Do you have 96 minutes to spare this Sunday afternoon? Want to learn about global economics and development? Then watch this video about Marilyn Waring:
You see, only a handful of decades ago, money for aid and development used to skew towards men (well… skew more than it is today). There were a few reasons for this.
Most of the studies on aid and development focused on income and income generation. By this measure, in most poor countries, men were the income earners. So aid and development was focused on what could help men earn more money (more education, better tools to work with, etc).
But what Marilyn Waring started pushing was the idea that a focus on money and income generation ignored women. Women, she argued, were working just as hard (if not harder) than men. Women were being overlooked because what they were doing (child care, food preparation, etc) wasn’t deemed income generating.
She argued that, if you measure things based on time spent working instead of income generated, you’d find a more accurate picture of what was going on. And, guess what? Women were working harder and longer than men were. In fact, in many villages, women (unlike men) were working virtually every waking hour.
Ms. Waring used this to make the case that helping women save time would ultimately help families earn more and pull families out of poverty. For example, women would often spend more than half a day preparing meals. With proper cooking equipment that time could be more than halved. The extra time could be used to let women earn their own income.
I thought I’d share this today because it’s an important reminder that we can invest heavily in studies on and research into poverty, aid, and development and still overlook major factors. I’m no Marilyn Waring, but this is what I feel is the case with what the poor are telling me about 1-to-1 help and overhead.
Many of the aid bloggers who have commented on my previous post (where I talk about charity overhead) insist that aid recipients don’t care whether overhead is covered by donations or through separate and distinct funding. This couldn’t be further from my experience.
When local villagers learn of the approach I’m doing they love it. Not only do they love it but they also compare it to more traditional forms of giving outside of the NGO-system. I wish I got a dime every time some villager, off-camera and just barely in earshot, would be talking to another saying (in Bengali) “for the first time, donations have been spent wisely”.
At the same time, I don’t deny that all the studies on aid recipient satisfaction may have no data on attitudes towards overhead (and whether or not overhead should be collected and raised separately). What I can say, as a sociologist, is that studies can overlook things. This is especially true depending on who’s counting.
