Solutions

Another post on women's rights. Sorry. I'm finding my soapboxes. So there are two major solutions that I know of to lack of women's rights in third world countries, and not solutions like raiding brothels or handing out condoms. Two lastig solutions so make women more self sufficient and help them to advocate for themselves. Not surprisingly, these also help poverty in general in those areas.

Education: As young people we are always told "you don't understand the value of your education" or "imagine if you were not allowed to go to school" and many people roll their eyes or make some snarky comment about how they wish they were poor people in Sri Lanka so they didn't have to go to school, but the truth is that education is huge. Also if you think about it for at least three seconds, you'll realize you do not want to be an impoverished person in rural Sri Lanka for so many reasons. Especially in the microcommunity of Prism, we stress about school so much. We worry about etting into the right schools, about what kind of a career we want to go into and how much it will pay, we worry about recs and what our parents will say if we get a B in calculus, but really school is so integrated into our lives that we don't realize how crucial it is. Even an elementary education does so much for a person, and illiteracy in women is huge--you can manipulate a person very easily if they cannot read the rules to tell them how much of what you're doing is illegal. Women cannot be business women if they never learn math, and they cannot become respected members of the community if they have not learned the basic skills that even America's poorest immigrant children learn for free.

Business: Study after study has shown that if you let women handle business in third world countries, they are much more effective at it. This is because the women are not used to handling money, that there is this social stigma against giving women any power so husbands and fathers take care of money and women take care of children. This means that when women do get loans, they are very cautious with money and do not overspend so they don't encounter the debt problems that plague so many first world businessmen and women. The other thing about putting women in buiness is that it takes off that dea that women cannot have any power, either  because of the thought that they are unintelligent or irresponsible (refuted when they are seen to be successful in microfinancing) or just because a culture says that women should not lead. It's funny how when power is given to powerless races within a society, the result is vastly different, highly ineffective, and almost always violent. HMM.