To Kavita Ramdas, women’s philanthropy is more than giving money to good causes; it is listening to what women in other cultures define as good causes.
“If you approach philanthropy from a place of humility and respect, you really have an opportunity to be part of social change, not saying, `We have the money so we have the answer,’ ” she said.
The Global Fund for Women, of which Ramdas is president and CEO, has the money. The San Francisco-based foundation will give more than 400 grants totaling $4.5 million this year.
But the fund, the only U.S.-based philanthropy that focuses exclusively on women’s groups overseas, takes the firm view that it is women themselves who have the answers.
“For women in Afghanistan, taking off the burqa is not a priority,” said, Ramdas, who was in Chicago over the weekend to speak at the annual conference of the Women’s Funding Network. “Sending their daughters to school is. And they ran secret schools in their homes to do it.”
It was a shrewd priority to have, she added. Challenging the burqa under the Taliban would probably have resulted in more women dying, while secretly educating girls helped create a generation of young women ready to pursue their independence.
The Global Fund for Women supports programs around the world that seek to improve women’s and girls’ lives. Among the groups it funded last year were one that taught leadership and health care skills to Sudanese women in exile; another that supported rural women radio announcers in Togo, Africa; and an organization that counseled and taught professional needle-working skills to war-haunted women in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Some of its grants address religious and cultural traditions that both play a positive role in women’s self-esteem and make women vulnerable to discrimination and abuse. They support programs that “protect female human rights while preserving cultural identity,” according to the fund.
The ideas for the programs come from women and girls, sometimes in the form of a simple letter. A group of teenage girls who ran away from their town in Uganda to avoid genital mutilation wrote to the Global Fund asking for help waging their own style of battle against the practice.
“They wrote to us, `We want you to understand; we are not against our culture. We want money to use to buy a van to go back to the village and talk to our mothers, our sisters and our elders about why we want to stay in school, and whether we can find another [coming-of-age] ceremony,’ ” said Ramdas, 39, an intense and effusive veteran activist and philanthropist.
The Global Fund gave the girls about $5,000; three years later, she said, the village’s elders ended the practice.
Female genital mutilation is tied to economics, she said. Indeed, Ramdas considers economic independence one of the two most urgent issues for women around the world.
The other, she said, is violence, both inside and outside the home.
Ramdas was born in India, but was raised in various spots around the world as her family traveled with her father, who served in the Indian navy. She became head of the Global Fund after working for eight years in Chicago on issues of U.S. poverty and economic development as a program officer at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
The Global Fund for Women was started in 1987 by three Palo Alto women who put up $500 each. Its Silicon Valley roots–David Packard and William Hewlett were founding donors–give it an entrepreneurial willingness to give grants to untested, unknown groups with nothing but a promising idea, Ramdas said.
