What's Woody Doing Now

Women Coming to the Aid of Women

Here's an interesting article of four (American) women working to empower (impoverished) women.  A brief summary of one woman is below. 

The article was written by Nick Kristof, a NY Times columnist and co-author of “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide”, with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn. 

The D.I.Y. Foreign-Aid Revolution - NYTimes.com.

[Elizabeth] Scharpf is a mild-mannered policy wonk, but the more she thought about it [lack of affordable sanitary napkins], 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.

And so Scharpf joined a revolution, so far unnamed because it is just beginning. It’s all about what might be called Do-It-Yourself Foreign Aid, because it starts with the proposition that it’s not only presidents and United Nations officials who chip away at global challenges. Passionate individuals with great ideas can do the same, especially in the age of the Internet and social media.

I became interested in such figures while writing a book with my wife, Sheryl WuDunn, about educating and empowering women as a solution to many of the world’s problems. We ran into extraordinary men, like Muhammad Yunus of Grameen Bank, who pioneered microfinance in Bangladesh. Or Bill Drayton, an American who is a godfather of entrepreneurs working for social change and who now runs a group called Ashoka to support them. Or Greg Mortenson, whose struggles to build schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan are chronicled in “Three Cups of Tea.”

But it struck us that women in particular were finding creative ways to help the world’s most vulnerable people, many of them also women.

Why did you specifically choose grandmothers (women) for that project?

Why only train women and not men?!  Roy Bunker, founder of Barefoot College, trains poor rural women to solve problems in their communities and villages.  He answer the question below. 

BUNKER ROY « map magazine's street editors#more-9205#more-9205.

Why did you specifically choose grandmothers for that project?

Because we feel that men are just untrainable! They are restless, ambitious and compulsively mobile and all want a certificate. The moment you give anyone a certificate in a village anywhere in the world, they’ll use it to get a job in the city.

If you go to any remote village in the world you’ll find very young people and very old people. So we thought the best investment for us would be to work with a grandmother because she’s been there for years and doesn’t want to leave, plus she’s not ambitious and doesn’t want a certificate and would be a marvellous engineer.

When you train women, they like to train other women. But if you train a man, he doesn’t want to train another person because his job is threatened. None of the grandmothers have ever let me down – they’ve all stayed and become role models and change agents.

So what if they’re illiterate? Where is it written that if you can’t read and write you can’t be an engineer or an architect or dentist or designer?

That’s what the Barefoot College has tried to prove over a long period – that you shouldn’t be penalised for being illiterate. The sky is the limit and anything is possible.

 

I agree with Roy Bunker about training men.  I have seen it happen in Bulape, Congo.  It contributes to village drain.  We have to train women.

Is There Really No Difference?

My marketing guru, Seth Godin, posed the following scenario below. 

Seth's Blog: Fear of philanthropy (avert your eyes).

Peter Singer is famous for posing a stunningly difficult question, paraphrased as, "If you are walking by a pond and you see a child drowning, do you save her? What if it means ruining a very fancy pair of Italian shoes?" Okay, if we assume the answer is yes, then why not spend the cost of those shoes to save 20 kids who are starving to death across town or the world? There's really no difference.  Or by, extension, invest in research or development that solves a problem forever... The issues are proximity and attention.

I agree there's really NO difference.  I would add compassion to his list of proximity and attention.  

10 Things Facing Nonprofits

Three things were worth noting for my nonprofit, Congo Helping Hands.

#1. "Fund-raising's gone viral." Social Media, a form of electronic communication, is important for any nonprofit.  It helps you save operating cost to stay connected with your community.

#2. "Even we are cutting back on donations." Reduced investment income and losses has affected every nonprofit.  Everybody is cutting back.  But the needs have in many cases increased.

#3. "Giving globally can sting locally." I think it is the other way.  Giving locally can cost global efforts.  Global giving was reduced by everyone, individuals to governments.

10 Things Nonprofits Won't Tell You (Page 2 of 2) at SmartMoney.com.

8. “Giving globally can sting locally.” IN THE WAKE of Hurricane Katrina, more than $5 billion was donated toward relief for the city of New Orleans and its citizens, according to Giving USA Foundation. A worthy cause if ever there was one. And yet, as often happens when donors respond to a major disaster, other kinds of charities felt the pinch as giving dropped, says Margaret Linnane, executive director of the Rollins College Philanthropy & Nonprofit Leadership Center. “Individuals simply have a finite amount they can donate. A disaster somewhere in the world will have an impact on local communities,” she says. How to decide where to send your money when there are so many good charities to choose from?