Remember the “Girl Effect,” the Nike Foundation’s two-year-old initiative to encourage philanthropic and government investments in girls?
Thanks largely to a catchy video (below), the effort has become something of a phenomenon, succeeding in helping to make girls a bigger focus of global antipoverty efforts. But Anna Carella, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Vanderbilt University, writes on the Aid Watch blog that while the effort seems like a “godsend for those who have been working to improve the lives of women, it may actually be damaging to women.”
Her objections:
- It reinforces stereotypes that women are naturally more caring than men and doesn’t do anything to encourage men to do more at home.
- The video claims that putting more women to work will drive economic development—yet women already make up a bigger percentage of the workforce in poor countries than in industrialized ones, but development is stalled. “What poor countries need to stimulate sustainable growth are not women taking out loans to buy cows but better governance and better terms of trade with rich countries,” Ms. Carella says.
- Focusing on economic development prioritizes the well-being of the economy over the well-being of women.
- The video, with its images of flies buzzing around the word “girl,” reinforces the perception that women in poor countries need saving by the Western world.
The post has generated more than 35 comments on Aid Watch, some from people who appreciate Ms. Carella’s critique and others who disagree with her arguments.
What do you think?
2 Responses to Has the ‘Girl Effect’ Been Good for Antipoverty Efforts?
rayu42 - January 10, 2011 at 12:07 pm
My daughter and I work with girls rescued from sex trafficking and children of sex workers in India.
I disagree with Ms. Carella for the following reasons:
1. Opportunities for girls in poor countries are significantly lower than that for boys.
2. We have case after case of girls supporting the family (mother & siblings) after being placed in a job after training.
3. Women provide for the family while the men squander their income on drinking and gambling.
I would like to know which countries Ms. Carella has data from and how long she lived in these countries.
Thank you
Ray Umashankar
2008 Purpose Prize Winner
Executive Director
http://www.assetindiafoundation.org
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment
before starting to improve the world.”
—Anne Frank
martinburt - January 15, 2011 at 7:13 am
Sadly, Anna Carella misses the mark in her criticisms of the Nike’s “girl effect” campaign. How so?
1. The Nike campaign does not rely on a “view” that women are more nurturing than men; it relies on data — from Brazil to Cote d’Ivoire to Bangladesh– which show that additional income in the hands of women has a greater positive impact on child survival and nutrition than it does in the hands of men.
2. Ms. Carella dismisses the idea that women could drive agricultural production – but does she know that women and girls already produce more than half of the world’s food? Or that in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, they produce up to 80 percent of basic foodstuffs? What if women were better educated, could own property, had access to financial services and had more control over their income?
3. She also seems to doubt that women are “an unrealized economic force” or that investing in them could accelerate economic growth, on the grounds that women already make up a large share of developing country labor forces, yet development has stalled. But the issue is not simply how many women are working, but also how productive they are. Seventy percent of the world’s out-of-school youth are girls. Without education, how productive will they grow up to be? And even if an uneducated woman could get a job in the modern sector, how readily could she adopt the technological advancements on which Ms. Carella says development depends?
4. Would developing countries benefit from better governance? Absolutely, wouldn’t all countries? Would developing countries grow faster if they had better terms of trade with industrialized countries? Yes, by definition: a country’s GDP increases when its terms of trade improve (ceteris paribus). But neither observation subtracts from the economic bang to be achieved by educating and empowering adolescent girls.
5. Should development programs skip the focus on women lest they expose women to increased domestic violence? Oddly, the link Ms. Carella provides on this point sends the reader to an article which only reinforces several of the central messages of the “Girl Effect” campaign. It says: Multi-strategy interventions that promote equity between women and men, provide economic opportunities for women, inform them of their rights, reach out to men and change societal beliefs and attitudes that permit exploitative behavior are urgently required. Similarly, the New York Times article by Nicholas Kristof, to which she directs the reader, begins with the story of woman micro-entrepreneur in India whose husband only stopped beating her when she started a successful embroidery business and began earning an income.
Even a decade ago, the evidence was overwhelming that, as the World Bank put it in its 2000 Policy Research Report, Engendering Equality “…ignoring gender disparities comes at great cost– to people’s well-being and to countries’ abilities to grow sustainably, to govern effectively, and thus to reduce poverty.” Today, the issue is still considered important enough to be the subject of the World Bank’s forthcoming 2012 World Development Report.
What is fresh and different about the “Girl Effect” campaign is that it highlights a fact is all too often overlooked: the most effective time to educate and empower women is before they drop out of school, become pregnant before they are ready, contract HIV/AIDS and/or become irremediably discouraged by their life prospects– that is, when they are still girls! Though not mentioned in the video, the Nike Foundation is quietly investing in a variety of pilot projects to find the most effective ways of economically empowering adolescent girls. (In the interest of disclosure, these include a financially self-sufficient high school in Paraguay developed by the Fundación Paraguaya, which is transforming low-income, rural girls into “rural entrepreneurs” who the skills and attitudes needed to overcome poverty.)
Of course, the “girl issue” is not only about economics – it’s also about social justice: should some people have fewer rights and opportunities because they were born of the “wrong” gender? However, if takes some catchy videos that shine media attention on the economic benefits of educating and empowering girls to wake people up to the importance of this issue, then Nike and its “Girl Effect” campaign have done the world a tremendous service. Hopefully, more and more people will “get” it.
Martin Burt, Executive Director, Fundacion Paraguaya