Neo-Missionaries and the Polemics of Helping
Despite the existence of extreme wealth on our planet, billions of persons remain desperately poor. Almost half of humanity – over 3 billion people – lives on less than US$2.50 a day. Nearly half of the world’s 2.2 billion children live in poverty. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 22,000 children under the age of five die each day due to poverty-related conditions. One-quarter of the world’s population lacks electricity, and water problems affect half of the people on Earth. 1 Women suffer a disproportionate share of the burdens of poverty. Hundreds of millions of women are living in peril. Women lack access to healthcare. The United Nations estimates that providing reproductive healthcare globally would cost about US$12 billion (less than the amount spent on pet food in the US and Europe), yet funding is lacking, and women continue to die from preventable diseases and circumstances associated with pregnancy and childbirth. Widespread and systematic discrimination against women contributes to the occurrence of domestic violence and its associated damages. The fate of humanity and the protection of the environment are intimately linked to the health and strength of women, and yet hundreds of millions of women live in embattled circumstances. That so many women are in trouble means we all are. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide focuses on the plight of women and calls for action “to battle gender inequity around the world and to push for education and opportunities for girls around the world” (Kristof and WuDunn 2009, 233). While their missive on the struggles women face is informative and important, the prescriptions Kristof and WuDunn preach are counter-productive. In short, Kristof and WuDunn get the problem right but the solution wrong. The strength of this work is its careful attention to the (largely preventable) harsh and often lethal conditions women face. Its crucial weakness is the call for individual, charitable cash contributions. This is a significant error. Examining the ways in which Kristof and WuDunn succeed in discussing the problem, but ultimately proscribe the wrong solution, is a useful strategy to interrogate the broader polemics of humanitarianism in the era of neoliberalism. Kristof and WuDunn have ample empirical evidence to discuss suffering. In chapter after chapter, each rich in anecdotes of specific women and their problems, the authors illuminate the struggles women face to survive. Kristof and WuDunn’s narratives offer a useful education on the hardships women face. Inadequate healthcare means women die from otherwise preventable diseases. As they note, it is important to know that “MMR”