Women are the Solution

"...We must be courageous in speaking out on the issues that concern us: we must not bend under the weight of spurious arguments invoking culture or traditional values. No value worth the name supports the oppression and enslavement of women...
The function of culture and tradition is to provide a framework for human wellbeing. If they are used against us, we will reject them, and move on. We will not allow ourselves to be silenced..."


Dr. Nafis Sadik, Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund, Beijing, 1996


I’ve been listening to the University of Berkeley’s lecture podcasts of their Population and Poverty course. Malcolm Potts, Martha Campbell, Ndola Prata and a host of other speakers share their insights and experiences to provide an understanding of the relationships between population growth, poverty, women’s empowerment, and the politics and changing paradigms of population control.


They explore the history of family planning movements the world over in order to place in context the developments of today, and why since the 1980s, population control measures seem to have lost their momentum,  though, “..globally one million more births than deaths occur every 112 hours, 90% in the poorest countries.”


In September 2000, the UN Millennium Declaration was adopted by 189 heads of state. It set out a plan for countries to work together to achieve the following goals for 2015:


• Goal 1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger


• Goal 2. Achieve universal primary education


• Goal 3. Promote gender equality and empower women


• Goal 4. Reduce child mortality


• Goal 5. Improve maternal health


• Goal 6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases


• Goal 7. Ensure environmental sustainability


• Goal 8. Develop a global partnership for development


In Lecture 5, Martha Campbell asks an inconvenient question – Is it realistic or feasible to work toward any of these goals without addressing the population problem? How can we speak of eradicating hunger when there are a million new mouths to feed every few days?


They make a strong case for the support of women’s reproductive rights…which they see as crucially linked to the availability of options for contraception. This was raised by Dr. Sadik in her 1996  Address To The World Conference Of Women, highlighting the need to liberate women "from a system of values which insists that reproduction is their only function”


“…the first mark of respect for women is support for their reproductive rights. Women must be empowered to perform this role as they see fit. No-one has the right to impose reproductive decisions on them.


Living in Mumbai, a city that is bursting at its seams, with hundreds of children begging at every traffic light, and hundreds upon thousands of families living their lives on the roads, these words resonate deeply with me. But when and how will change come?

Empower and Include

It's been a busy time. I finally did manage to pass my driving test (a very kind examiner, the winter chill and empty roads helped me overcome my mind numbing fear of tests!). Tremendously liberating. Still don't have a car, but it's nice knowing that there is now no other bar to mobility. So Empowering!

So, today, I focus on Empowerment.

And if and how global learning assets and open source education can be used to foster empowerment.

"The idea of empowerment is that those who have little or no influence, such as excluded people, are able to develop informed opinions, to take initiative, make independent choices and influence change...

It also means that those with influence actively change their attitudes and rules and change the way decisions are made through involving excluded people."

Source: The EQUAL Community Initiative (whose activities have now been completed).

Empowerment is the opposite of Powerlessness, which is described in the Voices of the Poor: Crying out for Change as "the core of the bad life", manifesting in "the inability to control what happens, the inability to plan for the future, and the imperative of focusing on the present". Read this global study by the World Bank published as a three part series "Voices of the Poor".

Powerlessness is a serious constraint on the ability to pursue happiness. Its antidote, true empowerment, must be preceded by a recognition of the need for some degree of equality. And for that there must be a change in attitudes and a fundamental shift in how education and learning is offered and made available, accessible and inclusive. It means turning things upside down and inside out. It means Open Education.

As a launch pad into the study of this immensely exciting arena, read Michaeil Feldstein's primer on The History of Open Education here.

Today, every institution that offers education must seriously assess their responsibility to the marginalised and the excluded and think about how they can empower the powerless. And how they can share their assets and benefit from the amazing possibilities for exchange.