Let’s show some luurrrve…. | It’s as simple as putting the biscuit in the basket

So it’s February 14th today, the first day of the year of the Tiger. It also happens to be the traditional greeting card company celebration of St Valentine’s day.

Valentines day is generally the day when men out there demonstrate their undying love for the lady in their life. Apparently, the rest of the year is not good enough to demonstrate this consumer driven emotion called love. So while we are feeling so generous on this day, perhaps I should take the opportunity of highlighting some other ladies who need some love directed their way.

I ofcourse am talking about girls and women in poor communities who are invisible to their societies and don’t get any opportunity thanks to good old fashioned oppression.

Here’s the breaking news – the overall role of women in society is very underrated. They perhaps perform more miracles on a daily basis than any other genius would. So why then do we choose to push women down in society? Why is it that the male HAS to be the alpha species?

Greg Mortenson [tweeted] a couple of days ago, about the [Girl Effect]; this is an initiative to help girls in poor communities gain education and necessary skills, which will help them raise the standard of living in their communities. You see – a woman essentially knits the community together. Traditionally she is the person to manage the household and manage the family; that would mean she is a central point to everyone from her husband, kids, parents, in-laws, and neighbours. If you could measure hard work on some scale, I think almost every woman with be on a level far superior to any equivalent male.

Perhaps this is why more than 95% of Grameen Bank’s borrowers are women [read this article]. Grameen Bank is a microfinance organisation in Bangladesh,and their business is based around disbursing loans of about USD300 on average. The reason why more loans are given to women compared to men is because under the former leadership in the country, huge emphasis was put on improving socio-economic conditions in Bangladesh, and the main driver for this was educating women in the rural or poor communities. As a result, the women have an improved belief in improving the community around them. The key driver here – education provided to the women!

After the recent earthquake in Haiti, a lot of food programs were encouraged to distribute specifically to women because they are more responsible in terms of managing, and distributing food supplies in the stricken communities. You can read more [here].

So, as you sit in front of your computer of phone screen, think about what you have done for Valentine’s day, and think about the greater good that you can do in the less fortunate communities. You can do something to help improve the situation in these communities by committing yourselves in some form to education projects, and how about starting off with Girl Effect.

Everyone in any community deserves to be loved; how about we show this by helping these folk stand side by side with each of us?!