I was not in Beijing in September 1995, but it still changed my life and my mission. I had helped our founding president Joan Holmes prepare her statement (click here) based on our field experience to date and – as we had at the Third Women’s Conference in Nairobi in 1985 – we sent a wonderful delegation along with Joan: women from India, Bangladesh and Africa.
Part way through the conference, Joan sent through a message that all of us at headquarters should gather in the conference room to be on the phone with the team. Joan’s message was quite short but very direct – “This will change everything. I don’t know how, but it will. And — you guys (meaning the males on the phone) — you are going to need to come to terms with it.”
We had know from The Hunger Project’s inception that gender discrimination was a tremendously important aspect of hunger and poverty — but in Beijing our team began to realize it was not merely important, it was fundamental. From Joan’s comments on the phone, it was interacting with women from Kosovo who had been victims of rape as weapon of war. What kind of society would do such a thing? And how can we transform it?
Here then – on the 20th anniversary of Beijing+20 – the UN Secretary General has declared the slow progress since Beijing as “Collective Failure of Leadership.” Beijing, after all, set the norm once and for all that women’s rights are human rights, and human rights are women’s rights. And those rights are still being violated.
In these twenty years, The Hunger Project has completely re-invented its programs so that our highest priority would be to catalyze a profound transformation in the unjust gender power relations that gives rise to hunger and extreme poverty.