While China’s government remains largely unaccountable to its people, the rapidly growing adoption of the Internet presents a glimmer of hope. Last year, for instance, China’s netizens successfully shed light on a number of social injustices. The resulting public attention frequently forces the government to back down and right wrongs. But such public cases remain the exception rather than the rule, due to the state’s extensive manipulation of public information—both online and off. The rule remains that the state’s views must dominate if at all possible. Read the rest of this entry »

• South Africa has 924 mobile phones per 1000 people; Eritrea has 22 per 1000 people.
• The highest connection charge for a business phone is $366.6 in Benin; the lowest is in Ghana at $0.7.
• In Sierra Leone 3 persons per 1,000 are Internet users
• For the period 2007, Zimbabwe has the highest adult literacy rate (91.2 percent); Mali and Burkina Faso have the lowest (28.7 percent)
• Cape Verde receives the highest net ODA per capita ($438.2); Nigeria receives the lowest ($9.5).

See all 50 things you don’t know about Africa on the World Bank website.

Last week the world celebrated International Women’s Day. Throughout the week, CIPE published a series of blogs highlighting stories and resources on women in education, women in advocacy, women in politics, women in post-conflict situations, and women leaders in corporate social responsibility. This week, we follow up with a Feature Service article, by Dr. Susanne E. Jalbert, a leading expert on economic empowerment of women.

Dr. Jalbert shares her thoughts and extensive international experience on how non-governmental organizations and women’s business organizations can help women become successful entrepreneurs and overcome entrenched social structures that prevent them from equal participation in the economy. She has worked with women’s organizations in countries as diverse as Iraq, Moldova, or Georgia. Yet, in all those places many of the challenges that women entrepreneurs face are the same: persistent cultural stereotypes and social barriers, few women role models, scarce availability of small business support and training, limited access to finance, etc. Read the rest of this entry »

“Quiet corruption” – the failure of public servants to deliver goods or services paid for by governments – is pervasive and widespread across Africa and is having a disproportionate effect on the poor, with long-term consequences for development, according to a new report from the World Bank.

This is according to the World Bank’s newly released Africa Development Indicators. Read more in the press release on the World Bank website or check out the report itself.

Overall, the report is interesting in that it shows that corruption is not just about bribery (exchange of money in brown envelopes), its much more complex than that. Report visual – “quiet corruption” as the bottom [larger] part of the iceberg hidden below the water level. Read the rest of this entry »

Iraqi women after voting.

It’s true that this election in Iraq is significantly different from the last one in 2005; however, we should be aware that this is a classic reminder that elections do not equal democracy. As ballots are counted and results tallied, a growing civil society is not-so-quietly preparing to voice Iraqi needs and concerns on a multitude of issues. Read the rest of this entry »

Throughout the week we had a number of posts on the barriers women face throughout the word.  We’ve also highlighted a number of successful approaches to removing cultural and legal barriers to the participation of women in society.

As the week comes to a close, I want to echo what many of us frequently hear, but don’t necessarily take close to heart.  Often, celebrations bring a spotlight to the issue.  But as the time passes, what remains is hard work to resolve the issues – the hard work that’s not necessarily glamorous or exciting in the daily routine of things.

As we certainly will move on to different development dilemmas in the coming weeks, I hope we continue to remember the appalling exclusion many women still face in countries around the world and what it takes to remove barriers to participation.  And I hope we don’t forget that removing those barriers is not just about publications, conferences, speeches, and meetings. Read the rest of this entry »

Students graduating at Birzeit University. (Photo: Abbas Momani / AFP-Getty Images)

The ongoing violent conflict in Palestine, the constant friction between different political factions, the economic sanctions and stifling restrictions on movement of people and goods don’t seem to discourage Palestinian women from the workplace. In fact, it is these dire circumstances that have forced women to find work and set-up their involvement in work in the public spheres.

The collapse of the Palestinian economy, which moved from being a middle income economy to one that is now immensely aid-dependent in the span of one decade, is causing a systematic change in women’s traditional roles. According to the findings of a report by CARE International, The World Bank and the Women’s Studies Institute (WSI) at Birzeit University, Palestinian women, regardless of their levels of skills or professional training, are becoming bread-winners and have a more noticeable presence in the public and private sectors. Life keeps handing Palestinian women lemons, and they just keep making lemonade.  Read the rest of this entry »

Reviving an economic base is one of the first priorities in post-conflict reconstruction. When large companies have suffered too great loses to resume operations quickly, and while foreign investors may still be wary of the security situation, local small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are often the first signs economic rebirth. Increasingly, women are joining men in creating their own SME ventures, contributing both to supporting their own households and to their countries’ recovery. But much remains to be done to empower those women: analysis of emergency and post-conflict spending patterns done by the UN Development Fund for Women shows that just 2 percent of post-conflict budgets target women’s empowerment or gender equality.

The presence of women entrepreneurs in post-conflict societies matters for several important reasons:

1) Women are often the ones left behind to support their families after their husbands and brothers went off to war and their ability to provide that support is crucial for survival of the entire communities.
2) Women are typically among the most trusted members of society following a conflict given their role of bystander or victim rather than perpetrator, and – as new economic leaders – they can foster reconciliation.
3) Countries struggling to alleviate post-conflict poverty need to harness all human capital available to succeed, making entrepreneurship a means for overcoming traditional social barriers to women’s economic participation. Read the rest of this entry »

Globally, women members of parliament comprise less than 20% of the total – that’s a fact.  Perhaps not surprisingly, they achieve the highest representation in Nordic countries (42%), but when Nordic countries are combined with the rest of Europe the number goes back down to just under 22%.  Also not surprisingly, women have the lowest representation in the Arab states (10%).

There are many ways of interpreting these numbers, but focusing on the numbers alone may be misleading. What is the right rate of representation? Is it 40%? 50%? 60% or more? There is no right answer.

One way of approaching the problem can be changing the number directly (such as through a quota system).  Yes, it can lead to some positive results, like in Rwanda where high representation of women in government has led to the development of many policies that facilitated the engagement of women in the economy. Read the rest of this entry »

A transferred wall painting from Janakpur.

As Nick Kristof and others have noted, women are more inclined than men are to spend their money on health care, food, and education for their families and communities. Overall, they invest more in long-term plans than in short term gratification. But what’s a woman to do when she lacks the education, skills, or start-up capital necessary to begin her own business? How can she earn an income when she does not know where to start? For a group of women in Janakpur, Nepal, the answer had been passed down for generations.

For centuries, the Maithil women of southern Nepal have painted elaborate traditional designs on the mud walls of their houses and compounds to celebrate weddings, festivals, and religious celebrations. The works of art create sacred and auspicious spaces for their families and their rituals. For generations, painting skills and designs were passed down from mother to daughter. Read the rest of this entry »

Femina VIP awards ceremony

Each year the world celebrates March as a special month for honoring women. Different organizations hold seminars, conferences, and workshops about women’s role in the society, while media devotes a lot of attention to women issues.

But we at CIPE don’t think about women only in March. During the entire year we seek ways to improve women’s lives, their businesses, and their families’ livelihood. We work closely with women business associations, chambers of commerce for women, and other groups dedicated to building women’s leadership in public, community, and business life. Read the rest of this entry »

Women in developing countries worldwide wish for many things – equality, education, safe communities, businesses, clean water… This week, the Vital Voices Global Partnership is honoring an extraordinary Pakistani woman for her leadership in bringing many women from wishing to working. Roshaneh Zafar has spent the last 15 years working to develop the Kashf Foundation, modeled on the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Although Kashf, which means miracle, focuses on providing microfinance to women in Pakistan, it offers much more than just financial services and enterprise development. The Kashf Foundation provides women in Pakistan the opportunity for legitimacy. Read the rest of this entry »

Shabnam is a student at Zinab Kobra High School who by the age of 19 had picked up skills such as netting, sewing, tailoring, and beading. Wahida is a student at Ferdowsy High School who has always dreamed of being a tailor. Nayla is another student at Ferdowsy who spent her spare time under the Taliban learning how to net beads and make necklaces and rings for herself and her friends, but there were no opportunities to sell her wares. These three young women are part of the estimated three percent of students who have gone on to start their own businesses after taking an entrepreneurship class at their high school as part of CIPE’s Tashabos program. In the U.S., by comparison, 0.29 percent of the adult population starts a business in a given year. Read the rest of this entry »

Providing girls one extra year of education beyond the average boosts their eventual wages by 10-20 percent, compared to 5-15 percent for boys. When it comes to such statistical comparisons, there are always a few helpful caveats to keep in mind, especially if you’re about to get showered with numbers as part of week-long festivities marking International Women’s Day. Since many of these comparisons reflect some form of regression analysis, they are vulnerable to a world of pitfalls. For social science statistics, some of the biggest caveats to keep in mind involve independence and noise. Read the rest of this entry »

Haifa Wehbe, a popular singer in Lebanon, dons an LTA t-shirt for the BLOM Beirut Marathon.

When you live and work in a region where daily life accessories may include shoulder-mounted missiles and backpack bombs, efforts to reduce corruption have plenty of incentive to be as creative as possible. The Lebanese Transparency Association (LTA) is the Lebanon chapter of Transparency International, and rather than investigating or exposing individual cases of corruption, which might invite a few unwanted accessories, LTA focuses on systemic factors that create situations for bribery, nepotism, patronage, embezzlement, and other forms of corruption. If you’re interested in asking LTA what it’s like to do this kind of work, you can ask them yourself, later today on Facebook.

LTA is CIPE’s featured partner for March 2010. Every month, CIPE on social media features one partner to highlight its work and the issues it faces in its region.