Empowering Girls & Women

Women and girls are the one who suffer from the burden of extreme poverty in our rich world! In our non-governmental organization, which I have created (but still waiting for the Ministry of Interior approval in order to be officially registered), we are committed to end poverty by attacking its roots. 

We will build more schools and I will fight for the rights of girls to be educated. I will fight for laws that will promote universal basic education for girls. I would like to set up a women saving groups that will pool resources to finance individual small businesses. 

I will try to find the necessary funding which will be needed to help girls and women to succeed in schools and to read and write in order to be free in their society. With education, women can become the catalysts for change. I would like to instill in all the girls in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia the significance of advanced education. 

I would like to help women to have access to better health systems and to help them combat infectious diseases in order to take care of their own children and themselves. I will try to install more water pumps in villages where girls have to walk miles away to fetch water instead of going to school.

In our NGO, we will address gender inequities. Most of the women are poor, they suffer discrimination, and they are vulnerable. I am also studying a micro-credit finance schemes that will empower our women and make them less susceptible to the domination of men in their villages. An efficient micro-credit program targeted specifically to poor women in order to empower them financially and psychologically.

I would like to help eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education in Benin, Niger, and Algeria. If more women become literate, they will have more voice in decision-making and they will have better jobs. If women are educated, they will be empowered financially and socially. Therefore, their self esteem will be tremendously improved. Un-empowered women are more vulerable to health problems such as HIV/Aids. Indeed, by giving women more access to funds and social networks will help them be financially independent. 

Women produce 80 percent of the planet's food but they receive less than 10 percent of agriculture help and they own about 1 percent of the world's land. C'est une abberation, n'est ce pas!

Beninese and Nigériennes women have to trek miles daily to fetch water, accompanied by a girl child, amidst the other normal daily chores. Girls stay at home to watch younger siblings or maintain the house. And most of the families do not invest in a girl's education because one day she will marry and she will go into another family.

I will select areas where girls do no go to schools or where the government is dysfunctional. First, I will assess whether the people are ready to help or no and then I will try to mobilize women to be active in changing their communities. 

We can fight poverty by empowering girls & women. I have decided to establish this non governmental organization to highlight women's issues and to help them take ownership of their own identity.

 Education plays an important role in the empowerment of girls and women. Education plays such an important role in enabling girls to access and secure their rights.

Benin: Making School Safe for Girls

"In the West African country of Benin, harassment of girls in school has been commonplace. Approximately half of girls in Benin enroll in school and many end up dropping out because of the hostile environment created by continual pressure for sexual favors from teachers or fellow students. Girls who report sexual harassment often are accused of leading a teacher on and may be forced to drop out of school by parents as a result."

Wible (2004) found that 43 percent of primary and 80% of secondary students in Benin dropped out of school because of sexual abuse.

"In Benin, a small nation on the west coast of Africa, many girls opt out of school because they are sexually harassed by teachers," Neylon said. With no punishment for the men, some girls find it easier to drop out of school. About 50 percent of girls enroll in primary school and a majority of them drop out by secondary school, according to UNICEF. Only 25 percent of Benin women age 15 and older are literate. The Republic of Benin's National Assembly voted July 17 to pass the country's first comprehensive sexual harassment legislation aimed at protecting girls and women in schools, workplaces and in homes, according to the Women's Rights Initiative, a program of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Sexual violence to girls and women in schools is happening all around the world! Very few female teachers work in schools. Consequently, girls are likely to be sexually exploited by their male teachers. 

A study by Rossetti (2001, cited in Davies), found that 67 percent of students in Botswana schools had been subjected to sexual harassment by teachers. Twenty percent of these students were propositioned by their teacher for sex. In Ghana, 13.5 percent of girls in both primary and secondary schools were victims of sexual abuse at school (Brown, 2002). Amnesty International reported that 50 percent of Malawi girls experienced unwanted sexual touching by their teachers or male classmates. According to the World Bank, 8% of school girls from Cameroon were sexually abused by their teachers. A student in Uganda reported that one of her male teachers required that she wash his feet, take water to the bathroom, and when he appeared naked asked her to "help him as a man" (Action Aid).

Teachers need to be trained in sexual harassment, gender equality, and discipline procedures that are respectful of the dignity of women and men. Students must learn about sexual violence, female equality, good communication skills, boundaries and respect of gender differences. 

The schools do not operate in a vacuum! It is a reflection of society's mores and values. Each community should create their own solutions to the problem of gender violence. We have to use the mass media programs on radio, television, town posters, and the Internet. We must listen to students because they have some of the best problem solving capabilities about this issue. A holistic approach, integrating agencies, NGOs, governments, and individuals will give us the chance to get rid of sexual harassment.

We must STOP violence in schools! It is an overwhelming task which will require from us to change the cultural belief systems about patriarchy, masculine hegemony, and girls and women's values in our society.

Al Dabour series and the Position of Women

The director of Al Dabour series is Tamer Ishaq. Most of the Middle East televisions have been broadcasting his TV series during the fasting month called Ramadan.

Al Dabour, one of the most popular television series in the Arab world,  provide us with an array of ceremonies, rituals, and folk practices which re-construct the daily routine of Arabic women's lives. 

Tamer Ishaq exposes anxieties related to the proof of virginity, women's mobility and transgression of home boundaries, restriction on speech and the idolization of silence as a feminine virtue, the threat of divorce or polygamy which "yokes women's daily lives into SUBMISSION", and the enforcement of this submissiveness through rigorous religious application.

Al Dabour TV series is a frank expression of mysoginy and it conveys the negative message that women are a source of worry because they are a potential threat to the honor of EL HARA (the neighbourhood)! The women are shown as an economic burden to be shouldered by the males of the family as long as these women live.  

Women, poor women, they lacked economic power, and most of them still do, most of us still do! Women are shown passive and completely insignificant in the scale of the society, and the universe at large. All these women in the TV series are trapped in social and economic conditions which they do not even question. And if they do, they will be murdered or accused of madness.

The women in Al Dabour TV series live in a patriarchal society under patriarchal control, completely excluded from the society, with covered faces and hidden bodies.

Well, thank you to Tamer Ishaq to remind us today that many women do still live like the women in the TV series called Al Dabour!

I would like women to start making television series which will be broadcasted during Ramadan and they will focus our attention on the important role that women have in our societies! Women's series which will serve to confront and counter the picture of the passive chador clad women! 

Mr. Tamer Ishaq, your TV series convey stereotypes of Muslim women: doe-eyed, veiled, and submissive, exotically silent, inhabitants of harem! Well, I am glad that women in Tunisia and women in Egypt's Tahrir square were at the front and centre of organising and leading protests! Women were a leading force behind the revolution. They are hotheaded young women with megaphones and blogs to cry their ideas out to society.

We are tired, Mr. Tamer Ishaq, of these TV series which convey images of women who have no voices in their homes, no voices in their neighbourhood, no voices in their society, and where they are only considered as good cook or sexual being! 

Women's sexuality was linked to the honor of the men and the family, while men's sexuality was not linked to their honor! Therefore, women are restricted to their homes  and if they went out, they were responsible of the preservation of their purity. 

Badran, Margot. Feminism, Islam and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt.. Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Badran, Margot and Miriam Cooke. Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing. Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Bildungsromane and Women Writers

Thomas Mann describes the conduct of the Bildungsroman with these words: "The inwardness, the culture ('Bildung') of a German implies introspection; an individualistic cultural conscience; consideration for the careful tending, the shaping, deepening and perfection of one's own personality or, in religious terms, for the salvation and justification of one's own life."

Well, there is a correlation between the Bildungsromane  of the 18th century German writers and the African woman Bindungsromane in which the heroine try to free herself from a restrictive patriarchal society which does not take into consideration the personal desires, ambitions and the individual freedom of women. 

While the European version of the Bildungsromane does not deal ethnic problem, the African and Middle East Bildungromane deal with ethnic problem, power, gender, and patriarchy. 

Emecheta's Second Class Citizen, and In The Ditch, Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, and Beyala's Le Petit Prince de Belleville and Maman a un amant "recount the storie of women who, to varying degrees and by different means, find qualified escape and expand toward individuation." The three African women writers the limited place that women have in our patriarchal society.

Middle East and Arab women writers have described in their literature the wish to escape the bonds of the enclosed home and the wish to enter the public sphere. Women's associations started in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, Jordan, North Africa, Sudan, and Arabian Peninsula. Arab women novelists write about war, frustration, the erosion of all preconceptions, exile and marginalization. 

 Birds of September offers the first example of Arab female Bildungsroman. Emily Abi Rashed NasrallahBirds of September is set in a small Lebanese village in which the privates lives of a number of male and female characters are influenced by "fossilized social traditions and deeply entrenched patriarchal conventions and religious differences." The young women cannot find refuge in migration abroad so they are obliged to live the limited intellectual and social life of the village. Muna is the central female character and she is ambitious, enthusiastic, and a great positive spirit. Muna is sensitive to the sufferings of other female characters caused mainly by partriarchy and traditional social customs. Birds of September (Touyour Ayloul)  is the Bildungsroman of Muna, whose sustained and powerful passion for self-realization and exercising individual freedom runs through the novel. The village people witness their loved ones (sons and husbands) depart from their lands, just as the birds in the month of September, but Muna stays in the village and she is more articulate in voicing her rejection of oppressive conventions of a patriarchal society. 

Nasrallah writes about oppressive experiences that a number of female fictional characters experience in a restrictive patriarchal society. A men's society where women are denied personal freedom and in which they cannot exercise their individual freedom. 

Revolution in the World and Women

Women in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, and Algeria must fight for their human rights and the revolution has yet to translate into greater equity in employment and in political and social positions.

In these patriarchal societies, religion or tradition are used as a barrier for equal rights. We cannot change the past but we can change the future. The equality that women have found during the revolution must live on!

The pro-democracy activists must not forget to promote and protect women's human rights. I urge women to keep fighting for more rights. We must be inspired by all these popular uprisings calling for freedom and change!

Women lag far behing men in nearly any mesure of equality. When women are educated, you can bet that men are too! It is not acceptable to still see women in the twenty first century who are illiterate, poor and powerless.

In this new century, we hope to raise the standard of living for non-western women to levels now enjoyed by European and American!

Polygamy

In the Middle East and North Africa, most of the people engage in monogamous marriages.

It is true that the Islamic Sharia law allows men to marry up to four wives but most of the people do not follow this law. In Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, and many other countries men resist polygamy.

Indeed polygamy goes against the diginity of all women. I think that all these countries cited above must outlaw polygamy and women must mount a drive to end polygamy!

We must create a "bill of women's right" that would allow these women to marry through exclusively monogamous marriages. The women must be able to have a religious marriage and a civil marriage!

Polygamy is an outdated religious practice therefore we must fight in order to abolish this practice. It is true that Christian and Islamic fundamentalists long allowed their citizens to have multiple wives.

I have noticed that in Benin, Nigeria, and Sudan, men have numerous offspring without having to assume the responsibility of raising them. Polygamy marriages just augment loneliness and jealousy among the wives and the children.

Mormons engaged in polygamy because early church leaders encouraged the practice. However, many citizens viewed polygamy with distrust and anti-Mormon sentiment grew, encouraging many Mormon families to leave New York.

For example, in many Native American cultures, polygamy was often permitted after wars or plagues, when populations shrank and sex ratios were thrown out of balance. In such situations, the practice provided widowed females with companionship and ensured that birth rates would not drop to dangerously low levels.

Altman, Irwin and Joseph Ginat, eds. Polygamous Families in Contemporary Society. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Van Wagoner, Richard. Mormon Polygamy, a History. Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books, 1992

"Key Events in the History of Polygamy (sidebar)." Issues & Controversies On File: n. pag. Issues & Controversies. Facts On File News Services, 19 Jan. 2001. Web. 1 Mar. 2011. .