The poverty puzzle - again
Yesterday I posted about an incredible book I just read called “I Shall Not Hate” by Izzulden Abuelaish. It’s incredible because it was written by an incredible man who, despite everything, still manages not to hate. But this post isn’t about the book, except to say go read it.
What I want to talk about is what the book motivated me to do. After reading the book, and gaining a much greater insight into the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, I wanted to do something. Of course, one of the most powerful things you can ever do for a cause you care about is to tell people. In our ever-connected world, the telling people part is made about as easy as possible. And I’m telling people, don’t worry about that. But then I decided I wanted to do more.
Coincidentally, I got an e mail yesterday saying that my kiva loan had been paid back. About 6 months ago I lent some money through kiva to a woman’s group in Senegal, and yesterday, they paid me back. “Great,” I thought, I can now lend this money to a Palestinian woman who is looking for a loan.
According to Kiva, since 2005 they have leant $275 million in loans around the world, and there are thousands of people at any one time looking for a loan on kiva. Thousands.
Naively, I thought I’d be able to lend money to any number of Palestinian women. But when it came time to look through all the loans and choose, all I saw was a wall of male faces. In fact, there was not a single woman looking for a loan on her own.
In the end I chose to fund the only female face I saw, who was a woman pictured with her husband. She runs a grocery store, and wants a loan to increase her produce so she can sell more. Apparently, her husband has a stable job, but there is always need for more income.
So I lent money to this woman’s grocery shop, but was left feeling a bit depressed. This only got worse when I looked at the overall kiva loans and saw that there are about 1,500 men looking for loans, versus 500 women.
And yet another piece of the poverty puzzle becomes blatantly obvious once again. We will never be able to eradicate extreme poverty when women are being excluded from education, and earning an income.
