Remarks by Joan Holmes, President of The Hunger Project

On the occasion of the 1998 award ceremony of the
Africa Prize for Leadership
for the Sustainable End of Hunger,
New York Hilton Hotel, October 3, 1998

Over 50 years ago, Prime Minister Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India, said you can tell the condition of a nation by looking at the status of its women. This statement is as true today as it was then.

There is universal understanding that women and children are the members of society most affected by the persistence of hunger and abject poverty.

What is less well understood is that the status of women is the major causative factor in the persistence of hunger.

In countries where hunger persists, women are subjugated, marginalized, and disempowered.

It is shocking when one honestly confronts the cradle-to-grave discrimination that women in the developing world face.

As children, they are undervalued, fed less, given inadequate healthcare, and denied education.

As teenagers, they are forced into early marriage. In extreme cases, girls are bought and sold for prostitution and slave labor.

As wives and mothers, they are under-nourished, work backbreaking 16-hour days, and often die in childbirth.

In fact, pregnancy complications are the largest single cause of death in women in their reproductive years.

Some 585,000 women – one every minute – die each year from pregnancy-related causes. Most of these deaths are preventable.

The low status of women – an inexcusable injustice in its own right – has profound and far-reaching consequences. Not only for the health of her family, but also for the health, stability and productivity of her nation.

High rates of child malnutrition are caused by the low status of women.

A landmark 1996 study by UNICEF revealed that South Asia has the highest rates of malnutrition in the world. That is a direct consequence of South Asia having the worst subjugation of women in the world.

This study underscores that the exceptionally high rates of malnutrition in South Asia are rooted deep in the soil of inequality between men and women.

In a heart-breaking description the study concludes: "no matter how much a mother may love her children – it is all but impossible for her to care for her children if she herself is poor, oppressed, illiterate, uninformed, anemic, unhealthy, and if she is without the necessary support either from health services, her family, society, or from the father of her children."

Even under inhumane conditions, women in the developing world are some of the most productive members of the world community.

Women work from dawn to dusk to meet the needs of their families.

They have the sole responsibility of doing the household tasks, which include walking 5 miles each day to fetch water and gather firewood.

They bear primary responsibility of feeding their families, taking care of their health and well-being, and educating their children.

Women account for 70-80% of household food production in Africa, 65% in Asia, and 45% in Latin America. They achieve this in spite of unequal access to land and inputs such as improved seeds, fertilizers and critical information.

Women are systematically denied the freedom, opportunity and resources to improve their lives.

They lack voice in making decisions affecting family planning, food production and nutrition.

Laws prevent them from owning land, forming cooperatives to make themselves economically viable, and from obtaining bank loans.

Even though poor women have the highest repayment rate of any group in the world. And even though it is now well known that women are the most efficient generators of wealth on the planet.

Girls are never enrolled in schools, or are taken out of primary schools permanently to work at home.

By and large girls are denied education, even though it is now recognized that the single most important investment that a developing country can make for its future is the education of its young girls.

Every year beyond 4^th grade that girls go to school, family size shrinks 20%, child deaths drop 10% and wages rise 20%.

Confronting and transforming this condition is of critical importance for achieving the end of hunger and a sustainable future for all humanity.

Although this situation most dramatically affects girls and women everyone on the planet suffers from this senseless, cruel and costly discrimination.

It will take all of us – women and men of the developed and developing worlds – to make this situation right.

One of the great champions of this issue was the past president of UNICEF, the late Jim Grant. Jim proposed that the world community should oppose the apartheid of gender as vigorously as it opposed the apartheid of race.

It is incomprehensible and unconscionable that we as a world community – which so rightly expressed fervent and sustained opposition to apartheid – would be willing to go into the next millenium with none of the moral outrage or sustained opposition for an injustice on a far greater scale.

As an expression of our commitment to the end of hunger, we in The Hunger Project commit to speak up – speak out – and break the silence that surrounds this issue.

We commit to create opportunities for women where none now exist.

We commit to invest our resources so that women have access to resources to improve their lives and the lives of their children.

We commit to pioneer strategies and take actions that will finally enable women to gain control of their lives and destinies.

Thank you.