* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The Women’s Forum in Deauville, Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit in California… I spent two days of my last two weeks listening to awesome and active women explaining how to overcome obstacles when you are a woman.
Back at the office –and happy to see men again- I am wondering what the real impact of these conferences is. Do they make a difference?
Almost two years ago, I launched the coverage of women’s rights on our website TrustLaw, to help women around the world know and defend their rights. It has quickly become a landmark, and the reason why I am invited to speak at all these conferences. The main benefit of these events is they bring together in a room many women in positions of authority, raising awareness of the issues women face and keeping discussion alive.
They are the places where you can meet amazing women with great destinies and get inspiration. In LA, it was great to listen to the amazing Ursula Burns, chairman and CEO of Xerox. She had very out-of-the-box pieces of advice for women at work that made me smile because they are so true:
- Sooner rather than perfect
- If you say something when somebody’s not ready to listen, it’s just noise
- I was more convincing when I said what I thought, than what I thought I should say. Sometimes this gets you into trouble
- Lead from YOUR seat, not mine (She got this advice from her predecessor at Xerox).
I also got to moderate a panel in Deauville with Cherie Blair and the amazing Bunker Roy. Bunker left a rich family in India to create the Barefoot College in Tilona, a small village in the Rajasthan desert, 40 years ago.
What he did there was teach the know-how that can change the lives of the poor and outcast – like training people to become a solar engineer in six months. This is not a joke. In the last five years, he has taught many African grandmothers – aged between 35 and 50, and who live with less than a dollar a day – the techniques to become solar engineers. When they get back home, bringing electricity to their villages and communities, they create new livelihoods for their families and others. He prefers to teach women because he says every time you teach rural men these kinds of things, they leave the villages for towns, whereas women stay in their community and teach others.
The Barefoot approach has been implemented in over 30 of the least developed countries. A total of 36,000 houses in 1,024 villages have been electrified with solar energy thanks to nearly 300 rural grandmothers. What an achievement. This 67-year-old could teach a lot to governments organizing aid, and to NGOs, around the world!
However, despite encounters like this, one key disappointment is that conferences are often all about talking, not about action.
And so I decided one year ago to create a conference to put the rule of law behind women's rights. With the International Herald tribune, we have organized the Trust Women Conference, due to take place on December 4 and 5 in London, with top women’s rights experts and Nobel-Prize winners among those attending. Here, we will take action and make commitments to improve things.
The first day is dedicated to “when culture clashes with the law,” focusing namely on child marriage, female genital mutilation, and the Arab Spring: has the Arab Spring been a disaster or an opportunity for women?. The second day is all about human trafficking and slavery.
Just know that in the time you took to read this blog, some 70 girls under the age of 18 years will have been forced into marriage, often with dire consequences. Every three seconds, a girl under the age of 18 is married off, sometimes at 12 or even less. Way before she is mentally or sexually ready.
Meanwhile, between 22 and 27 million people are slaves today, more than ever in history.
Do we want to take action to help put an end to barbarity?
Monique Villa is CEO of the Thomson Reuters Foundation
