Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [41]
Vital Voices is also working with women in several African nations, across Asia, and in Russia and Ukraine. It combats human trafficking, in partnership with the U.S. government, corporations, NGOs, academic institutions such as New York University, and philanthropists like Alice Kandell. It is striving to increase the role of Muslim women in the Middle East and North Africa and in the economic and political life of their countries. It has partnered with Queen Rania and the Jordan River Foundation to enhance the status of women in Jordan. It has programs to advance the economic and human rights of women in Venezuela, Peru, and Guatemala, with plans to expand into seven more Latin American nations.
Among the many impressive female entrepreneurs Vital Voices supports are Guo Jianmei, who founded the first NGO in China devoted to protecting women’s legal rights and highlighting abuses in the home or workplace or by government; Jaya Arunachalam, founder of the Working Women’s Forum in India, which over the last twenty-nine years has empowered 800,000 women through microcredit, political involvement, and access to education and health care for their children; Rita Chaikin, who discovered that Russian women she counseled at a rape crisis center in Kiryat Shmona had been trafficked from Russia into Israel, and who now works to stop the annual inflow of an estimated fifteen hundred to three thousand women into her country; and Inez McCormack, former Northern Ireland regional secretary of UNISON, the United Kingdom’s largest trade union, which built the Equality Coalition to ensure that Northern Ireland’s Good Friday Agreement would be fair to both Protestants and Catholics, to both women and men. With Vital Voices, Inez now brings Arab-Israeli and Jewish-Israeli women to Northern Ireland to better understand the opportunities of peace-building.
And there is Mukhtaran Bibi of Pakistan, who was gang-raped by order of an all-male tribunal in her village in retribution for her twelve-year-old brother allegedly holding hands with a girl from a higher-caste tribe. She was then forced to walk home naked in front of the villagers. Instead of committing suicide in shame, she pursued her attackers, was awarded compensation, and used the money to establish a primary school for girls and one for boys in her village. She too was illiterate, so she enrolled in her own elementary school to learn to read and write. She has also started her own aid organization and an ambulance service. Such women are worthy of our support.
Vital Voices is headquartered in Washington, D.C. Many of its financial supporters and volunteer activists are women. Think how much more they could accomplish with more money and more people.
In the United States, many citizens work individually or in groups to help ease tensions, relieve suffering, provide educational and economic opportunities, and resolve conflicts in the nations where they have their ethnic, religious, and family roots. Indian Americans and Pakistanis; Greeks and Turks; Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Kosovars; Jews and Arabs; Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants—all have been active in efforts to give troubled places new beginnings. Almost all of them have achieved a fair measure of success in America, and some are quite wealthy, like my friends Haim Saban and Danny Abraham, who have established foundations to continue the search for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. But you don’t have to be wealthy—thousands of middle-class Americans also do what they can for their homelands. I’m not sure the conflict in Northern Ireland would have resolved itself by now had it not been for the years of devoted efforts by a very large number of Irish Americans to get America to play a more active role and to provide more economic opportunity for both Catholics and Protestants there. Despite the obstacles, I see that same commitment among other Americans to resolving the conflicts in the Middle East, in South Asia, and between