Gates’ Grand Challenge to Measure Empowerment

Through my work with individual students and teachers, my girls’ club, and Camp GLOW, I learned a lot about empowerment. About how students who feel empowered to ask questions tend to do better in school, and stay in school longer. About how teachers who feel empowered to take on new activities inside and outside the classroom to help their students are the teachers who are making big differences in their students’ lives. About how when women and girls are empowered to make decisions about their own lives, everyone is stronger: families, communities, finances, countries.

But as I have mentioned in previous posts, measuring this can be hard. Empowerment is a process, and a messy, complicated one at that. And while data shows that an extra year of primary school can boost girls’ eventual earnings 10-20%, and an extra year of secondary school by 15-25% (source: tweet by USAID), more detailed analysis of the effects of empowerment has so far been lacking.

The Gates Foundation is trying to change that. They announced a Grand Challenge to create new methods of measuring empowerment – both the process of empowerment, and its effects on individuals, communities, and economies.

So if you have ideas on how we can measure social change and empowerment, let us know! You could benefit millions by making projects more effective.

An Inspiring Woman

Some days, whether in America or in Benin, it’s hard to get motivated.

It’s hard to keep fighting the good fight, to keep working to promote justice and education and tolerance when everything else seems like it’s conspiring against you. It’s hard to keep working when it’s so much easier to stop fighting, to let fate take you where it will, to curl up with a warm drink (if you’re in America) or a cold drink (if you’re in Benin) and say, “oh well, I tried.”

On those days, you have to look for sources of inspiration and motivation.

Yesterday, I found a new source of motivation: a Ghanian woman named Doris.

First some background. While I was in business school, I interned part time with an organization called ABAN: A Ban Against Neglect. They do three main things:

1. Bring in girls and young women in vulnerable situations in Ghana, and put them through a two year program. Typically these are girls from rural villages who ran away to the city, had no way of supporting themselves, and may have gotten involved with a sugar daddy in order to get enough food and clothing. Some of them have babies. ABAN gets them out of the city, and gives them training in literacy, health/life skills, financial literacy, and sewing, so they will have a trade when the leave the center.

2. Recycle plastic “sachets” of water. Used throughout West Africa, “pure wata” as it is known in Benin, is a means of getting more or less clean water, through half liter plastic bags. But used bags are all over the ground, polluting cities. ABAN collects them.

3. “Upcycles” the plastic bags, pairing them with hand-dyed batik fabric, and makes bags, purses, and other products that they sell in the US. They just released their new Fall 2014 line of products and I am about to go on a shopping spree myself.

Where does Doris come in? Doris is the programs coordinator in Ghana. That means she works with the girls, acting as part social worker, part friend, part mother, and part teacher. She is applying for a fellowship, and she and ABAN published her application essay on their website.

You can read the full essay here, but l’d like to share a short excerpt.

There are communities that still believe girls are only good when they have men by their sides and will never shine by themselves. As such, there are a lot of girls and women who are wasting away untapped potential in themselves that they may never know they have….

Many of the people in the villages that would want to access this help are unable because of financial constraints. Even if some are able to break through and make it, there is little incentive to go back into their communities and help it develop. This means the community remains underdeveloped, the mindsets of the local people never change, and the abuse of girls continues.

So what if help could be sent to the young women in these villages, to be empowered and trained to lead the next generation of children to sustainable community building?

…

For most of these women, all they need is someone to be there and be available, to listen and to lead them through the process. Someone to encourage and applaud their little efforts that when seen together, could transform their community.

Doris’ essay is a powerful reminder that girls matter, and that even small actions can have a big impact. It’s also a great reminder that African women are working to empower each other, and that their strength, energy and determination are making a difference in the lives of individuals and communities.

Sometimes, it’s nice to know that you’re not alone in the fight – you’ve got allies who are fighting alongside with you.

Oil of Life

Palm oil is central to life in southern Benin. It is used in Vodoun (traditional religion) ceremonies. It is used to cook with. It is used as the main export. It is practically impossible to go two days in a row without eating it in some manner. It is the main agricultural product from my village, and one of the only ones that is made in enough quantities to sell (most other products are sold, but are sold to local markets and are still consumed within the area).

So what is palm oil? And how do you make it?

It comes from palm trees. Americans (at least those of us from the Midwest) typically use the word “palm tree” to cover a variety of trees with fronds. In this case, palm oil comes from the fruits/nuts of these trees (photo courtesy of Wikipedia):

The oil comes from the fruit, which grows in a sort of spiky, pine-cone-like pod, like this (photo courtesy of palmplantations.com.au)

Or, once you climb up a tree (if it’s old enough to be tall), and cut them down with a machete, they look like this (all photos mine from this point forward):

From there, you hack at the pine cone with a machete, to loosen the fruits. When you’ve done this, you are left with the fruits:

And the core of the pine cone, which you can use as fire wood:

From there, you boil and pound the fruits, to get the red pulp of the fruit. You eventually get the woody fibers from the fruit to separate from the pulp.

(woody fibers, which can be dried and used as kindling for fires).

After that, there is a process of mixing, sometimes by hand or foot, and heating, and mixing again. Then you filter the oil.

mixing the oil

it’s a messy business!

 heating the oil over the fire

Eventually, you get a thick, deep red oil, which drives economic activity in Daagbé and is central to every day life.

For more information about palm oil’s nutrition content check out this NPR story, which also has great links to data on how much palm oil the US imports (2.7 billion pounds!) and the environmental concerns surrounding its production.

Kitty Voodoo Protection – photos

I previously wrote about how pet owners in Benin protect their animals from being taken and used in Vodoun (aka Voodoo aka the local animist religion) ceremonies: they cut off a tip of the ear or tail, so that the animal is no longer “perfect” and therefore of no ceremonial value. Below are some photos of my host family’s newest cat, Minou.

Why Camp Is Worth It

In the world of international development, there has been a focus on Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) in the past few years. This is totally logical: in the past fifty years, there have been lots and lots of projects, and very few ways to measure if they actually produced results. It’s important to donors, project administrators, and “recipients” that we learn from past and current projects to make future projects more efficient and effective.

But sometimes, the focus on M&E can lead to people questioning the need for projects where the benefits aren’t always tangible. Projects where you don’t build something, or teach a specific technical skill. Projects like Camp GLOW. Sometimes it can be hard to justify with hard data why girls’ empowerment projects and camps such as GLOW are necessary and effective, because the impact is either intangible and/or so far down the road that there’s no way to measure it now.

To those who question “why waste money on Camp GLOW when you could have built a road,” I have an anecdote from this year’s camp.

We split the girls into five teams, trying to make sure girls from the same village were on different teams, so they would get out of their comfort zones and get to  know new girls. Each team was led by at least one Beninese woman serving as a “tutrice,” which is a combination role model and counselor. Each team also had Peace Corps Volunteers assigned, who were with their girls the entire week.

The first night, the teams were just getting to know each other – girls, tutrices, and Volunteers. I listened in to the green team’s initial discussions.

The Volunteer, Piotr, asked the girls if they had plans for what they wanted to do with their lives. Most of them had never been asked this question before. The majority said they wanted to get their high school diploma, but didn’t really know what they could do with that. One girl said she wanted to drop out after the national exams in 9th grade, and become a hairdresser.

Now, there is nothing wrong with being a hairdresser. But these girls were chosen because someone saw potential in them, and wanted to nurture that potential. And as a teacher, I can never recommend to anyone to plan to drop out of school.

So I kept my eye on the girl the whole week. She participated well in all the activities and sessions, and seemed to be making connections with the other girls in camp.

Then came the career panel on our last day. The girls, in their teams, had the opportunity to speak to Beninese women who have professional careers. There was a caterer/restauranteur who often caters for high-level government meetings and conferences, a journalist, two health workers (one a nurse and one a community health expert working with USAID), and one woman who I’m ashamed to say I’ve forgotten what she does (possibly because I was running around trying to find enough chairs for this all to work, but that’s still no excuse).

During their last rotation, the woman asked the girls what they wanted to do. The girl who had previously planned to drop out of school said she wanted to be a doctor. She asked the nurse what she needed to study in school, and any other advice for how to reach her new goal.

If Camp GLOW had even a small part of producing a future woman doctor in Benin, it was worth it.

Photos from the Strike

During the second semester of this past school year, the full-time teachers of Benin went on strike. Then, some of the students went on strike, in solidarity with the teachers and in the hope that adding even more chaos to the school year would force the government to intervene to end the strike sooner.

The students at my school, influenced by students in the big city who came to agitate in our village, wrote a manifesto when they went on strike. Below is a photo of the manifesto, plastered on various places around the school campus.

Below are photos of the empty school and desks put in the “corridor”.

Photo Update to Voting Post

I posted a while back about how a country deals with voter registration when the majority of the population is illiterate. Now that I have fast internet and no grant proposals to take up my internet time, I have a photo update to that post. Below is an example of a voter registration location. It’s occasionally used as a Koranic school, and on school days you can often find students there, relaxing during breaks from school if they live too far to walk home for lunch.

Unfortunately a petite accidentally deleted the close-up photo of the registration rolls, which is mostly just a black and white photocopied head shot, I believe taken from the national ID card photo rolls, a name, and a village/neighborhood.

Camp GLOW: now with 100% more photos!

I’ve finally finished my month and a half of crazy traveling, AND now own a computer that has the letter “e.” Yes, this entire time I’ve been writing my posts on a laptop while having to copy-paste every time I wanted to use an “e.”

In any case, I now have enough internet to finally share some of the fabulous photos from Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World). Once again, a huge thank you to all who donated to make camp possible. The 51 girls are poised to become leaders of their communities, and they are the future leaders of Benin and of the world!

(above) The girls show off their new mosquito nets, which they got to take home!

(above) Showing off our arts and crafts project – tie dye!

(above) playing games during down time

(above) Taking notes at the field trip to the Royal Palace of Porto-Novo

(above) game time in the evenings

(above) PCV John helps girls with tie dye.

(above) one of our amazing tutrices (role model/counselor) works with her team

(above) PCV Taylor, our “energy specialist” since she always has fun songs and games ready to go at a moment’s notice!

(above) Strutting their stuff during our fashion show!

(above) Dance Party!

(above) showing off the fabulous outfits we found at the local market.

(above) learning about their history at the Royal Palace

(above) one of our tutrices, who is training to be a health professional, adds comments and information during a session on family planning.

(above) PCV Mike leads a session on family planning, where each of the girls had the opportunity to practice how to put on a condom – in this case a glue bottle standing in for the phallus.

(above) a PCV “men’s panel” where girls had the opportunity to have real men debunk myths (such as “it’s impossible for a man to be faithful” or “if a man doesn’t have sex regularly, he will die”)

(above) PCV games master John supervises a relay race/tag.

(above) PCVs getting in on the action for a wheelbarrow race

(above): Career Panel! Girls got the opportunity to speak to women in professional roles about their jobs, their education, and if it’s really possible for a Beninese woman to have a career and a family (hint: it is!)

(above) the Blue Team speaks with one of our career panelists

lots of smiles at Camp GLOW!

Stay Tuned!

Just because I’m leaving doesn’t mean I’m done posting! I have several more posts in the works about my life here, and many photos, which I’ll be able to post when I return to America. It will actually probably help me readjust to America if I can spend time writing about and posting photos of my life in Benin.

This is also the first of many, many thank yous I owe. To everyone who read this blog, thank you for your support. It’s been especially amazing to meet new Volunteers who recognize my name! Thank you to the 7th graders in Ohio who corresponded with my students here! Thank you to all my friends and family. Your love and support have sustained me.
And a special thank you to my boyfriend: it hasn’t been easy, but your love has been one of the main reasons I’m as strong as I am.

Also a special thank you to anyone who ever sent me food. You have NO idea what good food tastes like until you taste maple flavoring for the first time in a year.

So thank you and stay tuned for more!

Leaving

As you’ve probably heard, Peace Corps Washington is in the process of evacuating Volunteers and Trainees from Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea due to the Ebola virus. My thoughts have been with these Volunteers and their communities. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to be forced to leave your community, and to leave behind all your friends, knowing that if something happens, you were protected because you’re American, but your friends aren’t so lucky.

I’m not nearly in the same situation. But I am in the process of leaving my village, and leaving Benin. It’s been difficult.

First of all, there are the physical difficulties of leaving. I am unfortunately not being replaced (partly because the mayor stole my rent money, partly because Peace Corps Washington is nervous about my being so close to Nigeria, which is mostly ridiculous, but I digress).
This means nobody is moving into my house, so I have to get rid of everything. This presents a few issues, chief among them that I don’t have a latrine, so anything in my house I need to throw away but don’t want children to find and play with, I will have to burn.

I also have to distribute all my belongings without causing undue amounts of jealousy and bad feelings. This is a Herculean task, since views on ownership, gifts, friendship, and jealousy are often radically different from my American viewpoint. I know it’s impossible to give away all my stuff without causing some jealousy and bad feelings, but I would like to try to mitigate it as much as possible, since it’s unlikely there will be an American in my village again (at least for the foreseeable future).

I also have to arrange to get a large chunk of my stuff to the Peace Corps office in Cotonou. This includes my gas tanks, mattress, any Peace Corps issued books, my (broken) solar lamp, the remaining contents of my medical kit, my water filter, and anything else I want to take home with me. I’m also selling my couch and a table and chairs to a friend who is doing his third year in Cotonou, so we’ll have to fit all of this in one taxi. Which is not a problem, Beningenuity will allow the taxi driver to find a way to tie all of that down on the roof for anything that doesn’t fit inside. No, the problem is more hiring a taxi that will actually arrive relatively on time, and take me where I need to go without price-gouging me. Plus since it’s Oro season, there are fewer taxis in the area, so I’ll have less choice.

Beyond the actual packing and cleaning, there’s the emotional toll of leaving. I have to say goodbye to the people who have helped me in some of my darkest moments, and who have witnessed the accomplishments I’m most proud of. The people who taught me how to carry water on my head, and how to keep a class of 45 middle school-ers interested in English grammar. The people who have become my friends. The people who have become my family. The people who I know I won’t see in the next couple years, and may never see again.

I’m not really ready for this. I’m still in the denial phase, and probably will be up until the taxi pulls away with me in it. But I know I’ll be bawling as they take me out of here. Because as much as I complain about how hard it can be to live and work here, it’s become my home.