Business Lunch

This being International Development Week, as declared by the Canadian International Development Agency, we've been organizing various promotional activities at work, and attending events put on by other development organizations here in the city.

Today, one of my work colleagues and I got to attend a luncheon at one of the hotels downtown. I don't often get included in invitations to these sort of events, so it made for a nice change. It ended up being really interesting - the theme of this year's IDW is gender equality, so there were three guest speakers at the luncheon, all of whom were really interesting. There was a woman from the Caribbean, who works as a legal advocate and talked about issues of domestic violence and female poverty there. Next, the Vice-President of CIDA's Americas Branch (who is visiting Halifax from Ottawa this week) gave a presentation on what Canada is doing in South/Latin America and the Caribbean, particularly when it comes to aiding poor women. The last speaker was the best, however - a Guatemalan woman now based here, who talked about gender inequality in Latin America and where foreign governmental aid agencies are falling down in their efforts - made for a useful counterpoint to the official spiel of the CIDA VP.

There were three pieces of important, sobering information I learned today that stuck with me. I thought I'd better blog about them before I forget about them:

1. Studies in Brazil have shown conclusively that women who attend primary school for as little as three years have on average three children, nearly all of whom go on to undertake at least a little primary schooling of their own. In contrast, Brazilian women with no primary schooling have on average six children, nearly all of whom end up illiterate themselves and work from a very young age. Astonishing how even a taste of education goes a long way towards empowering the poor.

2. More women around the world die each year as a result of rape and domestic violence, than are killed by breast cancer, cervical cancer, motor vehicle and work accidents and warfare combined.

3. Women perform two-thirds of the world's labour and produce half the world's food, yet earn only 10% of global income and own less than 1% of the world's land.