The Power of Voice, Redux, on International Women's Day

US congresswoman Jeanette Rankin speaks
from the headquarters of the National American
Women Suffrage Association, 1917. Three years
later, American women had the right to vote.
Photo: Library of Congress.

Today celebrates International Women’s Day, a 104-year old tradition, honoring women’s social, economic, and political achievements and calling for greater equality and recognition of women’s rights. Its history dates back to the suffragette movement in the United States, when women took to the podiums and the streets, demanding the right to vote.    

You may remember that my first post for Her Blueprint, The Power of Voice, shared my experience introducing a public speaking training, grounded in the right to self-expression, to a group of Maasai and Kalenjin women in Kenya — and the transformative effect such training had on them and their community.  I'm aware of few development organizations that train rural women in public speaking. So in my own small way, I advocate for public speaking training for rural women in developing countries every chance I get.

Imagine my excitement, while recently conducting a gender analysis in Malawi,  when I happened upon a tool, the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index, which, among other factors, measures women’s comfort in public speaking as a key contributor to women's empowerment.

Roda from Narok County, Kenya practices her public speaking skills.
Photo: Landesa/Deborah Espinosa

Launched by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, and USAID's Feed the Future Initiative, the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index is the first standardized tool to comprehensively measure women’s empowerment and inclusion in agriculture.  

Among other constraints, women’s comfort in public speaking is measured along with group membership under the “Community Leadership” domain. “Group membership is an important source of social capital, and this indicator measures whether a woman is a member of at least one group out of a wide range of social and economic organizations.”1 High rates of disempowerment in the Community Leadership domain may indicate social and cultural norms that discourage participation in activities outside the home.2

Among the countries included in the Index Baseline Report, discomfort in public speaking was among the top three greatest contributors to women’s disempowerment in 3 out of 13 countries: Bangladesh, Malawi, and Zambia. For all 13 countries, constraints in the Community Leadership domain, generally, comprise from 14% (Liberia) to 37% (Nepal) of all constraints contributing to women's disempowerment.    

Given the significant other domains that the WEAI measures, i.e., production decision-making, access to productive resources, control over use of income, and time allocation, I am excited that I now have support for asserting the importance of women's leadership in communities, including group membership and feeling comfortable speaking in public to women's empowerment.

So for all of you international development practitioners out there, how do we honor this year's International Women's Day theme of "Make it Happen?" How does your program or project support women in gaining confidence to speak in public? To share their stories? To advocate for their rights?  

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

                                                         ~ Maya Angelou

1  Measuring Progress Toward Empowerment: Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index: Baseline Report (2012).

2  Id.

Family Planning: Whose Business?

This is a story of a family who live on less than $5 a day.  Mama and Papa have six children.  Mama would have seven but she lost the first one. She’s not sure why he died but she has never had enough food in the house, and with close pregnancy spacing she was not able to breastfeed the child that died for very long.  Even now, there is not much food to go around and so many mouths to feed.  Mama is exhausted. She needs an operation, because of the fistula she developed when having her third baby. Mama and Papa do not have the money for this operation; it would leave them without food to eat and they are already hungry. Their oldest child Mala has to help care for the other children.  Mama would like her to get some education but it is also expensive plus who will help her with the household chores? Papa is too busy in the fields.  Mama wishes she could have less children but doesn’t know how that is possible.  

This narrative is typical for women in developing countries all over the world. Already burdened with the tribulations of being poor and struggling day-to-day, they face further struggles through lack of education, higher risk of death due to childbirth, problems related to under-nutrition, and a vicious cycle that entraps their children into the same ring of poverty. This is not a specific cultural issue; this is an issue of universal female empowerment. It is well-documented that more educated women have less pregnancies and most women with large unplanned families want less children.

Female empowerment is not difficult to achieve. Despite the current negative rhetoric in the United States and United Kingdom around family planning, some developing countries have shown that politicians need not dictate to women about family planning, and that family planning does not equal abortion. Less children mean there are less mouths to feed, so the mother can focus on fully satisfying the nutritional needs of her smaller family as well as herself. It also means she has more time to focus on her economic needs, by working on the side she can supplement the household income and better lift herself and her family out of poverty. This begins to break the vicious circle, as it often enables her daughters to have a chance at achieving an education, which further empowers them to be agents of their own body and life.

This is the side of the story that the U.S. Presidential election rarely touches upon. The right-wing conservatives that make family planning an issue only about abortion directly feed into rhetoric that disables the empowerment of women. This also contradicts policy and evidence-based initiatives that have proved time and time again that family planning increases the quality of life of a woman. The Global Gag Rule, enacted by George Bush Senior and then reinstated by his son, was aimed at abortion but also ended up restricting contraception access. As a result, unintended pregnancies in areas that receive US aid actually increased. How can a policy that contributes to the vicious cycle of women in poverty possibly be empowering for women?

Despite these challenges, we have seen some tremendous gains in women’s empowerment in the last thirty years, even within family planning programs. In the mid 1970’s, Bangladesh had one of the highest fertility rates in the world with the average woman bearing seven children. By 2004, using a coordinated effort of making contraceptives readily available and implementing a peer-to-peer support program that visited women at home to provide follow up, fertility per woman had reduced from an average of seven children to an average of three.  Further success has been seen through NGO’s such as BRAC. By using grassroots measures to influence policy, we can empower women and lift them out of poverty, but family planning is an integral part of the solution. We can’t let the argument about abortion mask gains for universal female empowerment.