One of my favorite writers/activists is Nicholas Kristof. He and his wife, Susan WuDunn wrote the critically acclaimed best-seller Half the Sky which explores the role women play in the world and the unfortunate fact that so many women and girls are degraded, abused, mistreated, sold in slavery, uneducated and generally oppressed. A fantastic documentary has just been released in two parts. The first can been seen until October 8th via the following link and the second part will be aired tonight on PBS at 9:00pm Mountain time. The documentary is available for purchase as well and I am definitely going to purchase a copy for my digital library. Enjoy!
http://video.pbs.org/video/2283557115
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
African Voices
In life we may get discouraged at the thought of all the bad we see in the world. It can become easy to focus on the negative and feel overwhelmed at the task of overcoming life's obstacles. While some people see their circumstances as hopeless and absolute, others work to turn their stumbling blocks into stepping stones. CNN recently published an article highlighting women in Africa who have made the most of their talents and abilities to not only improve their life, but the lives of thousands living in Africa. These influential women have lifted the lives and spirits of Africans through their hard work and determination. Take this opportunity to read about these eight "Ruling Ladies" and what they have done to create change in the world around them. From Head of State to Nobel Peace Prize recipient, these women are worth recognizing for their incredible accomplishments.
What would you do if you knew you could not fail?
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Monday, June 18, 2012
Gender Parity and its Impact on National Security
In her recent book entitled Sex and World Peace, Dr. Valerie Hudson highlights the barriers to girls' education, and the plethora of incredible benefits associated with gender parity and girls' empowerment. While many groups and individuals now acknowledge that educating women and girls impacts local health, Sex and World Peace highlights another key benefit of women's education and fair treatment: national security. Says Hudson: "Interestingly, those states that invest in their women--for example, ensuring that girls are educated to an equal level with that of boys-- are more likely to be wealthy, to be stable, and to be democratic" (18). She adds "What makes a state safer-- power or gender equality? The answer may surprise you: both make a state more secure. Those states that foster gender equality through laws and enforce those laws are less likely to go to war" (18).
Specific to our work here at Grow.Learn.Give., the book notes that "one informant from Kenya told of women having to urinate and defecate in bags during the day, and then having to go out at night and throw the bags as far as they could into the fields. Girls' schooling may become sporadic if there are now adequate facilities for the girls to manage their menstruation at school, and some families may simply take a girl out of school once she begins to menstruate" (55).
This is where Grow.Learn.Give. steps in, providing education and realistic solutions to girls facing education barriers due to menstruation. While our goals are focused on small groups of girl students, we are happy to learn that the outcomes of our efforts might not only impact the individual lives of young women, but also the security of their communities and countries.
Watch this clip with Dr. Hudson for more on the book and its development:
Friday, June 8, 2012
Granny G Raps About Family Values
Here at Grow.Learn.Give we can't get enough of Granny G and her rappin' extravaganza. Check out her stylin' plea to "all those horny boys out there"--
Can't wait to hear her rap for the girls!
Can't wait to hear her rap for the girls!
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Disney's View on Menstruation
We found this fun vintage clip from Walt Disney explaining the process of menstruation. Some of the advice is worded differently than we might explain it today, but overall it was fun to watch and well articulated. Enjoy!
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Mothers
http://50.usaid.gov/infographic-saving-moms-at-birth/savingatbirth-1000/?size=infographicSmall
http://50.usaid.gov/learning-out-of-poverty/4n8b-usaid-final2-2/?size=infographicMedium
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
The D.I.Y. Foreign-Aid Revolution
One of our favorite NYT writers, author of Half the Sky Nicholas Kristof, wrote an article about menstruation challenges in the developing world and some of the work being done by SHE Innovates. The article, entitled The D.I.Y. Foreign-Aid Revolution, is quite long, but I've included some of the relevant highlights below. Feel free to follow the link above if you'd like to read the full article!
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Scharpf was interning in the summer of 2005 for the World Bank in Mozambique, helping local entrepreneurs, when she encountered a business impediment that she had never heard of. It was unmentionable, and thus unmentioned. It was menstruation.
A female boss griped to Scharpf about absenteeism caused by women reluctant to come to work during their menstrual periods. “It was because pads were too expensive,” Scharpf recalls. “I was trying to figure out why I had never heard of this before. This was causing productivity rates to go down.”
Scharpf began asking around, and everybody told her — in whispers — that, yes, of course menstruation was keeping women and girls from jobs.
Back at Harvard, where she was pursuing joint degrees at the business school and the John F. Kennedy School of Government, she began asking friends from Bangladesh, Nicaragua and other countries if they were aware of this problem. Of course, they said. “This spoke to me,” Scharpf recalled. “Hasn’t every girl or woman experienced the inconvenience, the disadvantage and the embarrassment in her life, when her period strikes at the ‘wrong’ time? I think half the world can relate to that. What really struck me was that this was a global issue that seemingly had significant costs. From back-of-the-envelope calculations, it had huge costs. And it could have a simple solution.” She paused and smiled tightly. “I was a little naïve there.”
Scharpf is a mild-mannered policy wonk, but the more she thought about it, the more indignant she became. Girls were missing school because they couldn’t afford sanitary pads? Women couldn’t go to work for lack of pads? And all this was taboo to discuss? Scharpf began to scheme.
Commercial pads turned out to be expensive to manufacture largely because the raw materials were pricey, so Scharpf started from scratch. She recruited a team of like-minded wonks, and they consulted villagers, agriculture experts and professors of textile engineering. What is there that is really absorbent, widely available and cheap? The team came up with five finalists: cassava leaves, banana leaves, banana-tree trunk fibers, foam mattresses, textile scraps. “We brought a blender to Rwanda and started blending things, boiling leaves from potato and cassava, things like that,” Scharpf said. “We would drop Coke on it to measure absorbency.” That was when they had their eureka moment. “We saw, hey, those banana fibers really slurp up the Coke!”
Scharpf accepted a $60,000 grant from Echoing Green, an organization that works like a venture-capital fund to finance people with great ideas. Later she won a social-entrepreneurship fellowship from Harvard Business School, and now her team has engineered a new sanitary pad that she hopes can transform life for women and girls in the developing world. It looks like a regular pad but is made chiefly out of banana-tree fibers, so it is sustainable and for the most part biodegradable. Best of all, it’s cheap: a pack of 10 should retail for 75 cents or less.
Scharpf’s organization, Sustainable Health Enterprises (or SHE), will begin manufacturing pads early next year in a tiny factory in Rwanda. It will be a pilot project, producing some 1,200 pads per hour, but once the kinks are worked out she hopes to have women in other countries franchise the system so that it spreads around the world. SHE has also taken on advocacy, calling on the Rwandan government to lift an 18 percent sales tax on feminine hygiene products so that they become more affordable. Awakened to the issue, the Rwandan Parliament recently appropriated $35,000 to pay for sanitary pads for impoverished girls who otherwise might miss school — a small sum, but an acknowledgment that the problem is important and real. Some Rwandan women Scharpf has interviewed say that the attention has made a difference in their homes: their husbands are now more willing to allow them to spend money on pads.
Will banana-fiber sanitary pads succeed? No one knows. It is entirely possible that Scharpf will find that even if manufacturing goes smoothly — a huge “if” — there is simply not much of a market for sanitary pads in poor countries. Families may consider a 60- or 70-cent pack just as unaffordable as a $1.10 pack. Or suppose for a moment that everything goes perfectly, and pad franchises spread and families buy packets of pads for girls who are now missing school because of difficulties managing menstruation. Will those girls now stay in school? We can’t be sure of that either.
-------------------------------------
This article was written in 2010, so check out the SHE Innovates blog for updates on their work, which we're excited about because it complements our education work so well!
-----------------------------
Scharpf was interning in the summer of 2005 for the World Bank in Mozambique, helping local entrepreneurs, when she encountered a business impediment that she had never heard of. It was unmentionable, and thus unmentioned. It was menstruation.
A female boss griped to Scharpf about absenteeism caused by women reluctant to come to work during their menstrual periods. “It was because pads were too expensive,” Scharpf recalls. “I was trying to figure out why I had never heard of this before. This was causing productivity rates to go down.”
Scharpf began asking around, and everybody told her — in whispers — that, yes, of course menstruation was keeping women and girls from jobs.
Back at Harvard, where she was pursuing joint degrees at the business school and the John F. Kennedy School of Government, she began asking friends from Bangladesh, Nicaragua and other countries if they were aware of this problem. Of course, they said. “This spoke to me,” Scharpf recalled. “Hasn’t every girl or woman experienced the inconvenience, the disadvantage and the embarrassment in her life, when her period strikes at the ‘wrong’ time? I think half the world can relate to that. What really struck me was that this was a global issue that seemingly had significant costs. From back-of-the-envelope calculations, it had huge costs. And it could have a simple solution.” She paused and smiled tightly. “I was a little naïve there.”
Scharpf is a mild-mannered policy wonk, but the more she thought about it, the more indignant she became. Girls were missing school because they couldn’t afford sanitary pads? Women couldn’t go to work for lack of pads? And all this was taboo to discuss? Scharpf began to scheme.
Commercial pads turned out to be expensive to manufacture largely because the raw materials were pricey, so Scharpf started from scratch. She recruited a team of like-minded wonks, and they consulted villagers, agriculture experts and professors of textile engineering. What is there that is really absorbent, widely available and cheap? The team came up with five finalists: cassava leaves, banana leaves, banana-tree trunk fibers, foam mattresses, textile scraps. “We brought a blender to Rwanda and started blending things, boiling leaves from potato and cassava, things like that,” Scharpf said. “We would drop Coke on it to measure absorbency.” That was when they had their eureka moment. “We saw, hey, those banana fibers really slurp up the Coke!”
Scharpf accepted a $60,000 grant from Echoing Green, an organization that works like a venture-capital fund to finance people with great ideas. Later she won a social-entrepreneurship fellowship from Harvard Business School, and now her team has engineered a new sanitary pad that she hopes can transform life for women and girls in the developing world. It looks like a regular pad but is made chiefly out of banana-tree fibers, so it is sustainable and for the most part biodegradable. Best of all, it’s cheap: a pack of 10 should retail for 75 cents or less.
Scharpf’s organization, Sustainable Health Enterprises (or SHE), will begin manufacturing pads early next year in a tiny factory in Rwanda. It will be a pilot project, producing some 1,200 pads per hour, but once the kinks are worked out she hopes to have women in other countries franchise the system so that it spreads around the world. SHE has also taken on advocacy, calling on the Rwandan government to lift an 18 percent sales tax on feminine hygiene products so that they become more affordable. Awakened to the issue, the Rwandan Parliament recently appropriated $35,000 to pay for sanitary pads for impoverished girls who otherwise might miss school — a small sum, but an acknowledgment that the problem is important and real. Some Rwandan women Scharpf has interviewed say that the attention has made a difference in their homes: their husbands are now more willing to allow them to spend money on pads.
Will banana-fiber sanitary pads succeed? No one knows. It is entirely possible that Scharpf will find that even if manufacturing goes smoothly — a huge “if” — there is simply not much of a market for sanitary pads in poor countries. Families may consider a 60- or 70-cent pack just as unaffordable as a $1.10 pack. Or suppose for a moment that everything goes perfectly, and pad franchises spread and families buy packets of pads for girls who are now missing school because of difficulties managing menstruation. Will those girls now stay in school? We can’t be sure of that either.
-------------------------------------
This article was written in 2010, so check out the SHE Innovates blog for updates on their work, which we're excited about because it complements our education work so well!
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Why invest in women?
Thought we should share this great infographic from USAID. Notice the discussion of education, its challenges, and the benefits of educating girls!
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