Highlights from 23 September 2000 events
1,700 activists, dignitaries, and grassroots women leaders from around the world came together to launch The Hunger Project's South Asia Initiative. The new initiative is designed to empower the leadership of rural women in India and Bangladesh as representatives in local democracy and as change agents in their communities.
Said Hunger Project President Joan Holmes, "The Hunger Project will ignite and sustain a coordinated strategic campaign of action to empower women as the key change agents for a new future. . . . This initiative is built on the fundamental truth that women, who are the primary victims of hunger, are also the key to the end of hunger."
Six grassroots women from India and Bangladesh have traveled to New York to speak at the event (see speeches attached). They will represent more than one million grassroots women who are taking action for progress in their villages, and the sustainable end of hunger.
Recent articles in publications including The New York Times and The New Yorker have shown that the leadership of 1 million grassroots women in India's local government (panchayati raj) is perhaps the greatest social experiment of our time. In Bangladesh, women are proving to be critical change agents for progress in their communities. Hunger worldwide will end when women -- those most affected by hunger and most responsible for its end -- have a powerful voice in decision-making at every level of society.