HumanKindMedia

Concerned about our global footprint? Help educate a girl

In an unusual and inspiring conversation hosted by Swissnex last week in San Francisco, Mathis Wackernagel, founder of Global Footprint Network, was not talking about increasing food production, reducing carbon emissions, or lowering consumption. He spent most of the evening talking about co-presenter Ann Cotton's work at The Campaign for Female Education (Camfed) in Africa.

Cotton and Wackernagel came together as part of Swissnex's ongoing program for "connecting the dots" between science, higher education, art and innovation for exchange and collaboration between innovators in Switzerland, the US and other countries.

In this conversation, the two described their first meeting at the Skoll World Forum (both have received Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship). After a chance seating arrangement next to Ann, Wackernagel realized a connection between the outcomes Ann was describing and the goals he was looking at for sustainability. Since then they have been looking at ways to work together to educate leaders, countries, communities, and NGO's about this correlation.

Ann Cotton and Camfed have been HumanKind Media favorites since this interview Liz did with Ann and Camfed graduate Fiona Muchembere. Fiona, you may remember, is now a human rights lawyer, and serves as director of Camfed’s alumnae network of 8,000 African women as well as being a big supporter of those girls herself (she sponsors 22).

Wackernagel is a Swiss native and PhD in community and regional planning from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where he created the Ecological Footprint, a science-based sustainability tool that measures how much of the Earth's resources we use, how much we have and who uses what.

In 2003, he and Susan Burns co-created Global Footprint Network with a mission to work with countries and cities, companies and individuals to monitor current ecological resource balances and to plan for the future, with the ultimate goal of reducing humanity's worldwide use back down to a "one planet" footprint. Check out the link to see when we passed the "one planet" mark (meaning we exceeded the Earth's bio-capacity.) You can assess your own footprint if you haven't already, here, or for eye-opening world footprint data click here.

Global Footprint Network aims to make the Ecological Footprint as prominent a metric as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to help countries begin to plan for sustainability. By 2015, through its flagship Ten-In-Ten Campaign, they hope to have ten countries managing their ecological wealth in the same way they manage their finances. To date, the list of countries, companies, NGO's and collaborators is growing and the case stories are impressive.

Last month on their 5th anniversary, GFN released their Africa report which examines the possibilities for managing African resources to advance African goals for ending poverty and disease within a sustainable development model. In spite of the fact that individual Africans' resource consumption is extremely small - in many cases not enough to adequately provide for
themselves and their families - rising population is bringing the region close to its ecological limits, according to Global Footprint Network's report.

Using scientific standards for the footprint to measure a country's bio-capacity combined with the UN's Human Development Index as an indicator of socio-economic development, Wackernagel is an evangelist for female education as a way to ensure Africa’s growth and development within the one-planet sustainability window. He says, "For $2 billion a year, just by investing in girls, you could transform all of Africa. This is one of the best investments we could make to achieve human development goals that can persist in the face of, and even help alleviate, resource constraints."

The pair make a compelling argument for the direct impact of female education on Humanity's Ecological Footprint: Girls who receive an education and can make decisions regarding their lives have a higher likelihood of marrying their peers at an appropriate age; they have fewer and more healthy children, are more likely to positively affect the health and education of their children, and contribute to their communities. They also earn significantly higher income than their peers--15 to 20% more per year of high school education.

As an illustration of this, last year Camfed and its alumae organization, Cama, supported more than 408,000 kids in school, had amassed 2,700 partner schools, and developed 380 community health care workers. The over 8,000 alumnae of the organization are sponsoring schooling of over 25,000 African children themselves.

Among the alums are filmmakers and program managers for Camfed in their countries; there are also assemblywomen, physical therapists, doctors, nurses, human rights lawyers, and business owners. In the UN Chronicle Ann says, "For the Millennium Development Goals to become a reality rather than just a broken promise, the rights—and dreams—of rural girls and women must remain at the forefront of policy planning and strategies. The education of girls and young women—with its dividends of poverty alleviation, gender equality, HIV/AIDS reduction—is the single most effective means by which so many of the problems blocking Africa’s development can be overcome."

In March, Goldman Sachs announced their 10,000 Women initiative which includes a partnership with Camfed to provide rural girls with post high school education in business, financial management, and entrepreneurship in a "summer school" program beginning in December.

Today, in my 29-Day Giving Challenge Day 3, Round 2, I added my support of a Camfed high school student, which I can now see not only as an investment in a girl's future, but in the future of a continent and a planet, too. Not bad.

You can help a woman heal the world by donating here. You can contribute to the important work Global Footprint Network is doing around the globe here.

If you're a new reader, welcome to HumanKind. You can get free updates here. Wonder what we're up to? Click on the links on the upper right, or scroll through the topics and archives on the left. If you're a regular, thanks for your support! Let us know what HumanKind can do to keep the media you'd like to see coming your way. You can e-mail me at chris (at) humankindmedia dot com. And please do share HumanKind with your friends.

What Would Happen?

Happy 97th Annual International Women's Day. In many countries, it's a national holiday. It's not in mine, but I'm celebrating anyway. I hope you'll enjoy this short film on the possibilities:

Today a reminder about HumanKind Challenge #2: Help a woman, heal the world. See what's happening at Vital Voices the Global Fund for Women , Women for Women International or your favorite group or organization that is helping girls and women.

What would happen if 50% of the population rose up and had their vital voices heard? Would the weight of the world's challenges feel lighter?

Camfed throws me a lifeline -- and thousands more

Every so often I get completely sidelined by life: Work seems all-encompassing, sleep becomes optional, and I lose all motivation to do anything but keep my head above water and hope that if I just keep going, sooner or later I'll hit dry land.

But often I don't hit dry land -- something rescues me instead. Lately, it's almost always something related to HumanKind. It happened last Friday: I was sick with a lingering cold, I was stressed out over work, and I had a 5 p.m. phone appointment to interview a human rights lawyer for Camfed, Campaign for Female Education, an organization that helps girls go to school in rural Zimbabwe, Zambia, Ghana, and Tanzania, and expanding soon into Malawi. I didn't think I had the brain power to make intelligent conversation, but I called her anyway, hoping she'd forgive me if I asked any dumb questions.

Less than five minutes into our conversation, I was practically soaring with joy, typing as fast as I could, so excited that a person like this is out there working for good, every day. My own work headaches vanished, and by the time we got off the phone, I couldn't believe I'd ever felt anything but hopeful and energized.

16 million African orphans; Braden takes 1,600

Last fall, my book club read There Is No Me Without You, Melissa Fay Greene's story of the beginning of the AIDS pandemic in Africa, and of the ensuing orphan crisis. It had the kind of impact on me that Mountains Beyond Mountains did a few years ago. Anything I thought I knew about Africa, AIDS, and orphans was challenged by Greene's account of one woman trying to do her part in the midst of a tragedy that will leave a continent reeling for decades or more. When I read it, I experienced a sense of shame: I had misunderstood what was happening there, to my fellow humans. I also felt disbelief that so many parents could die, and so many children be left alone in our world of advanced medicine, new technology, and relative wealth.

While reading "Without You," I kept hearing Bono's words, from the video in this post: "Where you live should not determine whether you live." That's when the status of children everywhere went onto the list of HumanKind topics.

HumanKind Challenge: More fun with friends

Something we've noticed here during our interviews and our first two HumanKind Challenges is that giving draws a crowd. Sometimes all it takes is one person to say, "Hey, I want to run for women in the Congo," or, "Let's raise money for ..." and before you know it, they've got friends and partners in their giving adventures. That happened to us when we asked people to participate in HumanKind Challenge #1, donating mosquito nets. Now we've got matching happening, and fund-raising in small groups, and monthly donations starting to roll like a snowball, thanks to you, our readers, our friends.

Cari Class and Stacey Boscoe started their giving adventure with dinner. California resident Cari heard about Dining for Women from a friend in Oregon. Founded by Marsha Wallace in 2003, Dining for Women is a can't lose situation for anyone who 1) has friends, 2) has friends who like to eat dinner with other friends, and 3) has friends who want to contribute to healing the world. Dining for Women chooses a grassroots organization every month (Women for Women this time around), prepares information packets, reading lists, and often a video from the featured organization and sends it to more than 170 chapters in the United States, Europe, and Australia.

Making that one-to-one connection

Check out our interview today with Trish Tobin, chief marketing officer for Women for Women. Before Trish took that job, she went on a trip with Women for Women to Rwanda, where she met women who were participating in the program. Looking back, she calls that making "the ultimate connection." She was so surprised by how she and the women she met related to each other that she ditched her corporate job and hasn't looked back.

Now, she's using her amazing marketing skills to try to create those moments of connection with people all over the world -- those of us who can't necessarily meet a Rwandan woman in her home, but who can connect with her another way: through global media.

A surprise next door

Our premise when we started HumanKind Media was that the more people heard stories about regular people taking on some of the big-ticket suffering in the world, the more possibilities we as humans would envision for ending that suffering. Since we started, we've learned that there are gazillions of those people and stories, and while we enjoy relaying them to you, we're really having fun finding them. Not surprisingly, you don't have to go far before you trip over a story about someone who's decided to create the change they want to see in the world. Meet my neighbor, Ellen.

We're ready to hear from you

So when I was done choosing my media palette for my Google home page, I ended up with three different daily quotation offerings. On one side of my page I get lofty quotes from Lao Tzu, like "Stay at the center and let all things take their course," and on the other side, just below my weather report, I get stuff from Dave Barry, like "Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles called electrons that you cannot see with the naked eye unless you have been drinking." The other day, in the third set of quotations, I found "A tragedy, the person who does nothing because they can only do a little."

Not here at HumanKind Media. You and I are all about the opposite of that tragedy: We know that millions of people doing just a little can end up creating a giant, quiet movement to heal the world.

What do women need?

Aliaa, an artist in Egypt, has been working with women in the small fishing village of El Max for several years, helping them develop skills and strengthening their community. We wrote about Aliaa's group, Gudran, which is helping this fishing village regain its economic health and local pride, in September. Here's the story of the work Aliaa is doing, in her own words.

Looking for a chance

by Aliaa El Gready, artistic counselor, Gudran Association for Art and Development, Egypt

There are many people who work to help women, whether on economic or social issues, issues within the family, and others. In my time in the Egyptian fishing village of El Max, Alexandria, I have focused on this question: What does a woman here miss and need in her life?

What would inspire you to run 31 miles?

If you know me, you know I don't run. Sure, I can do a few minutes on the treadmill. Okay, maybe 10 minutes. So you can guess how impressed I was at Lisa Shannon's decision to help support women in eastern Congo -- who are suffering from almost a decade of violent conflict -- by putting on a pair of sneakers and pushing herself to run a 31-mile fund-raiser of her own invention.

That run became Run for Congo Women, which over the past few years has raised money to support hundreds of women through Women for Women International.

Check out our interview with the inspiring Lisa Shannon.