It’s grey and occasionally raining in North London, where I meet Zohra Moosa, Action Aid UK’s Women’s Rights Advisor. She talks about challenges that women face and possible solutions, and discusses how to engage people into development issues.

On why women matter

Women make up 70 per cent of the world’s poor. Across the world, in every country, women are disproportionally likely to be living in poverty, not to have access to resources, to be discriminated against just because they are women. Because of inequalities between men and women, because of gender inequality, women tend to lose out.

On a circle of problems and solutions

Action Aid focuses on justice for women. What we find is that when we focus on women, it does actually benefit more than just women. It benefits families, communities, societies, regions, the whole world. When you target women specifically and support them to lift themselves out of poverty, when you work with them directly, much larger benefit can be felt. Being an anti-poverty charity, by focusing on justice for women, we also meet other agendas that we are trying to tackle on anti-poverty work. A good example of that is HIV/AIDS. HIV is fuelled by gender inequality, and specifically violence against women. We won’t be able to stop the spread of HIV if we don’t look at how it is spread, and one big way is through violence against women. So if we tackle violence against women, not only would that help women, which would be good enough even if that’s all it did, actually it also helps us fight HIV/AIDS.

On the main factor that brought us to where we are

The root cause for all of this, for women’s lack of access to power and resources, is gender inequality. Women don’t have access to education or to the labour market in part because of gender discrimination. They are less likely to be sent to school just because they are women. Women often go without food or with less water, intentionally themselves but also they are not given access to it. It’s just not prioritized. The root cause, the main issue is gender inequality.

On laws and how to eradicate gender inequality

There is no simple solution to tackle gender inequality. It’s important to have laws in place and not every country has it. In some countries, marital rape is still legally allowed, while in others they have recently succeeded in defining marital rape as a criminal act. That’s really powerful and important. But law in itself isn’t sufficient. Just because you have the law doesn’t mean women automatically benefit, although some women who have access to the legal system, to justice in some way, will.

On law enforcement

To benefit everyone, you do need a wider cultural change as well. And part of that is about enforcing laws. So sometimes the problem isn’t that the law is not good enough, it’s that the law isn’t being enforced. For instance, some judges don’t have the expertise to make sound judgments about what’s happening in the court. A case comes and they make the wrong judgment because they haven’t been trained in the new law. Or the police don’t know what they’re meant to be doing once the new law is in place. They’re not collecting the evidence because they haven’t been trained, “this is the new situation, the law has changed, you’re supposed to do it this way”.

On changing our perceptions

So part of it is just law enforcement. But other than that, cultural change is important. If you look at violence, for example, laws are important because they signal to perpetrators that the state is taking the issue seriously, but if the police aren’t enforcing it, then people can act with impunity, they can get away with it. Most violence doesn’t get reported. Partly that’s because women don’t have confidence in the police or the justice system, but also we as a society collectively buy into the idea that it’s OK to hit women. We sort of sanction it in our day-to-day actions. Surveys done in this country show young people thinking it’s acceptable to hit a woman if she’s nagging or because of the way she dresses. So you do need that broader culture change, but it all kind of comes together. Sometimes it comes before the laws are enacted, but quite often it happens after that. Once you have a new momentum, a law or a constitution, that introduces the idea into people’s mind that it can be different.

On the role of education

Our understanding of how we value women is a long term thing. It’s a big project to do. We’ve had centuries of thinking that women are worth less (or worthless). To expect that to change in a couple of years is unrealistic, it takes a lot of time. We have to look at education. Children at a very young age learn that women are less important than men. A very big problem is violence against girls in schools, something we’ve been working on for the past few years. 60 million girls are assaulted in school or on their way to/from school. They learn at school age that they are worth less. Going to school puts them at risk of violence, and violence became a condition of their access to education. That’s something we need to change.

On Millennium Development Goals

The MDGs will only be achieved if governments start taking them really seriously, a lot more seriously than they have. The goals are ambitious, but that’s the idea. There’s no point in having goals that aren’t ambitious. There’s no point in striving for mediocrity. We should eradicate poverty, we should have access to universal healthcare – those are reasonable goals to be striving for. We wouldn’t expect anything less for ourselves, why would we expect less for people in other countries? The challenge is that Northern governments haven’t followed their commitments.

On how to achieve the MDGs

I understand it can feel a bit overwhelming. You can look at the MDGs and think, “oh this is impossible, how are we ever going to eradicate poverty, who came up with that?” But at the same time, why on Earth are we living in the world that has this level of poverty? How is it acceptable that a billion people go hungry every day? It’s not. Why isn’t that the number one thing we’re focusing on? Why is it that one in three women experience violence in their lifetime? Why are we paying attention to a dozen other things that we choose to pay attention to instead of these issues? The goals are ambitious, but I wouldn’t say they are unachievable. It just requires a change of priorities and a change of investment. And that is within the possibilities of governments. It is possible for them to change their minds an act differently, they just need to do it. And we need to encourage them and use our votes to make them do it.

On hostile attitudes towards development in economically harsh times

I understand why people think of people in other places as not one of “us”, but I would say that it’s A) not true, and B) really not meeting our responsibility. We cause poverty. People in, say, Uganda are not poor by accident, they’re poor because of the choices that the UK makes. Our responsibility is to pay attention to our actions and make sure we don’t do harm to people. It would be one thing if we all lived on separate islands and never saw each other, but that’s not the way it is. We directly rely on what’s happening in the rest of the world for us to maintain our standard of living here. There is no “them” and “us”. That divide is completely artificial. We are all us. We are all in the same system, we get our bananas from “over there” but “there” are bananas, and we eat them. I think people need to wake up to that reality and be a bit more honest about our role in entrenching poverty and in causing poverty and then pay for it. We’re causing it, we need to fix it.

On widespread disengagement with world issues

Disengagement is reality. Of course everyone has their own particular challenges and problems, and that’s their lives. “I’m concerned about things that affect me,” it’s completely normal. We have to show how our lives are connected to other people’s lives. We’re not operating in vacuum. Action Aid creates these links between “us” and “them”. Our women’s rights project 6 degrees is based on the idea that everyone is connected within six connections of each other, six degrees away from anyone in the world. This project looks at how women are connected to each other, because then you can feel closer to them. If your friend needed help, no matter how much you were struggling yourself, you would try to help them because they are your friends. Equally, we’re trying to show that those people that we don’t see are actually connected to us through six degrees or less. They’re part of our lives, and we should feel obligated to help them, and also to take responsibility of what we’re doing that harms them. That’s one way to do it.

On the governments’ role

The other way is to use the power of governments, because they are the ones that can make a really big difference. So I can buy fair trade products, or I can recycle my tins, or I can make sure I use a reusable bag, these are all important things, but they’re not the mass change we’re talking about. What we need is a major global shift. The actors that have that kind of power are governments. One of the most powerful things that people can do as citizens is to use their vote to influence the government to take these issues seriously, to demand that the UK government uses its power and resources on the international stage. This is within our power, and it requires much less sacrifice than we think. It doesn’t require us never to use a car, although we’ll get there, but we are not there yet. There’s much to be done that doesn’t require major sacrifice, just a change of priorities. For example, make über rich companies pay their taxes which some of them don’t do. That’d have a massive impact, as those taxes are major revenue sources for developing countries. So essentially when our companies don’t pay their taxes, we’re stealing from the developing world.

On Destined to Fail

Action Aid released a report called Destined to fail? We tracked how violence against women is affecting five agendas which closely mirror the MDGs: education, maternal and child health, HIV/AIDS, conflict and governance. The report found that each agenda is being undermined, their progress stunned because of violence against women. So violence undermines development. The key challenge is that we don’t pay attention to violence against women in any kind of consistent way. When something dramatic happens, we pay attention to it, but generally we think of violence against women as only happening in particular situations, such as conflict. It definitely happens there, but it’s much more mainstream than that. It affects women of all age, all social locations, all situations. The report shows how this approach to violence against women as an isolated ad hoc thing undermines all these agendas. Specifically it’s targeted at the UK government. It says it should treat violence against women as one of the top priorities in its foreign policy work. As we go out on terrorism or climate change, equally we should go out on violence against women. The best way to do that is to appoint a minister on violence against women.

On when development agencies will not be needed

It’s hard to say. It goes up and down. The MDGs was a huge watershed moment. It was very exciting that everyone had committed to these goals. And you thought, “We can do this!” Since then, the targets are off course. Some of them are doing alright considering, but, for example, the one on maternal health has always been the worst target. It’s well behind the others, and it won’t be achieved at this rate. And that makes me particularly sad because other than the one of gender equality, it’s the one that affects women. They all do, but it’s the one you can visibly see. The fact that a woman dies every minute in childbirth is hugely depressing and it signals that we’re still very far from running ourselves out of business. How long will it take to eradicate hunger? I don’t know. I remain of the view that it’s really a matter of priorities and resources. It’s not that we haven’t come up with the answers, not that we don’t have tools, not that the money does not exist, it’s really just about our priorities and where we choose to put our resources. Until we can get the governments to permanently shift in a big way, we’re gonna be stuck with this situation.

image: katutaide via flickr