The renowned Catalogue for Philanthropy has recently announced that Women Thrive Worldwide is “one of the best nonprofits in the Washington, D.C. region” for 2012. The honor is given to charities that have been selected for “excellence, cost-effectiveness, and impact,” says Barbara Harman, President and Editor of the Catalogue for Philanthropy: Greater Washington.
This award shows that you can invest in us with confidence, and that every dollar you donate stretches further to help women farmers lift themselves and their families out of poverty. For more information on Women Thrive's latest honor, please click here.
If you are interested in helping Women Thrive do more, check out our new project fighting gender based violence (GBV). Violence is an issue that affects women and girls worldwide, and is particularly harmful for rural women farmers. If women are not safe in the fields, marketplaces, or even in their own homes, they will be unable to effectively use the agricultural resources that aid programs provide. Violence must be stopped to truly eradicate hunger and poverty.
Thank you for all your support!
On July 10, 2012, DuPont launched its new Global Food Security Index, an online interactive tool to examine food availability, affordability, quality and safety in 105 countries around the world. The Index will measure the impact of investments and will promote collaboration between world leaders and civil society organizations to address one of the most pressing issues of our time—feeding a growing world population.
Ritu Sharma, co-founder and president of Women Thrive Worldwide, spoke at the event, alongside other food security and international development experts like Howard Buffett, farmer and founder of the Howard Buffett Foundation, Dr. Rajiv Shah, administrator of USAID, and Dr. Patrick Westhoff, director at Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute. As the only female guest speaker, Ritu ensured that women and girls, who make up the majority of small-scale farmers, were not forgotten in this important discussion. For instance, Ritu asserted that agricultural technologies must be easy for women to adopt in order to truly reduce food insecurity.
It is because of supporters like you that the voices of women and girls are not ignored. Thank you! If you are inspired to do more to help women and girls feed the world, you can:
Ritu Sharma, Co-Founder and President of Women Thrive Worldwide, was featured recently as ABC's Working Woman. Please view the video link here: http://www.wjla.com/articles/2012/06/ritu-sharma-combating-global-abuse-against-women-76553.html
In the clip, you hear a bit about her experiences of living on less than $2 a day in places like Burkina Faso and Guatemala, and how Women Thrive is trying to change the world to make it better for all people, particularly women and girls.
“It's about really seeing the dignity and honor in every person, male or female, black or white, rich or poor, that all people deserve our respect,” Ritu said.
Please watch, share, and let us know what you think by commenting on this report!
Best,
Mei Powers
Manager, Organizational Advancement
Links:
Father’s Day is June 17, and we are looking for more good men to join the movement in empowering women worldwide.
Please listen to this two-minute interview with Compaore Koudougou, a husband, farmer, and father of 13 in Burkina Faso: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekzmwzwTNds&list=PL0CE3E8821867E235&index=7&feature=plpp_video. Compaore shares how empowering women (e.g. by providing them with training and greater access to resources) can help men and women better provide for their families and increase crop production to help feed the world.
Getting “buy-in” from men like Compaore is important to ensure that the entire community has a stake in successful outcomes for programs directed at women. This was also revealed in our “Time to Listen Report,” which surveyed and interviewed over 100 women’s organizations from 13 countries.
Too often women's empowerment, women's economic opportunity, and women's rights are seen as a women's issue. As a women's organization, Women Thrive is unique in that we advocate for change at the U.S. and global levels so that women and men can share equally in the enjoyment of opportunities, economic prosperity, voice, and freedom from fear and violence. And we recognize that to achieve sustainable change, we need to engage women and men.
For Father's day, will you help us engage more good men? You can do so by:
- Sharing our project page via email, Facebook, or Twitter and/or
- Making a donation in honor of a special man that has been a warrior for women here. GlobalGiving will send a tribute card via mail or email.
At Women Thrive Worldwide, we believe by partnering with and championing local women leaders, we are able to achieve transformational and sustainable change for women and girls around the world that lasts long after our partnerships end. This is why we partnered with organizations like the Development Action Association (DAA) in Ghana and Coalition Burkinabe des Droits des Femmes (CBDF) in Burkina Faso.
Through these partnerships, Women Thrive provided intensive advocacy training, just-in-time information on relevant changes in D.C., and strategic guidance to help our local partners refine their advocacy messages, identify targets, and strategize to make appropriate “asks” of policymakers. We also worked with CBDF and DAA to raise the voices of African rural women to key platforms and audiences, including Members of Congress, the Millennium Challenge Account coordinating body in Burkina Faso (MCA-BF), Ghana’s Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA), and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
As a result, these local organizations, CBDF and DAA, have demonstrated increased awareness of, influence over, and collaboration with U.S government-funded programs and their countries’ policy processes. Additionally, CBDF and DAA have established themselves as local experts on gender, and women are increasingly represented in important programming decisions that will impact their lives.
Madame Maryam Sirima, coordinator of CBDF, agrees: “This partnership between CBDF and Women Thrive Worldwide will be very useful to my country and the women of Burkina Faso. This is something that is going to help build our advocacy activities and help us promote our fight on gender issues as far as the Compact [agreement with Millennium Challenge Corpoation designating $480.9 million for reducing poverty and spurring economic growth] is concerned. The Compact should not exclude women, so this will help CBDF to get stronger so that we can help get women out of poverty. “
A recent external evaluation of Women Thrive’s partnerships with CBDF and DAA confirmed the importance and impact of our work. The report found that with the help of Women Thrive, CBDF and DAA have achieved “significant success in influencing policy change among the institutions, national and U.S., that were the object of their advocacy efforts” and that these changes “meant greater opportunities for women.”
Your contribution has been critical in supporting Women Thrive’s global partnerships. Help us continue to ground our work in the realities of women living in poverty, to partner with locally based organizations, and to create powerful coalitions that advance the interests of the women and girls we serve by:
Click the link for a full video of the 2010 interview with Madame Sirima:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4c9WeI0Gw4s&feature=relmfu
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