Half the Sky Live

By Ronda Bernstein on 03/09/2010 @ 11:00 AM

Some of you might recall my fair trade piece back in December. In it I stated that fair trade helps workers achieve a better quality of life and receive more profits that they can then reinvest into their communities for various things such as healthcare services and educational opportunities. What I didn’t mention is that, according to the Fair Trade Federation, seventy percent of all fair trade artisans are women. When women thrive, their communities thrive. On the flip side of this, "when women have their civil and human rights marginalized, societies are inherently unstable.” (Anne Applebaum, The Washington Post)

Half the Sky, written by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, takes you around the world – Africa, Asia, India – to bring to light the plight of women and girls in developing countries. It tells the sometimes horrifying stories of individuals, then shares positive tales about agents of change. “Half the Sky is full of stories of women who have gone from battered and abused wives contemplating suicide, to leaders in their community because someone loaned them a few dollars to buy a cow or plant some crops.” (Sarah Smith, My No Limits Blog: Half the Sky, 10/30/09)

At the Half the Sky Live event, held in NYC in February, then broadcast across the US and Canada at select theaters on March 4, the tales of several women were shared and songs to empower women were sung by celebrities such as India Arie, Maria Bello, Marisa Tomei and Sarah, the Duchess of York. One of the stories, which is not only part of the book, but also part of a six-part documentary that Marisa Tomei is currently producing, was that of Woineshet. As a young Ethiopian girl of 13, she was abducted by three men on her way home from school and raped by one of them. Though shunned by her community for “losing” her virginity and forced to marry her rapist, she was determined to keep this atrocious act from happening to others. Now, at age 21, she is still fighting a legal battle to bring her kidnappers and rapist to justice. At the same time, she is traveling Ethiopia, village by village, to explain to men AND women that this is not right, even if it is a cultural norm. She explains that it is not something women have to stand for and it is not something men need to do to prove their manliness.

According to Tomei, we need to “create a world in which women are not victims, a world where women are equal beings with equal rights.” Empowering girls is the movement for our time. Let us all do our part to help, because empowering women and girls is the key to changing the world.

Start by reading Half the Sky, or donating to various international aid organizations.

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