Kavita Ramdas: For Love of the World

In Kandahar, on International Women's Day, women clad in light blue scarves gathered publicly to pray for peace. In India, the Consortium of Pub-Going, Loose and Forward Women organized a pink underwear campaign. Medea Benjamin and Alice Walker, aided by Egyptian First Lady Suzanne Mubarak, crossed into Gaza; Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf cohosted a women's conference with Finland's President Tarja Halonen.

How to reconcile these acts of solidarity with suffering and isolation in places such as Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, and Iraq? Darfur and Eastern Congo?

"I derive a great deal of hope from the fact that the reason we commemorate International Women's Day is because women have continued to breathe and continued to resist," says Kavita Ramdas, president and CEO of the Global Fund for Women.

"Yes, the horrors of what is happening to women in so many parts of the world are real and haven't gone away," she says. "But the reason to take the time and celebrate the accomplishments of women is not to say that our work is done, but to acknowledge what we have achieved, what we share together, and the sense of being connected to one another."

The Global Fund for Women, over the past 20 years, has awarded more than $71 million to roughly 3,800 women's organizations in 167 countries. In a world where women make up 51% of the population, constitute 70% of people living in poverty, and hold 1% of the world's assets, less than 6% of total philanthropic resources go to women and girls, according to the Foundation Center.

As a scholar and longtime activist from a prominent Indian family of intellectuals and peace activists, Ramdas is a woman who has navigated the morass of global power and politics, militarization, and human rights. She has an optimism of the will and the vision to disaggregate and contest discourses of tyranny. She has the compassion to understand the despair and pain of others, the injustices of the disenfranchised.

When lecturing, she might sing a joyful song or be soberly analytical. She has received many awards for her human rights work, and she sits on several international boards and councils, including the Global Development Program Advisory Panel of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the African Women's Millennium Initiatives on Poverty and Human Rights. She joined the Global Fund for Women in 1996, after working in the Community Initiatives Program at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Ways of Seeing
With the U.S. economy fallen off a cliff, according to financier Warren Buffett; and some people looking askance at Milton Friedman and tilting toward Marx, perhaps an answer to what ails economies isn't a bailout of the status quo, but what the Global Fund for Women has been saying for years: invest in women-their health, education, empowerment, and economic security; ensure their full equality and participation in society.

"Women have to ask themselves: ‘What is it we are struggling to be equal to? Opportunistic killers? Torturers in the military?'" says Ramdas. "We want the equal right to question the status quo. To ask ourselves different questions: ‘What is this game where half the world is living on less than $2 a day? What is this game where women are not allowed to have a voice, where the GDP doesn't include women's labor? And what is this game where men and women have to be organized in such a way into a productive work force that neither have time to spend raising children?'"

According to Ramdas, philanthropy as the redistribution of privately gained wealth toward public good can't legitimize or make up for the huge gaps between the haves and have-nots. Despite philanthropy's inherent contradictions, Ramdas won't dismiss it as just "how the wealthy deal with their guilty conscience."

"We at the Global Fund for Women are struck by the fact that the money we are able to raise, whether from the Gates or Ford Foundation, or from individual donors of little means-when we can get that money into the hands of women in local communities-such extraordinary things can happen.

"People like the Gateses and Warren Buffett are asking themselves questions that are leading them to be more engaged in the public good. Maybe not with the same analysis or in ways others are looking at the world, but on some gut level, they are saying to themselves, ‘something is really wrong when children are dying from malaria, tuberculosis, and diphtheria, and my annual income is larger than seven countries' GDP.' You can't deny this engagement with the public good in that sense, and also can't say that philanthropy is useless, self-serving, and perpetuating capital enterprise."

Things Fall Apart
In the recent past, Ramdas says, there's been a feeling in the U.S. of being under constant siege from Bush and "the bad guys out there who hate our way of life and who any minute could be coming to bomb us." Now the insecurity is more economic; the fear is loss of jobs.

"That is a perfect environment in which you see anti-immigration sentiment rising, in which you see notions of Otherness being defined. We know this from every experience of economic crisis where violence against women gets exacerbated, where notions of masculinity become hypermasculinized."

What then might an academic institute be teaching, and what kind of questions should students be asking? "I am sort of old-fashioned in that I still believe that old maxim of ‘question authority' is the best thing you can teach your students.

I think again how education plays out at a given moment in time," she says. "We're not in a very pretty place right now to say, ‘We elected Obama, so now it's gonna be great.' Even those of us who are the most likely to see ourselves as global citizens, in times of crisis like this, tend to go back to our tribes, to our people, to our knowns. The implications for education are profound."

Hold Everything Dear
Ramdas calls for a mindfulness, for a reaching out, for a building of alliances across social movements and differences, for collective and personal responsibility. She has evidenced a kind of participatory philanthropy in a year that has seen a big drop in foundation grants, but an increase in individual donations.

"People wrote and said they were giving because they thought women would need more support now. "It's interesting," she says, "that in these difficult times, when we are coming from a place of scarcity, it's important to remember that this world really has more than enough of everything we need."

Still, Ramdas is anxious about raising money. "I have this mantra, which Gandhi used to always say, that if the cause is right, the means will come. So in my bleakest moments I just say that again and again," she says, smiling. "The notion of resistance, in and of itself, is that you keep breathing."