Dozens of former world leaders meeting in Little Rock concluded two days of talks about the state of women around the globe Tuesday by pledging to turn their words into actions.
Members of the Club de Madrid - an independent nonprofit group composed of 93 democratically elected former presidents and prime ministers from 62 countries - heard from social activists, business leaders and political peers in sessions that focused on women’s issues, including sexual assault, education, property ownershipand technology.
Walmart Foundation President Sylvia Burwell, a speaker at the event, encouraged members to circle Dec. 18, 2013, on their calendars.
“You can look at that calendar a year from now and say I actually did something about this,” she said.
Members - including former President Bill Clinton and former leaders of the Netherlands, Canada and Spain - proposed tangible solutions, such as providing cell phones and simple stoves to women in developing countries, and discussed broader cultural issues that have hindered change.
Improving gender parity will require assistance from men, the members agreed.
And the changes that will result will benefit all people, not just the women who are directly affected by new opportunities and educational access, Clinton said at the conference’s closing session.
“When all the girls are in school and all of the women have access to the markets, population growth slows and economic growth increases,” he said.
The conference, with events at the Clinton Presidential Center and the head-quarters of Heifer International, was held in Little Rock because Clinton is the honorary chairman of the Club de Madrid.
Members frequently cited Clinton’s post-presidential work and efforts by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton as examples of best practices in addressing the economic and political struggles of women.
Bill Clinton presented the Club de Madrid’s Young Leadership Award to Leila Janah, the 29-year-old founder of Samasource, a business that trains women and youth living in poverty to process and input digital data.
By using a simple computer process to break complex sets of data into manageable units, Samasource is able to employ the workers it trains in nations including Haiti, Kenya and rural India to complete contract work for global companies, such as Wal-Mart, Janah said.
Too many well-meaning organizations train women for jobs they can’t perform given cultural and geographical constraints, she said.
“The women we taught to fish lived in a desert,” Janah said. “Women need more than a fishing pole; they need to be connected to a river.”
That river, in the case of Samasource, is technology, she said, noting that the organization has helped 15,000 people work their wayout of poverty. Samasource aims to expand that number to 250,000 in the next five years.
Clinton applauded Janah for piloting a new project that will apply the same high-tech training and employment model to offer jobs to middle-aged women without college degrees in a low-income part of San Francisco.
U.S. women living in poverty have recently seen their life expectancies drop more quickly than men, and their employment opportunities have fallen as the nation’s economy has struggled, Clinton said.
“The thing that kills people’s spirit in life is when they think every tomorrow is going to be like yesterday,” he said.
Much of the conference’s second day focused on increasing economic opportunities for women, an issue intermingled with social issues, safety concerns and the use of natural resources,attendees said.
Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland, said more immediate concerns, such as health, shouldn’t be lost in the discussion of broad social change.
She applauded Hillary Clinton’s support for a global project that aims to give proper stoves to women in developing countries who cook their families’ meals on indoor open fires fueled by animal dung, making them susceptible to potentially fatal health problems.
Other speakers said cultural issues often prevent gender equality problems from being solved by strategies that merely offer the same resources to women that have long been accessible to men.
For example, in some countries where men use small loans to build their businesses, women offered the same financing are expected to use that money to support family members instead, said Mayra Buvinic, director of gender and development for the World Bank.
In those cases, in-kind capital, such as cell phones and livestock, can provide more opportunities for women, she said.
Cell phones, a frequent topic of discussion at the conference, provide women access to banking and market information they may have previously traveled miles to learn, Buvinic said. For example, a woman in Africa can use a phone to call a marketthat’s an hour’s walk away to determine if there’s enough traffic to justify traveling to sell that day, she said.
And giving women a role in their countries’ economies will improve the future for everyone, even men, attendees said. Speakers provided examples of how women’s involvement in public commissions and private boards has improved effectiveness of governments and made businesses more responsive to consumer needs.
“There is now a welldocumented understanding that we don’t just do this to be nice,” said Kim Campbell, the former prime minister of Canada.
“And I am optimistic because I think the terms of the argument have shifted. We’re no longer talking about what we want to accomplish. We’re talking about how to get there.”
Tuesday’s discussions came after a full day of events Monday, when the Club de Madrid announced two partnerships. An agreement with the World Economic Forum, a group seeking to engage politicians and the business community, will seek to strengthen ties with Asia. Another seeks to tackle climate change.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 12/19/2012