Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [36]
Skills-giving is going on in every region in the world, and there are many valuable projects under way that should be expanded or adopted by others. Here are a few that I’ve been exposed to.
In the Middle East, much of the rapidly growing youth population is frustrated by the absence of economic opportunity and by being cut off from the positive aspects of global interdependence. The senseless waste of their talent and potential makes them more vulnerable to the nihilist ideas of extremists, at the very least perpetuating a culture of resentment and powerlessness. Young Arab Leaders is a network of young men and women committed to making the opportunities of the global economy available to more young people throughout the Arab world. Established in 2004, YAL already has chapters in eleven Arab nations and plans to be active in the rest of them by 2008. The group’s mission is to spread leadership values and help develop future leaders with a positive vision; contribute to the region’s development with results-driven initiatives that address its most important challenges; and assist in bridging the “awareness gap” between Arabs and the rest of the world.
I met with the group in Dubai just as they were getting started and have met with them several times since. YAL now has more than five hundred members from diverse backgrounds, including business, politics, media, academia, the arts, science, and civil society. They represent the “other” Arab world we hear too little about in the mass media, because they are builders, not destroyers.
Young Arab Leaders participated in the Clinton Global Initiative in 2005 and 2006, and made important skills-giving commitments. They launched an Entrepreneurship Initiative, a competition to review thousands of business plans, identify two hundred for further review, then select thirty to be developed into concrete business projects with the financial backing of YAL business “angels,” already successful Arab business and financial enterprises. The group also committed to partner with Business for Diplomatic Action to recruit young YAL members for internships with top U.S. companies, vowing to “out-recruit bin Laden.” YAL is also working to improve Arab education systems to meet modern job-market needs, and organizing dialogues between young Arabs and their counterparts from other parts of the world. If Young Arab Leaders succeeds in its efforts, Arab societies will offer more equal and constructive life choices for young women and men, and all our children will live in a more peaceful, prosperous, cooperative world.
Women for Women International teaches skills to one of the world’s most disadvantaged groups: women in war-torn regions. Ninety percent of those killed or injured in modern conflicts are civilians, many of them women and children. The women who survive are forced to bear terrible burdens as the sole breadwinners and caregivers for children and elderly parents. They have often suffered rape, torture, starvation, and forced prostitution in ruined economies filled with unresolved animosities, and they rarely have the access men do to educational, political, and financial resources.
Since its founding in 1993, Women for Women International has taken 93,000 women “on a journey from victim to survivor to active citizen,” providing skills in job training, running a small business, and political activism. It has also distributed more than $30 million in direct aid and microcredit loans. In Afghanistan it registered thousands of women to vote in the presidential election. In Nigeria it helped women organize themselves to end female genital mutilation and oppressive widowhood practices. In Rwanda, women have been trained to prevent malaria. In Bosnia, its microcredit and skills-training efforts have helped nearly ten thousand women, who have a 98 percent loan repayment rate.
Women for Women was founded by Zainab Salbi and her husband, Amjad Atallah. Salabi escaped a difficult and dangerous life in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and wrote Between Two Worlds: