Thousands of development thinkers, practitioners and advocates are assembled in New York City this week to attend the U.N. Summit on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Clinton Global Initiative. Many eloquent words will be spoken and commitments made.
There will be lots of talk about the progress made, which is considerable in some cases, as well as the significant shortfalls in some MDGs. There will be calls for more funding, for greater attention to innovation and sustainability, and for new and improved ways to provide aid. New initiatives will be announced. There will also be calls to invest more in girls and women.
All of these are significant and essential. But, they aren't sufficient in themselves. I am particularly concerned that the call to invest more in girls and women will not reach far enough. It must be more than investing in women as beneficiaries and more than allocating resources to issues of prime importance to women such as family planning, maternal health, girls' education and micro-finance.
Investing in girls and women should also be a means of empowering them and putting them at the center of the development debate. They should be at the table when political leaders and donors define how new funds will be allocated -- and how the new aid architecture will be implemented. Women should be at the policy table when development assistance allocation decisions are made -- and when the funds are spent. This is especially true for the U.S. Administration's new Global Health Initiative and the Feed the Future Initiative, which are both are designed to be "women centered."
In CEDPA's decades of development work, we have seen repeatedly how the power of women's voices makes a difference. One of my favorite recent examples is in Bihar state in India. Through a program funded by the Packard Foundation, CEDPA India worked with rural women who had been elected to their village panchayats.
Most had been elected to serve in "reserved" seats and knew little of the roles they should play. Some had in fact run for office at the behest of their husbands -- and they were not truly independent actors. But, through the Pahel: Empowering Women Program that changed.
They were trained and quickly learned how to use their voices to ensure adequate attention to family health, equitable distribution of services within their communities and transparency of decision-making, which helped to root out corruption and abuses of power.
The changes in these women leaders and their communities are not unique to the Pahel program. Similar examples abound among CEDPA's 5,200 plus alumni from our various leadership and management training programs.
As the dialogue continues in New York, we applaud the focus on girls and women. But, we urge all the participants to push even harder to ensure that women are at the policy table when country priorities are defined and when government policymakers decide how funds are to be allocated and how programs are to be implemented. If women's voices are at the table -- and if they are heard and listened to -- we can all be sure that investments will be made in ways that enhance the likelihood of meeting the MDG's in 2015.
Certainly, we at CEDPA will do our part by mobilizing our network of alumni to seek ways in which they can be at that table.