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.
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