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Educating girls is investment in the future of nations, global leaders said at this year's Clinton Global Initiative
The topic of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) panel was investing in healthy and educated girls and women, but the sub-text really was: What will Hillary Rodham Clinton do next?
The annual CGI in New York brings together global leaders to try and find solutions to pressing issues, including how to help girls and women learn, earn, and control their own destinies.
Moderator Sanjay Gupta of CNN didn’t elicit the answer the audience hoped for, but he managed to get an answer of sorts as he asked panelist and former U.S. Secretary of State Clinton how important it is for there to be a woman president of the United States.
Making it clear that it was a question she would answer only by taking herself out of the equation, Clinton said, “It is, for me, part of the larger message to expand political participation and leadership for women around the world.”
She said the election of a female U.S. president really would be symbolic, but “symbolism is efficacious”.
“We have many challenges,” she said. “Electing one person, a woman, is not going to end those challenges but it provides a kind of boost” to the status of women. “Someday, I hope it happens,” she added.
The other panelists included Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan, Melinda Gates, co-chair and trustee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace laureate and chairman of the Yunus Social Business Global Initiatives.
They all shared memories of different moments that galvanised their interest in helping women.
For Queen Rania it was visiting a class of sixth-graders in Jordan. The girls all read accounts of their lives and aspirations. But one girl, named Noor, told the story of her grandmother, famous for telling the stories of others. Noor told the queen that she planned to write a story of her own, Rania said.
“If you educate a girl, not only does she transform her own household but her community at large,” she said.
For Muhammed Yunus, who pioneered the concept of microfinancing for the poor that eventually led to his founding of the Grameen Bank, it was an encounter with a woman making beautiful bamboo stools in Bangladesh.
The stools were exquisite, he recalled, but the woman was dressed in rags. He asked her how much she made every day and she told him between 2 cents and 3 cents. He asked her why so little and she told him she had to pay a loan shark for money, usually about 30 cents, to purchase the bamboo she used.
Yunus asked her how much she would make if she had the money to purchase the bamboo and she told him she’d easily make 10 cents. Yunus found 42 other people in the same position, needing a total of $27 to ply their trades.
He gave them the $27 to pay off the loan sharks and purchase the materials they needed. “That was the beginning of microcredit. I will keep it in my mind all my life,” he said of the memory.
For Clinton, it was a number of encounters over the years. One was a woman she met at a meeting of women under a tree in Lahore, Pakistan. The woman had 10 children, five girls and five boys. She told Clinton that she had sent all her boys to secondary school but held her girls back because it wasn’t safe to send them on a long walk from home.
She told Clinton that she wished there was a closer secondary school for her girls and added that when they married she hoped there would be more family planning available, said Clinton, with a smile.
“Empowering women is the unfinished business we need to complete in the 21st century,” she said.
When asked about the current state of women’s rights, Clinton said, “Sitting here today, it’s really kind of a good news and not-so-good news story.”
She added that although women have come a long way, “we have not achieved the kind of equal outcomes or even equal opportunities that we want to achieve. So we have to continue to make the case”.
Clinton said she will continue to work on women’s issues in her role at the Clinton Foundation. “I want to know exactly what we’ve accomplished and what we need to do to complete” the work.
Melinda Gates said her goal is to do research on contraceptives that yields results that women can use, with fewer side effects and fewer trips to the doctor. For example, she said, in some places she was told there was plenty of access to contraceptives, but the contraceptives were condoms. That doesn’t work for women who can’t negotiate with men to use those condoms, she said.
Queen Rania said her goal is to gather information about the status of girls. “I think it’s about bringing the information out there and making sure that people understand it’s compelling. The link between education and health is compelling. Education saves lives,” she said.
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