In the 19th century, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape.

Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater. “Women hold up half the sky,” in the words of a Chinese saying, yet that’s mostly an aspiration: in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos. There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism.

That’s why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution.<<

This is the war our countries should be fighting.

Great clip, Aribeth!

Sad statistics.

You would have to be a pretty thick male to ignore the huge and growing evidence that aid directed to women is one of the identifiable way of efficiently directing aid to counter the man-made problems in the world. There is also huge and growing evidence that there is plenty of male ignoring (aka ignorance) regarding this issue.

What an article! One would think that the men and boys in these countries would come to realize that all men and no women--no children at all, let alone sons. To ignore and mistreat women only keeps these countries in third world status or lower.

IMHO, it is the legacy of cruel animal world, where we are all from. We still cannot get rid from such instncts as violence, selfishness, disrespect to others, greed, ignorance, obscurantism, wilderness... I hope we finally will start to worship not invented gods but real goddesses by our side. 

Women are all the daughters, mothers, wives or sisters of men. How can they treat them this way? How can they have no love or compassion for the whole other half of humanity?

And the best half....