Investing in Inspirational Women
Inspirational Women Make a Wise Investment
Popular media has started covering the many ways that women and girls excel – academically in theoretical and applied sciences, as collegiate and post-graduate students, and as business leaders just to name a few – creating a climate that is inspiring women to take new professional risks as. There has been a related swelling of support for “the case for investing in women.” Several blogs for women also note that, be it via microfinance lending in South Asia and parts of Africa, small business loans across the Western world, or political support for female political candidates in countries with emerging economies, investing capital in women is slowly gaining recognition as a wise choice.
From the perspective of family structure and human development, the basic logic is that anything that benefits the mother of a family will also benefit the children and the father if there is one. For example the Women’s Funding Network collected data showing that after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, rehabilitation and housing grants funneled through women’s organizations or targeting mothers was significantly more likely to help children and to be spread more equitably among parents and children.
Several organizations, including UN WOMEN, have referred to the same phenomenon and argued that investments that target women are directly correlated with the entire family having greater access to those resources. So economic security, education, health care, human rights, freedom from violence, and the enjoyment of a healthy environment are all things that trickle down from women to families, thus reaching children and constituting an investment in children that is likely to lose a far smaller percentage to personal waste or corruption.
As far as achieving developmental advancements in both a developing and developed-economy context, there are several efficiency advantages to targeting women. Women’s aid funds are roughly four times as likely to reach marginalized and low or no income earners as they are to reach all other income brackets combined. Women’s funds are also far more likely to target minorities and support diversity. And put most simply, 70 percent of the worlds hungry and poorest are female, while they make up the majority of those who produce food in developing worlds, yet represent only about one percent of the world’s landowners.
As members of the 2011 World Economic Forum in Switzerland all agreed, investing in women makes sound economical sense for capital owners, countries, and businesses. The global value of empowering women is clearly gaining much-deserved momentum.
