The opening of City of Joy brought a delegation of more than 80 people from around the world to Bukavu, including media to help tell these inspiring women's stories. Photo Credit: Paula Allen for V-Day
According to the United States Census Bureau, each day 361,481 babies are born around the world. This past fall, one of those 361,481 babies bumped the world’s population to 7 billion.
When I was born 50 years ago the world’s population was 2 billion. At the time, my dad, Ted Turner, was shocked that in his 30 years of life the population had grown by 1 billion. A half-century later the disbelief continues with the addition of 5 billion people.
According to David Bloom, an economist at Harvard University, the world’s population grows by 80 million each year. Do the math, and that has the population tipping the scales at 9.3 billion by 2050. With this monumental influx of people calling our planet home, there is much at stake, including the unanswered questions on how it will affect our planet’s natural systems and our overall quality of life.
Currently our planet is challenged by unprecedented and complex issues like a climbing demand for clean water, melting glaciers, and a precipitous decline of pollinators, amphibians and many species of flora and fauna. As the population soars to new heights, we will continue to experience a depletion of our natural resources, and its equally as threatening effects on our public health and social and economic growth. This is especially true since 97 percent of the aforementioned population swell will occur in developing countries.
Statistics show that people are living longer, but not necessarily better. People around the world struggle with hunger, fight for their right to clean water and are given very few resources to make a change in their lives. Now with 7 billion people sharing the planet it has become more important than ever to create sustainable cities, which nurture economic growth, health and overall wellbeing. But easier said than done. Of the ten most populated countries, 6 of the 10 are classified as developing nations and face an uphill battle to achieve these standards.
To create a balance between the environment, health and society in these crowded times, we must empower the people to improve their own lives and therefore become catalysts for progress. For many, this empowerment begins with women. If we can’t take care of women, who are mothers and caregivers, how can we take care of the more complex issues affecting our planet?
In July 2010, the United Nations General Assembly created UN Women, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. According to the newly formed organization, gender equality is a basic right and empowering women fuels thriving economies, ultimately spurring productivity and growth.
This idea of liberating women in societies who struggle with social and economic conditions was the basis for Mohammad Yunus’ Grameen Bank. In 1976, the Bangladeshi economist set forth to prove that through micro-finance, the poorest of people, particularly women, can work to advance their own development. The gender inequalities that he experienced in Bangladesh were denying women access to work, basic education, healthcare and overall human rights. His solution was the Grameen Bank, which instead of giving loans based on collateral like most conventional banks, does so based on a person’s individual potential. The bank was his way of eliminating the exploitation of the poor by moneylenders and creating opportunities for self-employment for the vast population of unemployed Bangladeshis.
Nobel Laureate Professor Mohammed Yunus with Grameen Bank borrowers, the majority of whom are poor Bangladeshi women.
Unlike conventional banks, which are owned by the rich, poor women own Yunus’ Grameen Bank. 97 percent of borrowers are women, which is a monumental success for a country where women represent less than 1 percent of borrowers of commercial banks. Studies have shown that allowing women access to microcredit grants them access to resources and gives them control over decision-making in society and their own lives.
Since its formation, the Grameen Bank has grown to over 21,500 branches throughout Bangladesh and celebrates that more than half of its borrowers, about 50 million people, have risen out of acute poverty. This means that all school age children within the family attend school, all household members eat three meals a day and their home has a sanitary toilet, rainproof roof and clean drinking water.
In 2006 Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize and his Grameen Bank has become the model for similar banks around the world, including India, which is predicted to surpass China as the world’s most populous country by 2050.
Empowering women financially is only part of the solution. The United Nations Population Fund suggests that a woman’s ability to control her own fertility is fundamental to her empowerment and equality. They go on to say that when a woman can plan her family she can plan the rest of her life and participate more fully and equally in society.
Championing that very cause is Eve Ensler, founder of V-Day, the global activist movement to end violence against women and girls. Through a variety of benefits and innovative gatherings, including performances of Ensler’s famed Vagina Monologues and most recently her teen-focused I Am An Emotional Creature, V-Day strives to raise awareness and change social attitudes towards violence seen all over the world.
Most recently, Eve Ensler focused her efforts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the rape capitol of the world, which has been hailed as the “worst country in the world to be a woman.” There, rape is engrained in the culture and it is not uncommon for a woman to be raped so brutally and frequently that their reproductive organs become so damaged that fertility is no longer an option. Victims of rape become social outcasts and are excluded by their families. This causes a societal breakdown since Congolese women are responsible for cooking, farming and tending to the household.
The Congolese women who worked tirelessly to help build the City of Joy take part in the opening celebration of the facility in February of 2011. Photo Credit: Paula Allen for V-Day
With an abundance of laws that discriminate against women, life in the Congo is less than ideal for a woman of any age. Hearing the cries of these women, Ensler opened the doors to her City of Joy in Bukavu, a city in Eastern DRC, earlier this year. A safe haven for victims of abuse, the City of Joy invites 60 women at a time to spend 6 months undergoing “de-traumatization” sessions where they learn about women’s rights, literacy, business fundamentals and even how to use the Internet.
The opening of City of Joy gives women hope, education and power, but even more unique is that it also, for the first time, gave the survivors a platform to present to the international press and the world community their stories and demand for change, which included that women be given the right to land ownership, strict enforcement against acts of sexual violence, and adequate healthcare for victims of abuse.
Joining Ensler in her quest to empower women to take control of their own fertility is my stepmom Jane Fonda, who in 1994 attended the UN’s Conference on Population and Development as the Goodwill Ambassador to the UN’s Population Fund. Women and their fertility were a main focus of the conference and Fonda realized that there was plenty of work to do in our own country. Of all of the countries who had ratified the UN’s “International Bill of Rights of Women” at the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the United States remained the only developed nation who has not done so.
At the time, 7 out of every 100 teens in Georgia were becoming pregnant (making it the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the country) and 99 out of 100 of those pregnancies were unplanned. While Fonda had believed that contraception was the solution, after traveling across the state she realized that most teen mothers grew up in poverty and had no hope of bettering their situation. In fact, 80% of teen mothers were living below the poverty line before they became pregnant.
Fonda discovered that the reasons teens were becoming pregnant were not specific to the United States, but were similar to those seen around the world. Sexual abuse, lack of education and gender role stereotypes increased the potential risk of a teen becoming pregnant here in the United States just as it would in the DRC or any other country. Because of that Fonda founded G-CAPP, the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention, which recognizes that hope is the best contraception.
G-CAPP works to broaden the traditional pregnancy prevention agenda to create sustainable programs and a positive environment to reduce the rate of adolescent pregnancy. The campaign also works with teen mothers, through their Second Change Homes Network and their Doula Project, to teach them to become self-sufficient parents for long-term economic independence as to break the cycle of teen pregnancies and repeat pregnancies.
Though we are seeing a decline of our natural resources associated with the 7 billion people sharing the Earth, the resources provided by technology, forward-thinking and leaders like Yunus, Ensler and Fonda will allow us to create the sustainable cities that are necessary for our planet’s longevity. It is the winning combination of their passion and compassion that will help to ease the burdens of gender inequalities and inspire hope among all the world’s people no matter financial state, gender or location. When we create a society where men and women can walk as equals, then we will experience the progress we so desperately need.
- published in Southern Seasons Winter 2011 issue
