Gender Equality: Key to Every MDG

With her Africa Woman Food Farmer Initiative loan, this mother earns more and her family eats better.

MDG 1:  ERADICATE HUNGER AND POVERTY

Women and girls are trapped in a cycle of malnutrition, particularly in South Asia. By tradition, women eat last and least. They eat only the food that is leftover after the males have eaten. Often men and boys consume twice as many calories — even though women and girls do much of the heavy work. Girls in India are two-to-four times more likely to suffer from acute malnutrition than boys.

The vast majority of those living in hunger and poverty are women and girls. And when empowered, women are the key change agents to solve the problem. Studies show that 43 percent of the progress in reducing hunger from 1970 to 1995 was due to educating women, while improvements in food production only contributed 26 percent. Women are up to 15 times more likely than men to spend increases in income on family nutrition. Women grow the majority of food in the developing world, despite being almost entirely bypassed by aid programs. In all its work, The Hunger Project has given top priority to improving the well-being of women and girls and empowering women’s productivity and voice in decision-making.

Women leaders in tsunami-affected villages of India work with The Hunger Project to plan improved schools and other facilities.

MDG 2:  ACHIEVE UNIVERSAL PRIMARY EDUCATION

More than 120 million children are not in school, the majority of them girls. Each additional year of schooling for girls results in a 5–10 percent decline in child deaths. For every year beyond fourth grade that girls go to school, family size drops 20 percent and wages rise 20 percent.

Kofi Annan has said: “There is no tool for development more effective than the education of girls. No other policy is as likely to raise economic productivity, lower infant and maternal mortality, improve nutrition and promote health — including helping to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.” Everywhere we work, The Hunger Project empowers families to keep all their children — both girls and boys — in school.

MDG 4:  REDUCE CHILD MORTALITY

Every day marks the needless death of 30,000 children under five. Half of these children die as a direct result of malnutrition, in which gender discrimination is a key factor. The other half die from lack of health care, in which there is also tremendous gender discrimination. Because boys are seen as an investment and girls are seen as a burden, poor families are up to seven times less likely to take their daughter to the doctor when she is sick than their son.

Wherever we work, The Hunger Project empowers communities to understand the vital importance of health and nutrition for girls and women throughout their lives.

A Bangladeshi mother feeds her baby a nutritious meal.

A checkup at one of our epicenters in Uganda.

MDG 5:  IMPROVE MATERNAL HEALTH

The most egregious injustice in the world is maternal mortality. In the developed world, only 1 woman in 4,000 dies in childbirth — in Africa, it is 1 in 16. As our Uganda country director, Irene Wasike Muwanguzi, recently stated, “As women, our status is so low that we are not even protected as we give birth to the next generation.” Women not only lack access to pre- and postnatal care — they lack the sense of self-worth to demand it.

The Hunger Project achieves dramatic improvements in maternal health as women gain self-respect and voice in decision-making. Women learn the importance of good nutrition and health care and — as village leaders — ensure that the care is available and effective.

MDG 6:  STOP HIV/AIDS, MALARIA AND OTHER DISEASES

Redefining what it means to be a man in the twenty-first century, in a session of our HIV/AIDS and Gender Inequality Workshop.

A widow in Bangladesh at an AIDS rally organized by The Hunger Project.

HIV/AIDS in Africa is out of control because of gender discrimination. Society encourages men to practice unsafe sex with multiple partners, and denies women the power to say no to unsafe sex. UNAIDS reports that young women in Africa are now three times more likely than young men to become infected. In addition, women bear almost the entire burden of caring for the sick and dying — not only of AIDS, but of diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis.

More than 400,000 Africans have now taken The Hunger Project’s HIV/AIDS and Gender Inequality Workshop — the first such workshop ever delivered in rural Africa. This has not only slowed the spread of AIDS, but has also resulted in greater male responsibility and less domestic violence.

MDG 7:  ENSURE ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY

It is poor, rural food farmers whose livelihood most depends on the natural environment — and most of these farmers are women. They are also the family members who haul the water and firewood, and who must deal with the lack of proper sanitation, exposing themselves to numerous diseases.

In many developing world societies, women are the traditional caretakers of the environment — they possess the ancient wisdom for sustainability; they possess the ancient wisdom about biodiversity; they most often actually know what to do to protect the environment.

The Hunger Project empowers communities to ensure good access to safe water and sanitation, and to farm using sustainable methods — and we ensure that women have equal voice in decision-making.

A village mobilized by The Hunger Project-Bangladesh that has achieved 100 percent safe sanitation and 100 percent literacy.

Sanitary latrines at the Atuobikrom epicenter in Ghana.

MDG 8:  CREATE A GLOBAL PARTNERSHIP FOR DEVELOPMENT

Joan Holmes addresses a "Beijing+10" UN Session on behalf of the UN Millennium Project.

Despite growing global recognition of the profound importance of gender equality to development, the majority of development resources continue to go to men. Not only does this fail to improve the lives of women — and thereby the entire population — but it further widens the gender gap, pushing women further into poverty.

As Joan Holmes stated at the UN last year, “The very institutions we are counting on to make up what I would call the structure for fulfillment for achieving the MDGs — the government ministries, the UN agencies, the research institutes, the international finance institutions — are in many cases top-down, hierarchical, patriarchal and nonparticipatory in their very nature. These institutions are perhaps well-suited to implementing technical solutions, but are not as well-suited to addressing themselves to issues in the social domain, such as gender and all forms of social exclusion.”