feckless canopy activism

Big efforts that failed - the campaign in the 1970s and 1980s against FGM and the missions by Westerners to Afghanistan with the lofty goal of empowering women - fell short because they were decreed by foreigners high up in the treetops. Local people were consulted only in a perfunctory manner. The impulse of Westerners to hold conferences and change laws has, on one issues after another, proved remarkably ineffective. As Mary Robinson, the former Irish president who later served as a terrific UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has said: "Count up the results of fifty years of human rights mechanisms, thirty years of multi-billion-dollar development programs and endless high-level rhetoric, and the global impact is quite underwhelming. This is a failure of implementation on a scale which shames us all."

In contrast, look at some of the projects that have made a stunning difference: Tostan, Kashf, Grameen, the CARE project in Burundi, BRAC, the Self Employed Women's Association in India, Apne Aap. The common thread is that they are grassroots projects with local ownership, sometimes resembling social or religious movements more than traditional aid projects. Often they have been propelled by exceptionally bright and driven entrepreneurs who had encountered the "treetops" efforts and modified them to create far more effective bottom-up models. That is a crucial way froward for a new movement focusing on women in the developing world.

- Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky