IndiaPost.com - Liberating women, one grant at a time

India Post News Service

NEW YORK: Pursuing your personal convictions of seeing a world free of gender inequality and furthering the movement of philanthropic feminism comes easy, perhaps, if you are the daughter of Lalita and Admiral L. Ramdas. Admiral Ramdas, former Chief of the Indian Navy, took to social activism post his retirement.

And Lalita Ramdas, if you don’t already know, is a renowned Indian educator and activist whose lifelong work as a human rights and environmental activist put her among the 1000 women worldwide who were short listed for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. Proving worthy of her upbringing by such illustrious parents, is Kavita N. Ramdas, President and CEO of the Global Fund for Women, a US-based global women’s movement.

Kavita provides leadership and direction for the largest grant making foundation in the world focused exclusively on supporting international women’s human rights. During her tenure, GFW assets have increased from $6 million to $21 million; and grant making has risen to more than $7 million per year, and the number of countries in which the Global Fund has made grants has nearly tripled. "I was very lucky to have a family that supported my sense of personal conviction," Kavita told India Post while talking about her choice of work.

"But I didn’t think it was such a big deal or particularly courageous thing to do, it was something me and my siblings were expected to do." Her choice of social justice work for a day job comes from being exposed at a very impressionable age to her mother’s own radicalization over social imbalances. Kavita’s mother could not walk over people sleeping on the pavement to reach her posh apartment in Mumbai without asking why something so callous should be tolerated.

And as a child, Kavita realized that every privilege she took for granted was not real anymore. More than 10 years since she began working through the GFW, Kavita is still fighting to change governmental and corporate attitude towards marginalized women – to have them recognized as potential leaders and decision makers and not just as objects of charity.

The Global Fund for Women was founded by Anne Firth Murray in Palo Alto, California, to address the lack of funding for women activists worldwide. From the beginning the GFW was international in flavor, explains Kavita. "It was never an American organization trying to do things for the rest of the world. It was really influenced by people who saw the struggles that women face—struggles that are global in nature." And thus began a movement to change the understanding of philanthropy and advancing women’s human rights.

"It is a combination of these two different missions. On the one hand we are trying to change the notion of philanthropy as something only the wealthy people can participate in to something in which all of us have a chance to participate in. And on the other hand we are saying that if you really want to change this world into a better, fairer, more equal world, then it cannot be done without the participation of women, who form 51 percent of the world’s population.

In war torn countries like Afghanistan and Rwanda, women are almost 65 percent of the population, Kavita points out. "So if you exclude that section of the society and systematically oppress them and deny them full rights or economic opportunities, then in the long run, the outcomes won’t the best that you can hope for." The issue is the immense resistance to investing in women, Kavita points out. "If you look closely how major philanthropic dollars go, very few actually go to women-led organizations.

There is a notion of women as subjects of charity but not as objects or as agents of their own change. And that is what we at GFW are trying to shift." Most philanthropic organizations are based more on amelioration strategies than on strategies that will effect fundamental change, says Kavita. "In that sense the kind of grant making that GFW does is based on human rights, which is inherently political — not party-based politics, but in that it fundamentally asks for a shift in the balance of power. That means it isn’t just a question of building a house for these needy women or giving them a malaria net, or providing a small income generating opportunity.

It means raising their awareness, encouraging them to mobilize and organize themselves." Ideals apart, Kavita does not claim the GFW has magic solutions or that it will make a profound difference to the world. "But what we can say is that if these grants are given to groups who are asking questions, they have at least the possibility of strengthening alternative voices in societies where either the government or the private sector has tended to be a dominant voice," she says.

"So these grants to women’s organizations whether it’s a girl child network in Zimbabwe or a group of Rwandan women running for parliament or it’s a group of Afghan women trying to run schools or whether it’s a group of women trying to raise awareness about reproductive freedom of Roma women in Slovania, the only thing you can really hope for, is that for those particular women their lives will change, and you can hope for a ripple effect on society at large," she adds. Kavita, who was recently asked to serve on an advisory panel of the Gates Foundation’s work on global development, says that as a fierce critic of such huge corporate foundations, she was quite surprised to find that the Gates too were working towards policy change at governmental level rather than merely write out charitable checks.

"Melinda Gates recently said that no matter how many billions of dollars we have, unless the US government changes its policies on some of the issues, there will never be any real impact. So, its not a question of how much money you can throw at the problem… the question is, are we going to think of a radical way of organizing our society, sharing resources and distributing wealth." As the Global Fund for Women completes 20 years this year, Kavita envisions it to continue to be a catalyst not only through its grants, but also be a catalyst for the philanthropic community. "We want to change the way these big corporate philanthropists approach their work," she says.

While advocating equal rights and opportunities for women, Kavita admits that even feminists do not have every answer to how it can be achieved. "At the risk of being simplistic I do believe that you can start this change at home by treating your son and daughter equally," she says, adding that every individual can make a difference.

Less than a century ago, Kavita reminds everyone, Alice Paul was considered an insane woman for fighting for the American women’s right to vote. "But her success is what makes the US what it is today. Without that, the US wouldn’t be much different from Saudi Arabia."