Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [87]
The network is supporting women peacemakers in places like Sudan, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Sierra Leone, Bosnia, and the Middle East. Hunt’s contention is that, in many conflict states, “women’s status as second-class citizens is a source of empowerment, making them adept at finding innovative ways to cope with problems.” For example, the network is supporting Nanda Pok in Cambodia, a nation still not fully recovered from the Khmer Rouge ravages of the 1970s that claimed almost two million lives. Pok wants women to lead her country to a brighter, fairer future. She has trained more than five thousand women to run for public office, including 64 percent of those who were elected to local councils in 2002.
Mo Ibrahim, founder of Celtel International and one of Africa’s most successful businessmen, established a foundation to promote good governance in Africa. In 2007, he will award the first Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership, to recognize African leaders who have improved the lives of their people and strengthened conditions for sustainable economic and social development, including honest government and the rule of law, the empowerment of civil society, and advancements in health, education, and human rights. The prize, to be given after the leader leaves office, is $5 million over ten years and $200,000 a year thereafter for life, with the possibility of an additional $200,000 a year that the leader can direct to good causes. Ibrahim has also developed, in cooperation with the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, an Index of African Governance to rank sub-Saharan countries according to comparative, objective criteria. He hopes the index will lead to improvements in governance across the continent as well as open debates about how governance can best be assessed. I hope concerned citizens in other regions will consider adapting Ibrahim’s prize and index to their areas.
One of the most highly charged and highly publicized forms of this kind of activism involves citizens of one country lobbying for changes in policies by the government of another country. For example, the families of victims of the Pan Am 103 bombing, which killed 270 people in an explosion over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, have proved to be tenaciously effective in forcing the U.S. government to keep the pressure on the government of Libya, the home of the perpetrators, until the suspects were handed over for trial and the indemnity claims are paid in full. Because Libya is eager to shed its reputation as a sponsor of terrorism and to be reconciled with the United States, the families’ vigilance was clearly a contributing factor to Libya’s decision, after 9/11, to work with the British and U.S. governments to disclose and dismantle its weapons of mass destruction program.
Perhaps the most important current example of this kind of citizen activism involves the ongoing humanitarian tragedy in Sudan, where militia groups’ conflicts with the central government and its militia allies, the Janjaweed, have disrupted life in the vast Darfur region of western Sudan, spawning 2.5 million refugees and claiming between 200,000 and 400,000 lives from violence and starvation. Most of the killing has been carried out by the Janjaweed with the tacit and sometimes active support of the national government. The refugees are packed together in relatively isolated camps, protected only by a small force of fewer than eight thousand African Union troops, mostly from Nigeria and Rwanda. The force is too