August 2006
Kavita Ramdas is president and CEO of Global Fund for Women, a
U.S.-based, international network of women and men that advances women’s human rights by making grants to women-led organizations that promote the economic independence, health, safety, education and leadership of women and girls. She has been widely recognized for her work in the field of feminist philanthropy.
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In 2005, Ramdas received the Women of Substance Award from the African Women’s Development Fund in recognition of her significant contribution to women’s rights in Africa. That same year, she also received the Juliette Gordon Low Award for her contributions to advancing women’s human rights and for being an exemplary role model for girls and women.
In this interview, Ramdas speaks to UWTV about her work at the Global Fund for Women, feminist philanthropy and her views on women’s human rights.
Also, tune in to watch “What’s Good for Women’s Bodies Is Good for the Body Politic!” airing Saturday, Aug. 12, at 11 p.m. Pacific Standard Time on UWTV.
What is feminist philanthropy?
What the founders of the Global Fund had in mind when they talked about the idea of a feminist philanthropy was how you can have philanthropy that really reflects the values and the ideals of feminist philosophy, and what that would look like. That’s really how we see this work. It’s about trying to make those ideas realized in very pragmatic and practical ways.
So what does that mean? When you think about what feminist philanthropy is, you think about it as a philanthropy that begins from the premise that women and men are human beings first and should be treated with dignity and respect as human beings. That is the underlying premise of all the work of the Global Fund. But also, in the world that we currently exist in, although that’s the ideal we would like to strive for, that’s not the reality. The vast majority of women in the world don’t have equality of opportunity or freedom or respect in their communities. Therefore, for feminist philanthropy, it is not enough just to accept the ideal but also to work to change the reality that currently exists and move it closer to that ideal.
Feminist philanthropy means grantmaking that is inclusive and democratic and that really respects and values women’s experience and that places their own articulation and analysis of their own problems at the center of grantmaking. It also means seeing women not as victims but as the people who have the most capacity to transform their own lives. Rather than seeing women as passive objects of oppression or discrimination, we can treat women as those who have the most capacity to bring leadership for changing those realities.
Feminist philanthropy is very much focused on a sense of empowering women to change their own lives and to transform the world into one that is a more equal place for both men and women.
Is feminist philanthropy a relatively new area or has it been around for a while?
I do think it has been around for a while but given the way the word feminist has fallen into such disrepute, it’s not used as commonly anymore. I would say that the first women’s fund in the United States — which was the Ms. Foundation for Women, created in 1972 by Gloria Steinem and a number of women activists during the women’s movement in the ’70s — did use that word feminist philanthropy and called themselves feminists and articulated ways in which they would do their work in the context of the feminist philosophy.
But over the years in the U.S., the term feminist is so rarely used and has so many negative connotations that it’s increasingly less common. Today people speak of the women’s funding movement in the United States, but they rarely talk about feminist philanthropy, whereas in the international world that the Global Fund is involved with, feminism is not a negative thing. For example, you have women like Shirin Ebadi, the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner in Iran, leading the feminist movement in Iran, and saying that it has a branch in every family.
The current issue of Ms. magazine has a great story on the five women Nobel Peace Prize laureates who’ve started something called the Nobel Women for Peace. The Global Fund just made them a grant. It’s really amazing. There have only been 12 women ever in the history of the Nobel Peace Prize who’ve actually won the prize. Isn’t it amazing that they are the ones who come together and decide that they want to do something collectively for peace, and that they want to use their position as Nobel Peace Prize winners to argue that there can be no peace without women’s human rights.
The grant made was in general support of the work of this initiative. The first project that they did was to meet in Vienna last June. They brought women academics and activists and lawyers and teachers from Iran to Vienna to meet with the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei. They basically were trying to say: We want a civil society inside Iran. We want to tell you why we feel that bombing Iran or having a military response to the nuclear program would be such a bad idea and how it would result not in the opening up of Iranian society but in the closing down of Iranian society and in the disappearance even of whatever minimal freedoms there are.
I thought this was such an interesting way of approaching it, because instead of having a kind of militant response, the women in Iran are coming to have talks and say: Look, we want to tell you what the situation is like right now and what this will do, and we want to urge you to think about having this be resolved in a peaceful way by talking to each other. So that was the first thing that Nobel Women for Peace did.
The other area in which they want to do a lot of work is in the United States. Some years ago, the United Nations passed UN Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, which is a resolution that says women must be a part of all peace negotiations and conflict-resolution situations. And that women’s leadership must be included at the table in all peacekeeping missions and in all resolutions of major political conflicts. So right now, take the Israel-Lebanon crisis, these women are saying that, unless women are included in the delegations and in the voices that are discussing how to bring this to a peaceful conclusion, it will just continue with violence being traded for violence.
So that’s an area that Nobel Women for Peace wants to do a lot more work in. It’s really inspiring to see the people who’ve come together: Rigoberta Menchú Tum, Shirin Ebadi, Wangari Maathai from Kenya, and 1976 Irish women laureates Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan are part of it as well, as is Jody Williams from the landmines project, who’s an American. It’s such a different group, such a collaborative and collective approach. These women from all different parts of the world are coming together and saying, OK, what can we do? How can we use this title that we’ve received for real change, for positive change, in the world? That’s the perfect example of feminist philanthropy.
What do you say about feminist philanthropy being separatist, not being integrated into the overall umbrella of philanthropy?
If in fact feminism is a radical notion that men and women should be treated with equal respect and dignity, then how does that prevent us from making grants that support projects that involve both men and women? It simply requires a mindset that values women’s experience and women’s equality. So I would actually argue it’s not that I want to see a separate feminist philanthropy but that I hope eventually all philanthropy will inherently be feminist, as it will be humanist, as it will be democratic, as it will be tolerant and inclusive.
In that same sense, if all philanthropy can be feminist, to me there’s nothing that indicates feminism is a philosophy that can only be held by women. It’s a philosophy that was pioneered by women because women experienced discrimination and lack of opportunities and began to think about what the cause of that might be and began to develop a theory of understanding it. But I think there are amazing men who are feminists, and I think there are many women who are not feminists. So it’s more about an approach and a mindset. It’s the way in which we envision the world rather than something that’s exclusionary. And in fact so many of the women’s groups that we work with around the world see the inclusion of men allies in their work as a very central part of being able to realize a feminist vision.
Why is it that organizations that support women’s issues are so underfunded?
I’ll start with the phrase women’s issues. I believe there are no issues of significance in the world that do not affect 51 percent of us who happen to be women. I don’t think there is a single issue — whether it’s health, whether it’s environment, whether it’s education, whether it’s HIV/AIDS — that doesn’t depend on all of us and, since 51 percent of the world’s population is women, it especially depends on us.
I’ve decided that the term women’s issues tends to be actually much more of a ghettoizing phrase than almost anything else, because immediately what it calls to mind is domestic violence and child care — and everything else is really men’s issues. So that’s something we’ve tried really hard to avoid at the Global Fund. We talk about a women’s rights perspective of advancing women’s rights and funding women’s rights to speak on and participate in any issue that may seem of concern to or that affects the realization of women’s rights. So for some women, that might be land issues. For some, that might be clean drinking water. For some women, it might be constitutional law in their country. For some women, it might be economic opportunity. For some, it might be child care, and for other situations, it might indeed be the issue of domestic violence. But in other cases, it could be making sure the 48 percent of women who are in the Rwandan Parliament are not just tokens but are really advancing a feminist agenda for all Rwandans, women and men. I think that’s really the way in which I would think about it.
So when we look at getting funded, why don’t we fund from that perspective? Why don’t we fund issues that include a women’s rights perspective? Or include women in leadership. That’s when we get into this question of can women be seen as leaders in the environmental field, in the health field, in the field of science and technology. And there I think is where women’s funds — whether it’s the Global Fund for Women, or many other women’s funds throughout the United States — are directed at correcting the deep imbalance in terms of women’s leadership in a variety of different issues.
Women’s ability to be seen and taken seriously, and have their voices heeded in the arenas of world politics and world economics, is incredibly important. Some of the most interesting work we’ve done in the last two or three years in our funding has been to African women’s groups who’ve been at the forefront of the African debt relief issue and at the forefront of what they see as the challenges African women face because of globalization. And they don’t see those as women’s issues, but what they’re demanding is that women have a seat at the table to discuss how those issues impact and affect women and why women want to be able to negotiate on the critical decisions that are made because they affect women and children so disproportionately.
If you ask women in Cambodia — the ones who work in factories sewing our jeans for Gap or Target or Levi Strauss — why they are mobilizing for increased participation of women in the union election, they’ll say to you it’s because when men get elected into senior positions in the union leadership, they are only interested in negotiating our wages. When women get elected into senior positions in union leadership, they are interested in negotiating a health care clinic on site for all our kids, and a child care center on site. And those are things that benefit us, collectively, our families as a whole, not just the individual worker. But those are the ways in which we think about labor rights. We’re not just focused on the narrow definition of wages so much as we are concerned about the overall conditions of work.
Coming back to the question of how you get funding for that perspective, I think that is actually really hard. Because I think most foundations will say to you that they don’t focus on special-interest groups. The problem is because our world is so unequal and because our voices have been ignored in critical decisions that affect all of us, if you don’t focus on, and if you don’t give grants to, initiatives in which women are leaders and in which women truly have a voice in decision-making, then you will actually run the risk of ending up excluding women.
Take job training programs, for example. You can have the most brilliant job training program in the world, but if women are not involved in its design, very rarely will it take into account what women’s flexible hours need to be or the fact that there needs to be a child care center on site or the fact that women might need transportation or the fact that where that job training center is located might be unsafe for women to go to, and therefore they don’t come. And then people might say, It was open to both men and women, but women just didn’t come.
That’s because women’s realities were never factored in when designing this job training center. You cannot hope to reach the poor in this or any other country if you have a “gender-blind” strategy in your grantmaking. You will simply be unable to reach a really important constituency. We saw the same thing in all the emergency aid relief after Hurricane Katrina or after the 2004 tsunami disaster. You have fantastic aid programs. They’re bringing all this stuff. Well, it turns out nobody remembers to bring sanitary towels or supplies. Nobody remembers that women need to have separate places where they can have some privacy to change. Nobody remembers that women might be uncomfortable coming forward and speaking with a male aid worker. Or talking to a male health worker about reproductive health problems. And those are the ways in which there has been a failure to bring a “feminist” perspective. This perspective is lacking in most mainstream philanthropy. When there’s that huge lack, then even the most wonderful, generous programs will not be as effective as they could be because they fail to reach a significant portion of the population they’re trying to serve.
So what you’re saying is “gender-blind” strategies aren’t gender blind at all. In the end, they help to reinforce the status quo.
Exactly. I think that’s a really big contribution that the women’s funds have made in this country. I think they still struggle. They have a very small portion of the total amount of philanthropic dollars in the United States to give away, but I think what they do is so important, because they are really among the very few philanthropic institutions in the U.S. that do bring a feminist perspective to their work and that do make it possible for women in their organizations to survive and to thrive.
It’s not that different in other parts of the world. I was recently in the UK meeting with women’s organizations there. And they were saying the same thing about how hard it is for them to get funded. They gave examples of African women in the United Kingdom who were seeking asylum and who had been victims of rape. They simply wouldn’t talk to the male social workers who were assigned to them by the UK social services agencies. But the mainstream philanthropic response is that women’s organizations aren’t needed to do that work with refugees because a refugee program already exists.
So people think they’re getting at the women’s rights issue by dealing with other areas.
Right. And there’s also that issue of women being seen as a special interest group. It’s really bizarre to be the majority of the world’s population and be treated as though you are an additional, burdensome group that mainstream programs have to think about all the time. That’s quite alarming, but it’s the truth of what it’s like all over the world. I can give you examples ad nauseam. One of the major reasons that African girls drop out of school after fifth grade is so many of them start getting their periods and there are no latrines. And girls are embarrassed. They haven’t got any place to go to change their pad. And their parents are embarrassed for them, so they won’t send them. That’s a pretty simple issue to solve, especially when two-thirds of the population of kids who are out of school in the world are girls.
What will it take for people to understand that women’s rights issues are human rights issues?
I really think all social movements for change do take time and do take persistent and determined work. That was true for the abolitionist movement, obviously, and that was true for the civil rights movement, and I think it’s true for the women’s rights movement. I think that to be seen as a legitimate effort and struggle in the context of a world that for whatever sets of reasons has pretty much been patriarchal in every culture, in every religion and in every tradition, will take a huge amount of work — will take the incremental steps, two steps forward and one step back. There will be backlashes, which I think we’ve seen with the reemergence of fundamentalism around the world. But I think in the end, a group of people who simply refuses to accept that this is their lot in life and this is all that they can aspire to will in fact prevail. As Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
And I think the women’s movement is more than a small group at this point. Internationally, the women’s movement is a truly remarkable force for change, and it has achieved many things since the first stirrings for suffrage. New Zealand was the first country to give women the vote in 1893. That’s just over 100 years ago. (So we say it’s not an accident that the Global Fund was founded by a New Zealander.)
This is a very young movement, and there’s a lot to do, but I think there is a great amount of determination with actors in so many different parts of the world. The unequal treatment that they currently have in most societies is not acceptable to them anymore. They’re not willing to be quiet. They’re not willing to just put up with it. They are demanding changes. And they’re making changes. In some ways, we can say there’s such a long way to go, but in other ways, we can say it’s actually pretty remarkable that you could have a woman like Shirin Ebadi in a country like Iran. It is pretty remarkable that you could have someone like Wangari Maathai in a place like Kenya, where traditionally women have had such little voice in decision-making. It is amazing that a country like India was headed by a woman prime minister for 20 years. Those are significant steps, and those are steps that the women’s movement can take credit for. This call for women’s rights is a call that isn’t going to be given up anytime soon.
