Headline January 20, 2018/ '' 'WOMEN'S -WAVES- WEAVES' ''

'' 'WOMEN'S -WAVES- WEAVES' ''

''FOUNDER AQSA, WHAT PRECISELY are you up to?'' and...... 'Zilli, can you - most discreetly,  check out this statistic for me, please?' ''

That by the way is me, having my very regular conversation and early morning briefing with one of the world's top genius, the Head of the Research on The World Students Society, Zilli

THERE'S NOTHING FAIR in this world. Beyond interpersonal relations development policies need to address the underlying conditions that produce poverty and inequality.

These include unfair global trade policies, insufficient labour and environmental regulations, and systems of corporate taxation that leave poor countries without the resources necessary to invest in agriculture, education, health and infrastructure.

These factors leave girls and women disproportionately responsible for the survival their families and communities, while transferring the burden of responsibility away from the governments, corporations and global governance. 

YET THE GHOST STATISTIC should be a cautionary tale.

Even when quantitative data are valid, they often produce very limited understandings of the complex realities of women's and girls lives and the conditions that produce poverty and inequality.

These simply cannot be captured by a trial or a survey alone. The Gates Foundation spokesperson for example, sent me recent studies showing that investing in women is a highly effective development intervention.

Among them was Duncan Thomas's paper demonstrating that as the spokesperson put it, '' maternal income increased family nutrition by 4 -7 times more than the income of fathers,'' and that ''child survival had a highly positive relation to unearned income of mothers, and that effect is 20 times larger compared to fathers.''

Unlike the ghost statistic, these results are reliable. But they don't simply reveal that that ''when  women have access and control over the household income, they are more likely than men to invest in the health and welfare of their families,'' as the spokesperson wrote me.

They reveal a shocking depth of gender inequality at the level of the household.

The rapid expansion of conditional-cash-transfer and microfinance programs around the world, such as BolsaFamilia, in Brazil and the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Grameen Bank, in Bangladesh, is based on the idea that giving money to women rather than men leads to significantly higher development returns.

Yet critical feminist scholars have demonstrated that these programs employ a feminized logic of development that has been shown to shift the burden of development onto poor girls and women, who are expected to solve a laundry list of problems.

In her new book ''Unjust Conditions,'' Tara Cookson reveals that conditional-cash-transfer program in Peru had significant ''hidden costs'' for mothers, who were required to overcome time-wasting barriers to access public services and meet local authorities' coercive demands.

The feminist scholars Ananya Roy and Lamia Karim have similarly demonstrated that popular microfinance programs, such as Grameen Bank, often have adverse effects on the women they intend to serve, including increased debt and domestic violence.

For Cookson and Lorena Fuentes, of the feminist research consultancy Ladysmith, ''the gender data gap is also qualitative.'' Closing it also requires engaging with women's accounts of their own lives and drawing on decades of feminist knowledge about the root causes of poverty and inequality.

If we continue creating global-development policies based on the story that women are more likely than men to invest in their families, we will not transform the inequitable gender relations that make these statistics true.

We will capitalize on these inequalities-and potentially exacerbate them for the sake of development return.

As the novelist ChimamandaNgoziAdichie has warned, this is ''danger of a single story,'' which produces homogenized portrayals of people, places, and their possibilities.

We need to support women and their families, and we also interventions to transform the patriarchal relations between men and women that enable these statistics to be true.

The Honor and serving of the latest Global Operational Research on Women and Sufferings and Empowerment, continues.

With respectful and loving dedication to all the Girl-Students, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all  prepare for Great Global Elections and ''register'' on : wssciw.blogspot.com -The World Students Society and Twitter - E-!WOW! - the Ecosystem 2011:

''' Wastes & Wants '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless