Fighting Poverty by Helping Women

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn have written a great article for the New York Times Magazine on the importance of improving the lives of women and girls in the developing world. It's adapted from their book, “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.”

In the early 1990s, the United Nations and the World Bank began to proclaim the potential resource that women and girls represent. “Investment in girls’ education may well be the highest-return investment available in the developing world,” Larry Summers wrote when he was chief economist of the World Bank. Private aid groups and foundations shifted gears as well. “Women are the key to ending hunger in Africa,” declared the Hunger Project. The Center for Global Development issued a major report explaining “why and how to put girls at the center of development.” CARE took women and girls as the centerpiece of its anti-poverty efforts. “Gender inequality hurts economic growth,” Goldman Sachs concluded in a 2008 research report that emphasized how much developing countries could improve their economic performance by educating girls.

Read the whole thing.