Print
Share
Girls Still Count
January 14, 2011
Today Miriam Temin and I responded to a critique of Nike’s “Girl Effect” campaign posted on William Easterly’s AIDWATCH blog (check it out here).
As our readers know, Miriam and former Senior Fellow Ruth Levine co-authored the reports Girls Count and Start With A Girl: A New Agenda for Global Health in 2009, arguing that the cycle of neglect of girls’ rights, poor health and education indicators, meager economic options, and the generation-to-generation transmission of poverty can be broken by focused investments in policies and programs that meet girls’ needs. These arguments were simplified in a Nike Foundation campaign video that quickly went viral on the internet.
You’d think this would be relatively uncontroversial, given the strength and extent of the underlying evidence. But Anna Carella’s critique on AIDWATCH has been plenty popular with 40 comments (a lot in aid-blog-world!). So we jumped into the fray. Join us!
One Response to “Girls Still Count”
Post a Comment
We value frank and constructive exchanges and encourage you to use your real name in your comments.
January 19th, 2011 at 8:47 am
Effective development needs both enthusiasts *and* critics : Enthusiasts to believe things can be done, but also critics because even the best intents can go wrong in at least some ways.
I believe it’s not a fair description of Anna Carella’s message to imply she said something like investments focused on girls should be stopped altogether. I think she was worried we could get into a situation where, at some specific place, investments focused on girl would be be almost the only kind of investment made, and that would not be the right thing to do.
Was she right to be worried about that ? If it’s correct that today only 5% of aid goes to adolescent girls, probably not.
But has the situation of over-investing only on one thing, forgetting everything else, until we get to non-sense situation never happened in aid ? Certainly not.
I can think of the specific example of the AIDS/Tuberculosis situation in South Africa. Huge founds were available for AIDS but meanwhile the TB patients were dying by the tens of thousands with almost no money available for their treatments, next to brand new hospitals that were available *only* for AIDS patients.