In her address (click here for full text) (click here for video), Joan Holmes declared that “The treatment of women and girls is the greatest violation of human rights in our world today… Gender discrimination is the greatest moral challenge of our age. And we will be judged by history on how we respond to this challenge. Since women are at the center of the development process, "no improvement in the lives of women will be sustained unless girls are given tools and opportunity to reach their potential…"
"We truly don’t have a clue what the world would look like if girls and women could express themselves and be ‘everything they can be.’”
Joan called upon developing country governments to implement policies to ensure the empowerment of girls and women. These include mandating that health workers and midwives teach mothers to breastfeed their girl babies as long as their boy babies and to ensure that daughters are as well fed as sons; scholarships and other incentives for girls in secondary school; mandating that farm extension agents work with women farmers; and that developed countries increase the amount of their aid and make aid conditional on countries improving the lives of women and girls.
Joan’s address was followed by three young women from India, Mexico and Uganda who recounted the gender discrimination they faced growing up as girls. Despite overwhelming odds, these young women broke free from these shackles and dedicated themselves to altering gender relations in their own communities.
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Irudaya Mary from India was abandoned at birth by her father, simply because he wanted a son rather than a daughter. Mary “knows it would have been different if I had been born a boy.”
Reyna Ortiz Concha from Mexico was denied her family’s support for her education, even though her brothers’ education was fully supported and paid for by her family. Putting herself through college “was part of a revolution.”
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Susan Katushabe from Uganda was confronted by family and cultural pressures to be married at a young age to a much older man whom she did not know. She said that “I refused…It was the best decision I ever made in my life.”
In addition, Rafiqul Islam Sarkar from Bangladesh described the impact of gender discrimination in his culture: “Our society ingrains in its boys and men that we, as the males, have been born entitled to lead a life where the women folk are born to take care of us and to be subservient to us…As a society, we are cursed because we subjugate our mothers, sisters, wives and daughters. Because we do not consider them equal to us.”
Susan, Mary and Reyna as they prepare to do media interviews between rehearsals.
The evening concluded with a joyous performance by the New York Metro Mass Choir.
Sunday, November 7, Meeting of the Global Board of Directors
Country Directors from South Asia, Africa, and Latin America updated the board on The Hunger Project’s dramatic expansion in 2004. Highlights of this year’s expansion included the Latin American Strategy Meeting held this year in Mexico, Joan Holmes’ meeting with President Vincente Fox of Mexico, and the opening of the first Ethiopia Country Office. 2004 also saw dramatic expansion of programs in India and Bangladesh.
Joan Holmes briefed the board on The Hunger Project’s continuing advocacy campaign to influence international development policy to guarantee the empowerment of women and girls as a key to ending hunger. In 2004 Joan was appointed as a member of the Hunger Task Force of the UN Millennium Project and has played a key role in advocating for strategic inclusion of gender in the Task Force’s Action Plan to halve hunger by 2015.
This was also the first year when The Hunger Project’s partner in Peru, Tarcila Rivera Zea from Chirapaq (the Center for Indigenous Culture of Peru), joined country directors for this important meeting.
Sunday - November 7, 2004 - Global Everyone Meeting
At Sunday afternoon’s Global Everyone meeting, Country Directors updated investors about the breakthroughs to end hunger sustainably which have occurred on the ground in their countries.
This spirited reunion was also the launch of the year end campaign to raise more than $9 million globally for The Hunger Project in 2004.