Search Results

This chapter discusses the World Bank, the UN Population Fund, and UN Women. The World Bank does consider rights issues under, for example, its work on political decentralization and anticorruption. However, it is particularly sensitive to politicizing its mission and prefers to be quiet about this work. UNFPA and UN Women are more open about their rights policies. Both are closely involved with women’s rights. UNFPA also works on rights issues around sex selection and forced sterilization, as well as safe motherhood. The conclusion is that smaller agencies, with more specific mandates, can be more open about their rights policies than larger and more visible ones.

The global impact of four women Ministers of Development on empowering women and eradicating their poverty was varied, multidimensional, and substantial but difficult to measure with any degree of accuracy. Their very existence and actions as a group had an important demonstration effect in empowering women in developing countries. Though they did not launch a joint ‘gender’ initiative as such, they each took many initiatives in their national development policies to raise the profile of gender issues, increase women’s empowerment, and reduce their poverty. They also worked together to support international undertakings aimed at improving women’s access to education and health care, and empowering them on issues of family planning. More broadly they supported initiatives on women’s rights and strengthening their status in society. This chapter starts with a short review of their efforts to empower women before they became ministers. It then presents examples of their efforts as Development Ministers at the national level as well as in support of global initiatives in which one or more of them were involved.

While sitting in a window seat during a flight from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. about twenty years ago, I had an experience that changed the course of my life. On the ground below, vast numbers of trucks and mile-long strings of railroad cars were moving along extensive networks of highways and tracks that threaded out in all directions, like a circulator system in some giant organism. Products from factories and farms were flowing through these arteries toward distant cities and coastal ports, and raw materials were flowing in the other direction to processing and manufacturing plants. In my mind’s eye, the web-like connections between electric power plants, transformers, cables, lines, phones, radios, televisions, and computers resembled the spine and branches of a central nervous system, and the centers of production, distribution, and exchange and all connections between them within the global economy. This conjured up the image of a superorganism feeding off the living system of the planet and extending its bodily organization and functions into every ecological niche. I realized, of course, that the global economic system is not an organism. It is a vast network of technological products and processes that members of our species created in an effort to enhance their material well-being. But this system does in ecological terms feed off the system of life on this planet and extend its organization into every ecological niche. After my plane landed at Dulles International Airport, I asked a simple question that required years of research to adequately answer. How did members of one species among the millions of species that have existed on this planet manage to increase their numbers and the scope and scale of their activities to the point where the capacity of the system of life on an entire planet to support their existence is being undermined? The answer is that our species, fully modern humans, evolved against all odds the capacity to acquire and use fully complex language systems.

While sitting in a window seat during a flight from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. about twenty years ago, I had an experience that changed the course of my life. On the ground below, vast numbers of trucks and mile-long strings of railroad cars were moving along extensive networks of highways and tracks that threaded out in all directions, like a circulator system in some giant organism. Products from factories and farms were flowing through these arteries toward distant cities and coastal ports, and raw materials were flowing in the other direction to processing and manufacturing plants. In my mind’s eye, the web-like connections between electric power plants, transformers, cables, lines, phones, radios, televisions, and computers resembled the spine and branches of a central nervous system, and the centers of production, distribution, and exchange and all connections between them within the global economy. This conjured up the image of a superorganism feeding off the living system of the planet and extending its bodily organization and functions into every ecological niche. I realized, of course, that the global economic system is not an organism. It is a vast network of technological products and processes that members of our species created in an effort to enhance their material well-being. But this system does in ecological terms feed off the system of life on this planet and extend its organization into every ecological niche. After my plane landed at Dulles International Airport, I asked a simple question that required years of research to adequately answer. How did members of one species among the millions of species that have existed on this planet manage to increase their numbers and the scope and scale of their activities to the point where the capacity of the system of life on an entire planet to support their existence is being undermined? The answer is that our species, fully modern humans, evolved against all odds the capacity to acquire and use fully complex language systems.