One of the most effective ways to fight global poverty is surprisingly simple: empower moms.
As the World Food Program recently noted, in much of the world women make up the majority of farmworkers and are the ones responsible for doing everything from waking up before dawn to fetch water to cooking meals to tending and harvesting crops.
Theres also a strong correlation between hunger and gender inequalities. According to the WFP, the countries with the highest rates of gender inequality also have the highest rates of hunger.
As the Deseret News Allison Pond reported earlier this year from India, countries that invest in women, by providing equal education opportunities for example, are more likely to be stable, democratic and wealthy.
A growing body of research is showing that empowering women is among the most effective ways to fight global poverty and extremism. As a result, more money and more programs are serving women and girls throughout the developing world.
Those programs vary from the Krishna Kumar Charitable Foundation, which Pond wrote about in July, to the Maya Relief Foundation, a California-based charity that brings highly efficient stoves to Guatemala, cutting down on the time women have to spend gathering firewood, to the Apparent Project in Haiti, which helps moms earn a living by turning trash into jewelry.
To learn more about the links between gender inequality and global poverty, take this quiz: http://www.wfp.org/10reasons
As the World Food Program recently noted, in much of the world women make up the majority of farmworkers and are the ones responsible for doing everything from waking up before dawn to fetch water to cooking meals to tending and harvesting crops.
Theres also a strong correlation between hunger and gender inequalities. According to the WFP, the countries with the highest rates of gender inequality also have the highest rates of hunger.
As the Deseret News Allison Pond reported earlier this year from India, countries that invest in women, by providing equal education opportunities for example, are more likely to be stable, democratic and wealthy.
A growing body of research is showing that empowering women is among the most effective ways to fight global poverty and extremism. As a result, more money and more programs are serving women and girls throughout the developing world.
Those programs vary from the Krishna Kumar Charitable Foundation, which Pond wrote about in July, to the Maya Relief Foundation, a California-based charity that brings highly efficient stoves to Guatemala, cutting down on the time women have to spend gathering firewood, to the Apparent Project in Haiti, which helps moms earn a living by turning trash into jewelry.
To learn more about the links between gender inequality and global poverty, take this quiz: http://www.wfp.org/10reasons
