The Kind of Momentum We Need to Keep: Women's Rights Around the World

Taking questions about women's rights: (l-r) Annette Souder, Sierra Club's Global Population and Environment Program; Sarah Craven, UNFPA; and Ellen Marshall, International Women's Health Coalition.
Photo by T.E. Lesle

by Timothy Lesle
Visionary Solutions Session
Ellen Marshall and Sarah Craven, Population Balm: Empowering Women

After the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo and the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing, a woman in Ghana rented a van with a loudspeaker mounted on top of it. She drove around her town, energized, announcing all the women's rights her government had agreed to at these conferences. This, according to Ellen Marshall, of the International Women's Health Coalition, is the kind of momentum we need to keep.

Marshall spoke along with Sarah Craven, chief of the United Nations Population Fund's (UNFPA) Washington office, at a session entitled "Population Balm: Empowering Women." Both panelists focused on the vital importance of gender equality and women's empowerment in a world where women make up more than half of the agricultural workforce and head almost a quarter of the households in the poorest countries. Despite playing such important roles, many women are unable to make key decisions about their own lives, and lack choices, education, and basic empowerment and equality.

This has contributed to the spread of HIV, unwanted pregnancies, domestic violence, and insufficient health care for women and children. As Craven pointed out in a long litany of frightening statistics, 17 out of every 100 babies in the developing world die in infancy, 25 percent don't live to age 5, and enough women die of maternal health problems to fill two 747s each day of the year. Statistics like this would be unacceptable in this country, but are the norm in many others. Furthermore, careful environmental management—such as responsible water stewardship—is critical to enabling people to survive; in turn, careful family planning and gender equality will ultimately help with a range of environmental problems like resource depletion, deforestation, and biodiversity loss.

Craven noted that the UNFPA operates in 146 countries. Its two largest contributors are the Netherlands and Japan. Afghanistan recently donated $100 to the program, a largely symbolic gift designed to convey its gratitude for UNFPA's work in that country. For the past five years, the United States has contributed no money at all.

Marshall, visibly emotional, stated the situation bluntly: “The Bush administration has placed the vision of a narrow constituency over the welfare of the world's women.” However, she later added, many governments and activists are staying the course.

When a New Mexico college student asked how she could help as an individual, Marshall encouraged her to become active in policy issues and follow Gavin Newsom's advice to hold politicians accountable. Don't be shy, she said, about addressing global issues at state and local levels. Both she and Craven applauded the Sierra Club's Global Population and Environment Program for its level of citizen engagement and effectiveness with public officials. And Marshall highlighted a group called 34 Million Friends of UNFPA, designed to promote dialogue among Americans. The group asks participants to donate a dollar to the UNFPA, and to ask their friends to do the same. If 34 million people do that, they will have raised the same amount of money that the administration refuses to give the program each year.

-- 09/09/2005 Fri
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