Women's Philanthropy--Women's Issues

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Palestinian Security Forces Target Journalists

April 8, 2011 Follow us on

Palestinian Forces Target Journalists Sharp Rise in Attacks Against Journalists in West Bank, Gaza Last year, the Palestinian Authority detained Muhannad Salahat, a freelance journalist and filmmaker, for 14 days, interrogating him and subjecting him to solitary confinement for days on end. “They were concerned because I have worked with Al Jazeera, which had been doing shows about Palestinian Authority corruption,” said Salahat. He was never charged with a crime. A new Human Rights Watch report documents how Palestinian security forces in both the West Bank and Gaza have arbitrarily detained, beaten, and tortured journalists. They have also confiscated equipment, like cameras, and barred journalists from crossing their borders. The situation is getting worse, as security officers are rarely held accountable for harassing or assaulting journalists. In 2010, physical attacks and other violations against journalists by security personnel in Gaza and the West Bank leapt 45 percent compared with a year earlier, according to the Center for Development and Media Freedoms, a Palestinian rights group. Only last month, Hamas security services targeted journalists in Gaza who covered demonstrations protesting the political split between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. In one case, about 15 security officers raided Reuters’ Gaza office, smashed computers and beat journalists, threatening to throw one reporter out a window. Read more » Photo: © 2007 Reuters Torture Allegations in Mexico Several victims interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that Julian Leyzaola, the new Ciudad Juarez police chief, had arbitrarily detained them and taken them to a military base in 2009 and 2010. There, they were beaten, given electric shocks, and threatened until they confessed to crimes despite their professed innocence. Leyzaola allegedly committed these abuses when serving as Tijuana’s police chief. Baja California’s state human rights commission found that, during that time, Leyzaola oversaw the detention, torture, and planting of false evidence on five civilians. One victim told the commission Leyzaola had personally asphyxiated him with a plastic bag while punching him repeatedly. A week ago, witnesses saw Ciudad Juarez police stop a car and detain its four passengers. The men, all in their 20s, have been missing ever since. Leyzaola has pledged to find out what happened to these “disappeared.” But the unresolved allegations against him raise serious questions about his suitability to investigate the case effectively. Federal authorities should take over the investigation into the disappearances and ensure that credible allegations of torture against Leyzaola are investigated. Additionally, the promotion of Leyzaola while such serious allegations are pending sends the wrong message to security forces: that violating human rights is the mark of a good officer.   Read about the men who disappeared » Photo: © 2011 Reuters Most Popular Headlines Côte d’Ivoire: West African Immigrants Massacred   Ivorian militias and Liberian mercenaries loyal to Laurent Gbagbo killed at least 37 West African immigrants in a village near the border with Liberia. Witnesses in Côte d'Ivoire told Human Rights Watch that armed men, some in uniform and others in civilian clothes, massacred the villagers, presumed to be Ouattara supporters, possibly in retaliation for the capture of nearby areas by pro-Ouattara forces. Saudi Arabia: Let Women Vote, Run for Office  The government of Saudi Arabia cannot expect Saudi women to believe that a lack of preparation is behind the denial of their rights to political participation. This was a preposterous excuse in 2005, and even more so now. This crude sex discrimination is an insult to millions of Saudi women. Vietnam: Release Prominent Legal Activist  Cu Huy Ha Vu is being tried for his political bravery in peacefully challenging abuses of power, defending victims of land confiscation, and protecting the environment. The government makes a mockery of its international human rights obligations when it persecutes activists like Dr. Vu who try to use the legal system to demand official accountability and rule of law. Editor's Picks Gaza: the Stain Remains on Israel's War Record by Kenneth Roth The Guardian   The Netanyahu government is doing everything it can to interpret a recent Washington Post op-ed article by Justice Richard Goldstone as vindication of Israel's conduct in the 2008-09 Gaza conflict. It is nothing of the sort. Israel's reluctance to confront that reality finds a parallel in its refusal to date to conduct credible investigations into the serious violations of the laws of war that it committed in Gaza. Libya: Allow Eman al-‘Obeidy to Leave Tripoli  Libyan authorities have further victimized Eman al-‘Obeidy, the woman who alleged that she was raped by Muammar Gaddafi's security forces, by refusing to let her leave Tripoli. They should ensure that she can leave the city at once to receive supportive medical and psychological care, following the trauma she experienced. With a Migrant Crisis Looming, the EU Should Learn from its Past Mistakes by Simone Troller New Europe   I was not prepared to document torture and severe abuses when I started researching the human rights situation for migrants in Europe. After all, I was working on Western Europe, the developed world with a rule of law, independent judiciaries, functioning social services, and oversight bodies. Côte d’Ivoire   Côte d’Ivoire: Ouattara Should Act to Control Troops Photos   Libya’s Missing: At least 370 Libyans have been reported missing in eastern Libya. Photos   Abandoned Weapons in Libya: Eastern Libya is littered with unexploded munitions. Publications World Report 2011 Purchase a bound copy of the edition Download PDF   No News is Good News Abuses against Journalists by Palestinian Security Forces

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What's New A Significant Increase in Sex Trafficking in Minnesota?

What's New.

A Significant Increase in Sex Trafficking in Minnesota?

The Advocates' Staff Attorney Beatriz Menanteau participated in a panel discussion on sex trafficking in Minnesota hosted by the Sexual Violence Prevention Program on November 5. Along with other panelists, Ms. Menanteau described the issue and the prevention work that is being done. Nearly 100 people participated from throughout the state.

The panel presentation discussed:

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Acumen Fund | A New Solution to Poverty that Makes a Lasting Difference

Acumen Fund | A New Solution to Poverty that Makes a Lasting Difference.

Ladder to the Top: Shattering the Glass Ceiling

 

The United States trails behind the rest of the world, ranking 84th in the number of women in our national legislature.

Its no secret: Despite our progress, women are vastly under-represented in politics and in the highest levels of management in nearly every professional sector: business, law, media, you name it. We must stand together to empower women in these diverse fields, and give them a leg up on the ladder to success. Take a night to invest in clear-cut solutions that will make a difference for women.

Save the Date...

Ladder to the Top: Shattering the Glass Ceiling
Thursday, September 23, 2010

Give women a ladder to the top.
It's time to shatter that glass ceiling!

 

Ladder to the Top is a full evening of programming, starting with an inspiring reception at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and ending with intimate dinners across our nation's capital. Together we will draw attention to the crisis of women's under-representation in leadership.

First, raise your glasses to women's accomplishments on the Hill and beyond at our Hail to the Chiefs Reception.

Held from 6:00-7:30pm, this tradition shines the spotlight on the Class of 2010 women Chiefs of Staff who support our leading members of Congress.

At the reception, we will honor Senator Olympia Snowe, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz for their distinguished leadership for women.

A new twist on WCF's recently premiered Voices from the Ladder performance piece will be debuted.

Then, at 7:30pm, proceed to the Dinner Party of Your Choice in extraordinary women-owned DC restaurants. Join WCF-Endorsed Candidates, Chiefs of Staff, and talented women and men from the fields of politics, law, banking, labor, media, and more to discuss how we can solve this crisis of leadership.

Mark your calendars for September 23, for a sparkling evening with a serious task at hand: empowering women in every aspect of leadership. Tell your friends, tell your colleagues, tell every woman you know: On September 23, we stand together to say we need more women in leadership - now.  

Warm Regards,



Siobhan "Sam" Bennett, President/CEO
Women's Campaign Forum

 

 P.S. Also mark your calendar for March 14, 2011 for our Parties of Your Choice Gala at Christie's Auction House in New York City. 

WOMEN FOR WOMEN INTERNATIONAL

SOURCE:  http://www.womenforwomen.org/

 

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Field Report: Sudan

Zainab Salbi visits the program in Southern Sudan to share first hand the state of women in Sudan and meets with our new program participants.
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2010 Sudan Elections

The first Country Director for Sudan and DR Congo, Judithe Registre, notes that regardless of Sudan election outcomes, we must continue investing in women. Read the Article.

The Next Green Frontier.

Zainab Salbi states that future agricultural policies need to incorporate the 70% of the world's farmers who are women.

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JACQUELINE NOVOGRATZ -- Philanthropy's Transformer

SOURCE:  http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-03-09/philanthropys-transformer/full/

by Liz Goodwin

Liz Goodwin is an assistant editor at The Daily Beast. She has written for the New York Sun, GothamSchools, the Tico Times, and Fodor's Travel Guides.

Jacqueline Novogratz, who will speak at The Daily Beast's Women in the World Summit this weekend, is all business in her approach to attacking the gap between rich and poor. She talks about her adventures in Africa and writing her best seller.

Jacqueline Novogratz, founder of a nonprofit venture capital fund that serves the developing world and best-selling author of The Blue Sweater, is a former banker who is all business about closing the widening gap between the rich and the poor in developing countries. She became a globalist early on in her life, a moment that is crystallized in the incredible anecdote that begins her book. While jogging in Kigali, Rwanda, Novogratz spotted her castoff blue sweater, given to her by her Uncle Ed when she was a kid, on a little boy. She had tossed the beloved sweater in the Goodwill bin in Virginia a decade earlier, after a classmate teased her about it. She ran up to the little boy and tried to explain that he was wearing her old sweater. She turned down the collar and saw her name written on the tag. The lesson she learned was simple, but became a mantra for her: "Our actions—and inaction—touch people we may never know and never meet across the globe," she wrote.

"I think I still have a great sense of adventure and trust and am surprisingly idealistic given all the horrible things I've seen since I was 25," she says.

Novogratz stole moments to write her book late at night while keeping her her nonprofit Acumen Fund running during the day. In it, she recalls her time in Rwanda building a microfinance institution, attending Stanford Graduate School of Business, returning to the country after the genocide to try to make sense of the crimes, and building her new philanthropy. "It turns out it was all about, do you really believe in an interconnected world, and what kind of systems do you create for that world. And it all went back to that blue sweater," she says.

Novogratz, who is participating in The Daily Beast's Women in the World summit this week, has transformed the way people think and talk about philanthropy with her idea of "patient capital," a way of investing in businesses in developing countries at below-market returns and for longer periods of time. Donors are called investors, and they expect a return on their capital measured in social change. Aided by a lot of management support, the businesses are expected to scale up to serve at least a million customers with basic services. One of the many topics that gets Novogratz excited is empowering the poor in developing countries by treating them as customers with choice. Even people who earn a dollar a day want choices on how to spend that money, and building local businesses to create that choice also creates jobs for low-income people, which empowers them to have more choice as consumers.

Some of Acumen's success stories: an entrepreneur who started a bed net factory that employs 7,000 people, mostly women; a chain of hospitals that delivers babies in India for slightly higher prices than the government hospitals but under much better conditions; and a plant in India that provides clean water to a quarter of a million rural poor people. The fund has invested $40 million so far, and hopes to reach $250 million in the next seven to eight years.

• Tina Brown—Women in the World: Stories and Solutions
Long before Novogratz founded Acumen in 2001 and shook up the philanthropy world, she was a just-out-of-college banker at Chase Manhattan. At her job, she helped write off loans for the elite in developing countries, and wondered about the nations' middle class and poor, and why they couldn't get credit. She quit and moved to Africa to work at The African Development Bank. At her first job in Cote d'Ivoire, she was warned that her resentful co-workers might try to poison her, and she did become mysteriously, wretchedly ill for a week, eventually moving home to recover from the disastrous work experience. Then it was on to Rwanda, where she helped found a microfinance institution that serves women. Novogratz worked with 20 unwed mothers, called prostitutes by their neighbors, to make a bakery profitable. The women quickly went from earning 50 cents a day to up to $3.

"The reason why they were called prostitutes is the landlord would sleep with them," Novogratz says. "'You can't pay? You give me sex.' And suddenly for the first time, the women could be like, ‘No here's the money, no.' And I saw the transformation that was all about in some ways the ability to say no." She saw that one or two extra dollars a day made the difference between being powerless, having no choice, and being able to make your own decision.

Novogratz left Rwanda before the genocide in 1994, but returned in 1997 to try to make sense of how the massacre could have happened. One of the women who helped found the microfinance institution with her was in jail for encouraging the genocide as the leader of Parliament. Another of her former co-workers had lost much of her family in the mass killings. The bakery she had founded was now occupied by a squatter who had never heard of the structure's former incarnation. No one was left unscathed. But though Novogratz has seen horrible things in her quest to reach the world's poorest, she says she has not lost the idealism she had as a 25-year-old determined to save the world.

"I think I still have a great sense of adventure and trust, and am surprisingly idealistic given all the horrible things I've seen since I was 25," she says. "I think how I have changed is that I have a much deeper understanding of the dark forces in the world, of power."

Although Novogratz got her start on Wall Street, she has occasionally had trouble convincing financial titans of the viability of her particular mission. She says she once got into an argument with someone who worked at a hedge fund about subprime mortgage loans. He said that as long as no more than 90 percent of people default, the system works. Novogratz was shocked, since for Acumen Fund to succeed, it's vitally important that every single person pays back. "What we're saying is, in an interconnected world we have no choice but to think of ourselves as one tribe. And if we think of ourselves as one tribe, there is a place in it for this kind of patient capital that is really used for each others' success since we're vested in each others' success."

Novogratz is not embarrassed to shine a light on the world's problems, and in that way shares something in common with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who is a big fan of Novogratz and worked to bring attention to the genocide in Darfur through his writing.

"I adore Nick Kristof," she says. "Once he said to me, ‘I really like you because you're not anti-sweatshop.' I said, ‘Nick! What a terrible thing to say!'" She laughs. "I think both Nick and I have seen enough of the really awful in the world to realize that the perfect is really the enemy of the good."

In her book, Novogratz conveys the frustrations of trying to transform inefficient charities from within, and of the often Sisyphean nature of making any progress. She skewers the good intentions of unwieldy projects because they are not enough: Results are what matters. She also grapples with the complexities of helping the poor from the place of privilege, and stresses that any change must come from the people themselves.

Novogratz has the simultaneous intensity and calm of someone who is doing what she believes in. "When I see people that are my age and reaching 50, the ones that are really sparkly and full of joy are the ones that are committed to something bigger than themselves," she says.

Liz Goodwin is an assistant editor at The Daily Beast. She has written for the New York Sun, GothamSchools, the Tico Times, and Fodor's Travel Guides.

Women and leadership: Learning from the social sector

SOURCE:  https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Women_and_leadership_Learning_from_the_social_sector_2336

Jacqueline Novogratz, CEO of Acumen Fund, shares lessons in leadership from her work in venture philanthropy.

MARCH 2009

As a venture philanthropist, Acumen Fund’s Jacqueline Novogratz leads entrepreneurial projects across the globe—many of which put women at the helm of emerging local businesses. In this video interview, she discusses her experience developing other women leaders, the way they have shaped her own approach to leadership, and the different leadership cultures she sees at play in the public and private sectors.

This interview was conducted by Bill Javetski, an editor with the McKinsey Quarterly, in February 2009. It was recorded in the New York office of Acumen Fund.

Video: Women and leadership—Learning from the social sector

Jacqueline Novogratz shares lessons in leadership from her work in venture philanthropy.

The Quarterly: One of the secrets of your activity in building entrepreneurialism is focusing on women as workers. Can you talk about that?

Jacqueline Novogratz: I had been in Rwanda where I worked with a small group of women to start the first microfinance organization in the country and, simultaneously, a bakery with 20 unwed mothers. My own background has taught me a lot about the power of investing in women, because you do end up feeding a family and not just an individual.

I worry actually that the international-development community may, in focusing so much on the women, end up demoralizing and devaluing men even further. I don’t want to be glib about just investing in girls. We have to build healthy societies and we have to recognize that boys and girls develop differently and [we have to] find ways really to include, to value, to have high expectations, and to provide opportunity.

And so there’s this big, philosophical question around how do you hire, how do you encourage different behavior. Can you—in the dormitories—bring in other activities to bring in reproductive health, to help with microfinance and savings? There’s a really interesting platform here.

The Quarterly: Your story of the bakery in Rwanda was in large part a story about developing the women that you worked with there. What did you learn about leadership from their experience of developing into owners and operators of that business?

Jacqueline Novogratz: I went in as a leader with pure audaciousness. I didn’t have as much humility in that I just assumed—I’m the eldest of seven, I can do the Bad News Bears thing really well, I’m just going to cheer them on—without having the humility of really understanding what their starting place was.

After many mishaps, including having them steal from me and having them not really know how to sell—I mean they would look down the whole time and have to explain to me that they were considered prostitutes by many; for them to go and look somebody directly in the eye and shake their hands was not exactly a Rwandan-woman kind of thing—so I had to learn to have the humility myself to really listen to their perspectives, and yet not stop there; to have the audaciousness to say, “It’s a good starting point, but we want to get you to this other place.”

The real lesson for me was how that dignity is so much more important to the human spirit than wealth. And that what these women, as all of us, needed was to know that we could cover basic needs, but to have the power of being able to say no to things that we didn’t want, that we didn’t want to do. And so leadership as a way of inspiring, listening, and letting people, you know, grow themselves in their own way.

And it was a small experience in some ways, and yet one that I think about all the time that taught me so much about listening and dignity—and laughter as a really, really key component. The more stressed I got, the less anything worked; and the more we could laugh, the more we got done. And so that was probably another really big lesson.

I’m a big optimist. I really believe in setting impossible goals and then making them possible. And I really love people—and I think people feel that from me. So it’s probably that sometimes very confusing mix of optimism, idealism, but also high expectations, lots of discipline, and pragmatism.

Part of the journey that those of us who are privileged, which is pretty much everyone in this country, has to make is not being embarrassed by privilege or guilty for privilege or confused by privilege, but to start from that place of recognizing that your responsibility is to use that privilege in the best way you can to serve the world. And there are lots of ways of serving the world.

The Quarterly: Many women work in social sector, fewer in finance. Let’s say actually fewer lead in finance. You’ve succeeded in both. Any thoughts on the skill set, and why one isn’t more prevalent in the other area?

Jacqueline Novogratz: I think that girls really are relational, and what I love about finance—and what I love about accounting even, which is kind of embarrassing to admit—is it’s another form of storytelling. And if you could teach young people to find the stories in the combination of the balance sheet and the income statement, I think we would see a lot more girls taking leadership in finding that comfort.

I just did a panel for women on Wall Street, and what they spoke about was how rigid our financial institutions continue to be around integrating women into the workforce—particularly after they’ve had children—and that the rules are so driven by a different kind of discipline that the social sector has taken upon itself to reinvent. And that may be more to the point as to why we don’t see as many leaders—women leaders—in finance. It’s a much older club. It’s been driven by a stricter set of rules and expectations.

I have four brothers who all work on Wall Street, and I remember when one of my brothers’ wife had a child. And I said, “Well, is there, you know, paternity leave?” And he said, “Oh, yeah. We have the most liberal paternity leave on Wall Street—but I would never take it, because if I did, everybody would think I was, you know, wimpy.” And I think there’s great truth to that. So there’s a cultural piece that needs to be looked at. Whereas in the social sector, as a woman leader, you have the opportunity to invent the culture in which you want to work and thrive.

Young people often will come to me and say, “I really want to do this, but first I feel like I need to do A, B, C, D, and E.” In some ways I think we’ve put young people, especially, on a track where they have these expectations that they’re going to do one thing after another because that’s what everybody else does—and then they will get this freedom. And I think there are lots of different paths and that the path isn’t always clear, but you just should start; that work will teach you; and that I can’t imagine a more joyful way of living than a life when where you are serving in the spirit as equally of adventure as you are of change.