“The fastest way to change society is to mobilize the women of the world,” said Charles Malik, former president of the United Nations General Assembly in a recent speech. Though women represent a disproportionately low percentage of the world’s utilized capital, they may also be a key to overcoming serious obstacles from poverty to climate change. When we unleash their talents and bring their inherent qualities into balance with the world’s power structures, things change.
In the Nike Foundation’s award-winning cause campaign, The Girl Effect, this message was made demonstrably clear. The world is a mess, and according to Nike, a girl is the unexpected solution that can turn a sinking ship around:
“Adolescent girls are uniquely capable of raising the standard of living in the developing world,” says The Nike Foundation. “[They] are the most likely agents of change, but are often invisible to societies and our media.” To be sure, the world’s women and girls, willing and able as they may be to instigate change, face an unfortunately skewed system and general lack of opportunities.
The data demonstrating global gender disparity is clear enough. According to the White House Project, women’s income is 50 percent lower than men’s income in over 60 of the world’s states. Of the 1.2 billion people living in poverty worldwide, 70 percent are female, while women own less than one percent of the world’s land. To make matters worse, it is has just been revealed that women will take on the brunt of climate change.
“Climate change will not only endanger lives and undermine livelihoods, but it threatens to exacerbate the gaps between rich and poor and amplify the inequities between men and women,” says the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in a new Report. “Women – particularly those in poor countries – will be affected differently than men. They are among the most vulnerable to climate change, partly because in many countries they make up a larger share of the agricultural work force and partly because they tend to have access to fewer income-earning opportunities.”
The UNFPA’s report indicates that not only are women are more likely than men to die in climate change-related natural disasters such as heat waves, hurricanes, cyclones, droughts and floods, but they have historically been unable to adapt as well as men. Whereas men migrate to safer areas, most women and girls stay home, as they are the ones primarily responsible for local agriculture production as well as sustaining families in poor communities. To change their fate, women need better platforms for engagement.
The UNFPA asserts that we cannot successfully confront the climate challenge if we ignore the human side of things – the raw potential of half the people on the planet. Empowering the status of women must be a key strategy to persevere in the fight against global warming, they say. But so far this topic has received scant attention from negotiators working toward a new global climate deal. As a Worldwatch Institute press release recently pointed out: “Women will be most affected by climate change but remain noticeably absent from Copenhagen agenda.”
That’s too bad, because the UNFPA’s report’s core message hearkens back to The Nike Foundation’s Girl Effect campaign, positioning women as highly effective change agents. Women may very well be the missing link between a seemingly unsolvable climate problem and a viable, human solution.
“This is the first report in which a United Nations agency has connected climate change to human population and the status of women,” said Robert Engelman, Worldwatch Institute’s Vice President for Programs in the press release. “Its main finding – that investing in women and erasing the constraints on their achievement will slow climate change and build social resilience – is powerful and hopeful.”
Models of Resilience
What would happen if the world’s poor farmers – many of them women – began to work directly with the soil and crops to transform themselves from net emitters of greenhouse gasses to net absorbers? Could they slow, perhaps reverse, the rise of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere? The UNFPA describes such a process in its report, noting that it would require a new agricultural production system based on increasing the carbon content of soil and decreasing the use of chemical fertilizers. However, the significance of the concept is greater than science involved.
The UNFPA’s idea demonstrates the need for adaption. So many communities are coping with climate change, but adapting to it is another story. With this idea, each farmer adjusts to a changed reality, becomes part of a necessary solution and serves as a model of resilience. With initiatives such as this, women could potentially elevate their status from climate change casualties to climate change agents.
The women of the world have an excellent track record when it comes to implementing ideas and taking part in organized systems that advance their own development. In Bangladesh, for instance, eradicating poverty has been a key concern, and thanks to assistance from micro-finance institutions such as The Grameen Bank, which distribute small loans at affordable rates, many women have overcome even the most difficult of personal circumstances.
“The fact is that mainstream society does not allow women to explore their full potential,” Nobel Peace Prize winner and Grameen Bank founder Dr. Muhammad Yunus told me in an interview several years ago. “My original hope for Grameen was that it would dispel poverty and hunger at their origin, and that by investigating the sources of poverty, we would develop better approaches for eliminating it. We quickly recognized that women should be the focus. Once we help a woman explore and seize her immediate opportunities, she concentrates on her family and reshapes their destiny.”
Indeed, data indicates that whereas a woman or girl will reinvest 90 percent of her income back into her family, a man will invest 30-40 percent. Women and girls tend to nurture their families, which in turn strengthens communities, creating a chain reaction that can translate to major socioeconomic change. This is why Grameen narrowly concentrates on female bank clients.
Ninety-six percent of Grameen’s four million borrowers are women, whereas 98.02 percent pay back their loans. Given that there are roughly three thousand microcredit organizations such as Grameen worldwide operating with a similar construct, this success represents great potential – a means of liberating people from poverty and increasing their participation in the broader economic and political scheme of things.
Should such a macro-construct be devised and executed on a global scale for climate change, the impact could be just as sweeping. The UNFPA stresses the potential of such a vision, but again points to the obstacles to women’s participation, in rich countries as well as poor. Women have the innate power and will to mobilize against climate change, but this potential can only be realized through policies that empower them.
“In a world whose changing climate must be simultaneously combated and adapted to, shackles on half the world’s population are unsupportable,” says the UNFPA’s report. “A positive development is that many women are moving forward despite these constraints. They are modelling new ways of operating in society and relating to one another in ways that could make a difference—not just to climate but to sustainable social relations and a sustainable environment overall.”
Perhaps there is reason to be optimistic. For all the talk of carbon credits, carbon trading and carbon taxes, it is really striking to reconsider the role of people and relationships in all of this.
Invest in a woman or girl, give her a platform for change, and she will do the rest. Clearly she is not the whole solution to our social and environmental woes, but she is a significant part, one that is presently being overlooked. Can world leaders and Copenhagen negotiators grasp a feminine solution? Can they afford not to? Consider what’s at stake. As Nike says in its Girl Effect campaign: “It’s no big deal. Just the future of humanity.”
