All over the world there are women working tirelessly to bring change, both for other women and for the wider community. They are making their voices heard on the international stage, in government, in businesses large and small, on matters of health and education and at the grassroots.
Here, Global presents the stories of a selection of women from around the world with a special passion for the causes they are committed to. They include a leading campaigner against female genital mutilation, the founder of the world’s first women’s cooperative bank, a broadcaster with a mission to raise and confront destructive social problems and a campaigner who works to improve government policies towards women.
We salute their crystal clear determination to succeed as well as their remarkable achievements to date.
Working for cultural change
Julia Lalla-Maharajh
Founder and Executive Director of the Orchid Project, UK
I had spent 20 years in the private sector and then went off and did voluntary service in Cambodia and Ethiopia, and it really opened up a whole new life for me. In Ethiopia I came across the scale and impact of female genital cutting (FGC).
I had a moment where I felt I couldn’t look away, so my response was to come back to London and do what I could to try to raise awareness about FGC. The Orchid Project is there to try and break some of the silence around the taboo, and also to work with the many, many organisations on the ground that are doing something about it.
Female genital cutting affects 140 million women in different countries, and about 3 million girls every year are cut. Put very simply, FGC is the forcible removal of a girl’s external genitals. I say this very dispassionately but you can image with no anaesthetic, done in very rural areas, what this will mean to a girl sometimes as young as the age of five. The damage to girls and women is huge. It can be anything from haemorrhaging at the time of the cut, leading to death,
through to infections. It affects them at the onset of menstruation, in childbirth and during intercourse and pregnancy. At every point in a woman’s life that we would celebrate, something awful can happen through FGC.
I’ve just got back from Senegal and there is now incredible change happening in the communities. I discovered that almost 5,000 communities have chosen to end FGC in the last five years, not just in Senegal but in eight countries in West Africa. I worked with an incredible NGO on the ground called Tostan, which works with communities to ensure that they can access their rights but at the same understand their responsibilities. Once a community understands that it has a responsibility to end violence against women – and that it means something to them and their lives – then they take action to change it. At the end of the day it is communities and the respect for the communities that will allow this practice to change.
I think the most important thing I’ve found on my journey is that knowledge is an incredible power. I started from a point of being outraged, shocked and upset, but the more I’ve come to understand FGC, I now realise that no parent would knowingly put their child through pain. We thought FGC was to ensure chastity and fidelity but actually, one of the main issues behind it is to ensure marriageability. A girl who is uncut cannot be married and, for a community in which FGC happens, it’s a worse thing that a girl is unmarried than that a girl is cut. So you can see how strong an issue it is that keeps FGC in place.
I think what can change things on the ground is talking to communities with respect. If we walk into a community and say “Why have you mutilated your daughters?” the community says “Here’s the door”. But when we approach in terms of a common, real respect, wanting the best for their daughters, it’s incredible what happens. If we ask questions, if we understand their positive practices, but also question why they’re doing this, then change can happen.
How drama can alter attitudes
Noeyln Wagapu
Chair of the Commonwealth Youth Caucus and Young Female Solomon Islander of the Year 2009
I am a radio broadcaster and I use what I do as means of getting information back to the rural areas at the grassroots. In the Solomon Islands we have a lot of issues that are affecting young people today. I’ve put together a group who are interested in radio drama and we do a 15 minute programme on one Sunday every month. In each month we have a different issue, for example, domestic violence or HIV/ AIDS and sexually transmitted infections. We gather information from NGOs then we put that in a play and we disseminate it to the different provinces.
There are 30 young people in the drama group. Their ages range from 8 to 29. Some of the group members come from broken families that are directly affected by the issues we tackle. Having experienced the problem, they can put all their effort into doing this drama and they have the passion for it. You can see it in their eyes that it has changed them – it’s a driving force that takes them through. Some of them have found better work now and they attend education, or else they go into other training.
In the Solomon Islands there is always a clash between traditional beliefs and the law. In traditional beliefs, women are supposed to stay home, they are to cook and they are not to go into education. So we use radio as a voice to get through to the rural areas so even though the women are not normally heard there, the way we use their voices means they can be recognised.
I would say as a female it is very difficult to put information across in our society because women are supposed to be mindful of what they say. In the drama group we are a mixture of young women and men. We tend to put across the messages that we women can’t mention by using the voices of the men in the group. It’s not a taboo to talk about these issues but it is a taboo for women to be up there – they will just look at you and say: “What are you doing?”
Transforming policy and social attitudes
Doris Bingley
General Secretary of the National Council of Women in Malta
After I married, I lived overseas in many countries, and in each country I always chose to do some charitable work. For example, in Bangladesh, where I was president of the UN women’s organisation, we raised money to buy treadle pumps, because Bangladesh is often flooded and there are areas where they need drinking water. In Nigeria, where I lived for a very long time, I was again in the international women’s organisation and our work was always trying to help, raising money for Christmas or bringing children for parties.
In Malta, with the National Council of Women, we do a lot of policy work. Every year when the local budget comes we make sure that it’s helping women. We have five committees, on education, health, wellbeing, consumer affairs and the environment. We believe in sustainable development and that we must have clean air and a clean country. It’s widespread, the work that we do. We invite women from the small states of Europe, for example, for conferences where we share good practices. We invite women from other places. So our work is vast, actually, and never stops.
In Malta, we would like to see more women in decision-making, especially in political decision-making. We have less than 9 percent in parliament and we haven’t even one woman in the European Parliament. So we have to break that glass ceiling. We need women in the boardrooms as well. With the financial crisis, we all feel that there should be women there. After all, we are more than 52 percent, not just in Malta but all over the world, so I think women should be out there.
The Council has been in place since 1964. In my younger days in Malta if you married you couldn’t go on working. You had to give up your job. The Council worked against that and now women can work. The Council also brought up the issue of domestic violence, as it was a hush-hush situation before. We raised awareness about it and now there are shelters and a lot of help is available. When it comes to domestic violence, we can’t keep talking about the women alone. We need the men to be educated. Some of them might do it through culture or upbringing but if we make them aware of what they are doing I think that would help.
Education is paramount. Not just in the three Rs but in all aspects. We must prepare girls and even boys. It is not just about getting an academic education but about promoting their skills so that when they come out they can be economically independent, find jobs, feel secure and feel motivated and empowered. That’s very important. The Council also works on tertiary education, and we try to eliminate illiteracy and absenteeism.
