While all this celebration is going around, however, and despite some static improvements, the overall status of women in the developing world has not improved significantly enough. Today, there are over 600 million girls in the developing world who are living in poverty. They are economically deprived and have not been given a chance to receive educational or economic opportunities. In some cases, their lives are of such little value that they are left to die. For every single progressive action taken to help women live a better more dignified and healthy life, we are faced with cruel actions that range from rape to oppression to killing baby girls.
This year the world seems to have finally realized that it has to have a culturally sensitive all encompassing female empowerment concept and solution and place them at the forefront of the world agenda that attacks and acts on female education, health, political participation and economic participation by and for women. These measures cost money, and must be constructed in a way that can be implemented, and must have political will behind them in order for them to succeed. The problems are of such huge proportions, however, that countries look to the private sector and philanthropic entities for help in not only getting financial resources, but in how to allocate the resources.
At the three Alwaleed bin Talal foundations, we are constantly aware of the four critical areas and are trying to deal with them in a way that befits each country’s needs. Therefore the issue of how to define female empowerment, what policies will the foundations advocate? What actions should we take to help women? Which organizations to support? And who are our partners? These are vital questions that we have to answer on a daily basis. We observe due diligence, because getting things right matters.
The three Alwaleed foundations, as a result of the direction of their founder and president, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, are focused on finding the most effective ways to help not only raise awareness of female empowerment, but support it in the manner that will bring about real results that fit our part of the world.
Prince Alwaleed firmly believes that encouraging and supporting women and female initiatives is one of the most important ways to measure real tangible progress in any country.
The different Alwaleed foundations take this mandate very seriously, and our work ranges from simple acts of recruiting and retaining top talented Saudi women in key positions to carrying out studies that look at the complex issues related to supporting organizations and innovative initiatives that help women.
Our focus is on finding and implementing key solutions, not merely creating data and discussion. To that effect, all of our foundations fully share commissioned issue specific studies with other entities that asks for them and we frequently hold convening forums as a catalyst for action. Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s three foundations have focused, in the past three years, as a result of key studies on several specific issues and consistently tackling them in local, regional and Islamic women’s leadership initiatives, the financial support of organizations that deal with women issues and providing housing and educational opportunities to women. We believe that tackling the issues on all fronts especially for the MENA region is very vital for long-term significant success.
The first component that we tackle is leadership, finding and developing the most effective leadership. The international Alwaleed Foundation (AF) has supported law and leadership organizations such as KARAMAH, which work on developing the skills and knowledge of Muslim women leaders from around the world in order to help them bring positive change to their communities. AF international has supported The Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow initiative, which helps to equalize the gender divide within the global Muslim community. They have supported the Muslim Public Service Network, which places mostly American Muslim female interns within all three of the US government branches to help the Muslim community learn and participate in the American governmental system.
Last but not least, the foundation has also supported through its Islamic centers at Harvard, Georgetown, and Cambridge, studies on gender issues within the Islamic and cultural traditions of the developing world. These types of leadership initiatives are the keys to ensuring the long-term success in all other initiatives that we deal with.
Economic empowerment is at the heart of much of the oppression that face women in the developing world. Therefore, Alwaleed Foundations have also worked with hundreds of local and regional organizations to help support women’s economic empowerment. We do it through several complementary initiatives. From giving financial support to the core operations for service providers such as organizations that help female orphans, and widows. Moreover, we work on providing housing for the economically underprivileged with priority being given to women who are the heads of the household or are the primary care givers. We also work with organizations such as Oxfam and Islamic relief to provide mentoring and training for small-scale female businesses. However, at certain times, we also look at infrastructure issues, as we did in Bosnia, since our studies showed the issue was not the creation of business but the roads that helped deliver the goods. And we continuously evaluate programs.
To help round out the picture, the second component is to work very closely with organizations that create economically viable opportunities for women in Saudi Arabia, the MENA region and Africa that can be carried out. Recently, we started an initiative to help develop the Saudi female arts and crafts sector to become economically competitive within the global framework. The arts and crafts SME’s is a good solution that fits with the Kingdom’s situation, but has mostly — with few notable exceptions — been treated like a charity rather than like an economic-driven business. Changing that one sector and getting government support can help create a billion-dollar religious tourism industry. If this is successful, we hope to roll it out in the region.
The third component of our foundations work is education. We look at the real educational needs of the area and how to most effectively provide the initiatives that are needed after serious considerations to deal with problems such as cultural, patriarchal and religious obstacles. For example, we have built dorms for university female students all over the world, as studies showed that logistics and safety are two of the biggest factors preventing deserving women in the developing world from receiving education. In Saudi Arabia, there has been tremendous support for female education and training through known organizations in all 13 provinces. The issue is to provide what is really needed, not what people perceive to be needed.
It is heartbreaking that there are 600 million underprivileged girls around the world, mostly in Arab and Muslim countries, and they need to have an equal chance to be educated, to live a dignified life, to be in charge of their lives and to make their own decisions. Acknowledging how laws in patriarchal societies have consistently discriminated against women is an important first step. However, it is our duty now to effectively work on supporting initiatives that create the right leadership for women, to support organizations that work on institutionalized consistent reform, and to work on creating data-driven solutions that can be implemented. Women’s empowerment is really and truthfully human empowerment.
