . . Women and girls aren't the problem; they're the solution." Indeed they are.

The Women’s Crusade

Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
The New York Times / August 17, 2009

IN THE 19TH CENTURY, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape.

Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater. “Women hold up half the sky,” in the words of a Chinese saying, yet that’s mostly an aspiration: in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos. There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That’s why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution. . . .

The rest of the piece is here.