MARCH 17, 1999

President's report - Transforming gender issues in the mainstream

To: Members of the Global Board of Directors

From: Joan Holmes

Executive Summary

In 1998, our highest priority was to confront the fact that the subjugation, marginalization and disempowerment of women is the primary causative factor for most of the remaining hunger in our world. It was always known that women and children were the primary victims of the persistence of hunger, and now it has become unmistakably true that women are the key to the end of the persistence of hunger. As this recognition has taken hold throughout our global movement, it revealed the fact that merely doing more of the cutting edge work we are already doing is insufficient.

Last October, we announced a new four-fold commitment. We committed to implement bold, new initiatives to transform the underlying conditions that hold women back, and thus prevent humanity from achieving the end of hunger. This work moved to the mainstream – at the forefront of all our work.

Thanks to the financial strength provided by our worldwide constituency, we are in a position to aggressively launch new high-profile initiatives and continue to strengthen our Strategic Planning-in-Action work around the world consistent with this commitment.

To achieve this, we have designed a challenging year for ourselves in 1999, which will require all of us to upgrade our own leadership and management capabilities.

In this report, I’ll present an overview of:

The commitments made on October 3rd

In my remarks at the 1998 Africa Prize ceremony, I summarized the new commitment of The Hunger Project:

Ramifications of these new commitments

At the October 4th board meeting, we discussed the implications of these commitments.

Strategic actions: Since we launched SPIA in 1990, improving the health, education, nutrition and income of women has been at the forefront of our work. This work is necessary, but not sufficient to transforming the underlying centuries-old discriminatory traditions, attitudes and laws, which give rise to the problem. Clearly, additional new and focused action must be taken.

Committed Leadership: We also observed that an intrinsic aspect of SPIA is to mobilize the most influential leaders from all sectors to lead our work. Given that most of the existing leadership is male, most of our councils are dominated by men. We therefore saw the need to create new forums of leadership that bring experienced, powerful women into our movement, while at the same time re-structuring existing forums to empower women.

South Asia – the region of greatest subjugation of women

India - refocusing our strategy: Our program of Strategic Planning-in-Action (SPIA) was launched at the beginning of this decade. Much has changed in India during the 1990s, and our strategy has evolved and grown. We will use this year, 1999, to retool / refocus / revitalize our strategy for the next decade. Central to this strategy will be the empowerment of panchayats – India’s democratically elected local government councils – and to transforming the social conditions of women. This process will be the heart of our national council meeting on April 7th.

The November Jaipur meeting: Our women’s initiative was born at the August 1997 Bangalore meeting of the National Council-Hunger Project India, and was the centerpiece of the council’s November 1998 meeting in Jaipur. This meeting was also attended by a delegation of leading women from THP-Bangladesh and a large delegation of women investors.

More details of this meeting are in the attached reports. A full day of our meetings in Chennai will be devoted to the Women’s Initiative.

As a result of the Jaipur meeting:

Bangladesh - 40 points of progress: As in India and elsewhere in the world, our SPIA program in Bangladesh is undergoing a transformation. Our most experienced volunteer grassroots animators have launched a two-year program of training and leadership development to empower them as they catalyze the process of creating "hunger-free" zones. They are applying a 40-point village self-assessment protocol in these areas, which enables villagers to set their own priorities, and measure their own progress. Villages that reach a score of 90% have achieved the criteria for being "hunger-free." Sixty-four clusters of villages are currently in this program, and THP-Bangladesh intends to bring 200 more areas into this process by December of 2000.

Women’s leadership in Bangladesh: For years, our mobilization of voluntary leadership in Bangladesh has struggled to create space within that male-dominated culture for greater participation for women.

Women who participate as Hunger Project activists take a stand to speak powerfully and not fall into traditional roles where women are silent in the presence of men. Men who participate take a stand to break their own habits and listen powerfully when women speak.

Our team of women activists who attended the Jaipur meeting returned to Bangladesh to organize special workshops with women, both at leadership and grassroots levels, based on the 7-point analytic framework we utilize in the Women’s Initiative. They are now building a growing cadre of women Hunger Project volunteer and staff leaders.

Last year saw a tremendous acceleration in our overall campaign for self-reliance. The key to this campaign is our training and empowerment of hundreds of volunteer grassroots animators. By decentralizing this process of training and empowerment in 1998, we trained nearly twice as many animators as in the previous five years combined. As the numbers of animators increase, we have ensured that at least 25% of our animators are women.

Africa – Honoring the African Woman Food Farmer

Women in Africa produce 80% of Africa’s food – yet they own only 1% of the land and receive only 7% of agricultural extension services. African women are meeting the basic survival needs of an entire continent – despite the fact that they are undernourished, illiterate, unskilled, and lack voice in the decisions affecting their lives.

To launch ourselves into more powerfully addressing women’s issues in Africa, we will carry out a special initiative with the Africa Prize. This year only, instead of presenting the Africa Prize to an individual, we will put an international spotlight on all the women of Africa – the unsupported, unacknowledged rural women of Africa who do the lion’s share of the work for the sustainable end of hunger on the continent. We will call on Africa and the world community to ensure that grassroots African women gain the support they need and deserve.

This year, instead of presenting a $100,000 award, we will announce a new $1 million-plus initiative to directly empower grassroots women in Africa.

We are determined to have this new initiative be as bold, as high-leverage and as catalytic as possible. To ensure that, we have begun a series of consultations with many of the most experienced and committed African women, and envision creating an initiative that will:

Our Africa Prize award ceremony on October 9 here in New York, will be a breakthrough for The Hunger Project and for this issue. In addition to its distinct focus and the announcement of our new $1 million-plus initiative, the ceremony will feature:

This initiative is proceeding concurrent with two other overarching priorities in our work in Africa this year:

More details of all of this work are in the accompanying reports.

Latin America – Strategic Partnerships

The Hunger Project now has active programs in Mexico, Peru and Bolivia. We have three overarching priorities in this work for 1999:

Strengthening our organizational capabilities

The great grassroots leader Dr. A.T. Ariyaratne often says: "we build the road, and the road builds us." This is always the approach we take organizationally in The Hunger Project. We strengthen our organization not on the basis of a theoretical model, but on the basis of the work at hand. Some of the areas where this is taking place today are: