Power & Progress: How Women Are Redefining Global Development
Rachel Lindley, Co-CEO Five Talents UK
As we celebrated International Women's Day last week, I was conscious of a deep irony. Despite the ever increasing challenges for so many around the world - from climate change and conflict, to food shortages and health crises - all we've heard over the last few weeks is men, both at home and abroad, cutting billions of dollars of life saving aid. And yet the women I meet in Five Talents savings group programmes, in rural, and often disadvantaged communities - in countries like Malawi, Uganda and DR Congo - are using their skills, entrepreneurship, solidarity and determination to save $1 a week - they are doing it themselves. Through their community savings groups, they are starting and growing businesses, they are feeding their families and they are able to send their daughters to school.
Despite the disillusionment and disappointment emanating from Washington and Whitehall, it is these women coming together to shape their own future who give me hope. So, as we deplore the stark impacts of the high level decisions of recent weeks, it is also important that we recognise there is power and potential in communities; and it is centred in women who are catalysing change.
Community savings groups are rooted in the power of what people already have, whether that is their group savings which can be leveraged as loans and yield dividends, their land, business assets, natural resources or group relationships. By pooling these and building together, we've seen both economic growth and lasting social transformation.
For example, in the Five Talents programme in Burundi, two thirds of women were able to buy their own land and a third of women built businesses employing 2 or more people, spreading that economic growth further. More than 90% reported now sending their children to school, including girls - that intergenerational change is powerful. More than half of all women in the programme went on to take up community leadership positions too, meaning they can advocate against early child marriage or gender based violence. So from employment to education, from improved health to social change, the ripple effect of this simple community savings groups model is clear. And we know these groups are sustainable too - 84% are still operating over a decade after all programme support has ended. Savings groups work so well precisely because they leverage local networks and resources, and are locally owned and led and there for the long-term.
But these opportunities, and this empowerment of communities, is built on partnership - and we too have a role to play. It's clear we are in an era where government funding for global development is diminishing, and yet we also know relatively small investments to support the formation of community savings groups have catalytic, long-term positive effects. If we accept there is a practical case for investing in global development - in terms of increasing security, boosting global economic growth and reducing the impacts of climate change, conflict or pandemics - as well as a moral case, then we are going to need a new approach, one that leverages the power of what we all have.
As we look to entrepreneurial women in central and eastern Africa to lead the way in their communities, perhaps the same is required closer to home. Globally, it is estimated that through wealth transfer, women will inherit 70% of a projected $41 trillion over the next 40 years - that's a huge opportunity for women philanthropists to lead on global development, to partner with the women who are saving $1 a week to build a better future for themselves and their families.
We can all play a part in this; just as women coming together in community savings groups are resisting narratives of powerlessness and despair, we can come together to invest in projects like these. By doing so, despite the gloomy outlook we read daily in the news, we will discover hope and opportunity, power and progress in the decades ahead.