Ten women have been honored by first lady Michelle Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for their exceptional courage in advocating for women’s rights and empowerment, often at great personal risk.
Since the inception of this award in 2007, the Department of State has honored 38 women from 27 countries. This is the only Department of State award that pays tribute to women activists worldwide.
At an awards presentation at the State Department March 8, the first lady praised the Women of Courage winners for not standing silent in the face of violence, oppression, poverty or inequality.
“Time and again, these women have discovered a very simple truth: that courage can actually be contagious,” Obama said to an audience filled with diplomats, members of Congress and business people. The first lady used as an example Yoani Sanchez, a writer in Cuba whose blog “caught fire” on the Internet and was being downloaded onto computer flash drives and passed from person to person. When it was censored by the state, she distributed her blog through what she calls a “citizen network” — people outside of Cuba who helped publish her posts. Her writing is now translated into 15 languages.
In addition to the first lady and the secretary of state, those gathered to honor the awardees included Melanne Verveer, US ambassador at large for global women’s issues, and Julia Gillard, the first woman to become prime minister of Australia.
This year’s Women of Courage awardees are:
• Roza Otunbayeva, president of the Kyrgyz Republic.
• Maria Bashir, prosecutor general for Herat province in Afghanistan.
• Nasta Palazhanka, deputy chairwoman for Malady Front (Young Front), a nongovernmental organization in Belarus.
• Henriette Ekwe Ebongo, journalist and publisher of Bebela, a weekly independent newspaper in Cameroon.
• Guo Jianmei, lawyer and director of the Beijing Zhongze Women’s Legal Counseling and Service Center in China.
• Yoani Sanchez, innovator, writer and founder of the Generación Y blog in Cuba.
• Agnes Osztolykan, member of parliament and the Politics Can Be Different Party in Hungary.
• Eva Abu Halaweh, executive director of Mizan Law Group for Human Rights in Jordan.
• Marisela Morales Ibañez, deputy attorney general for special investigations against organized crime in Mexico.
• Ghulam Sughra, founder and chief executive officer of the Marvi Rural Development Organization in Pakistan.
Yoani Sanchez of Cuba and Nasta Palazhanka of Belarus, Clinton noted, were not present because they were prevented by their governments from attending the awards ceremony in the United States.
At the awards ceremony, Clinton repeated US support for women striving for equal opportunity in their societies. She took note of the women of Egypt and Tunisia, who, the secretary said, have just as much right as the men in their countries to remake their governments and make them accountable and transparent to the people. Women should be part of the process for forming such new governments, she said.
Clinton also announced an initiative in partnership with Goldman Sachs Group Inc., a New York-based investment bank, to educate women in the business skills needed to be successful entrepreneurs. Lloyd Blankfein, chairman of Goldman Sachs, explained that the program will be an extension of Goldman Sach’s “10,000 Women” program launched in 2008.
That $100 million, five-year campaign has trained dozens of women from more than 20 countries. The first women to participate from the State Department extension of the program will be from Haiti and Indonesia.
The Women of Courage awards ceremony fell on March 8, the 100th anniversary of the first International Women’s Day. In a commentary released by Bloomberg News Wire for the occasion, Clinton states there are now more than 200 million women entrepreneurs worldwide and that women earn more than $10 trillion every year, most of which they invest in their families and communities. Even so, women worldwide perform two-thirds of the work but earn just one-third of the income, she said.
The United States is working to close the educational and income gap between women and men, the secretary said. Programs like the mWomen Initiative, which gives women access to mobile technology, the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which helps women gain access to markets, and the Pathways to Prosperity Initiative, which helps women develop their business skills and economic opportunities, all fall into that effort.
“This is a central focus of my diplomatic outreach,” Clinton said. “Wherever I go around the world, I meet with governments, international organizations and civic groups to talk about economic policies that will help their countries grow by expanding women’s access to jobs and finance. “If we decide as societies, governments and businesses to invest in women and girls, we will strengthen our efforts to fight poverty, drive development and spread stability.”
“When women thrive, families, communities and countries thrive,” she said, “and the world becomes more peaceful and prosperous.”
Jane Morse is a staff writer at www.america.gov
