Digital development brings promise and challenges

August 4, 2014

5 min read

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Digital development brings promise and challenges

By Jennifer Brookland

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Children in Mtwara, Tanzania use ICT to enhance their reading skills. ICT4D principles encourage designers to work with them in mind.

Despite its relative youth, the digital development community has set forth nine Principles for Digital Development to overcome problems that have plagued the industry from the get-go.

Information and Communications Technology for Development (ICT4D) practitioners hope these “living guidelines” inform the design of technology-enabled development programs and help avoid common pitfalls: siloed initiatives, uncoordinated implementers, inflexible donors and an overabundance of unscaleable and unsustainable small projects.

A forum at Creative Associates International on July 31 engaged them in a discussion on Principle number one: Design with the user.

As a tenet, designing with the user elicits little controversy. But for implementers, it’s hard to actually employ.

“Designing for the user is simple in theory. Less so in practice,” says Panthea Lee, Lead Designer and Principal at social impact firm Reboot.

She says good examples from the private sector’s ability to pivot and respond to customer needs belie the complexity of doing the same thing in development.

“When we talk about user-centered design people often point to the private sector as having really good examples of how we should be doing it,” Lee says. “In the development space, we have to contend with multiple stakeholders, complex politics and environments we don’t always know very well.”

Let the user lead the way

To get to know those environments a whole lot better, Dianna Kane and her design team at Medic Mobile ask Nurse Mary, who works at an under-resourced clinic four hours from the nearest hospital.

Or Prudence, the pregnant woman who delivered her first three children at home and has no interaction with the healthcare system.

Mary and Prudence don’t exist in reality, per se, but they are two of four “user personas” the startup queries as it designs mobile health initiatives in 21 countries.

“We don’t start with technology, we start with people,” says Kane, Medic Mobile’s senior designer, who calls human-centered design as much a mindset as a methodology. “It takes a lot of complex issues and brings us back to the four of them. Their approval is how we measure success as a team.”

And, she says, it’s something you can’t fake. “We actually have to care about our users in order to gain meaningful insight that will transfer into tools.”

Medic Mobile also uses sketches, illustrated cards and role-playing to invite participation in the design process by the very people they hope will use the technology being developed. They take a look at the workarounds people are already using—prime clues as to where technological interventions might be embraced and impactful.

“We want Nurse Mary to feel like this was a platform designed for her,” says Kane. “And we want it to do the kinds of things she needs it to do to have a greater impact on her community.”

Getting donors on board

In this way a design with the user approach is explicitly geared toward serving users and not customers.

That can make it a lot trickier to “sell” to donors. It also means implementing partners who act without strong donor support for user-centered design assume a lot of risk.

“It’s really a scary thing for designers to go into a completely new set of users and have to promise something to donors,” says Kane.

Organizations rarely have flexible funding, and feel pressured to get things done quickly. With the seemingly incongruous timeline required to design with the user, it is unclear which donors will be on board.

Fora like this one are being held, in part, so the ICT4D community can present a united front when they explain to clients the importance of designing with the user.

The ICT4D community can’t afford not to, in Kane’s opinion. “It’s more expensive to design something that fails,” she says.

And she foresees organizational costs coming down. “Once you have some best practices based on robust design work and analysis, you can have a much leaner process so that you’re not starting from scratch every time.”

Design for aspiration

When Tapan Parikh was advising Indian social media startup Awaaz.De on increasing the engagement of farmers with a call-in radio show, he wanted to meet the users where they were. He analyzed their context, motivations and abilities, and came up with a system that allowed callers to leave messages.

That was just the beginning. An assistant professor at UC Berkeley, Parikh realized he could do better than meeting the user where they are. He’d meet them where they wanted to be.

“Something I’d like to propose is trying to design for where users want to be, or where they will be tomorrow, in a week, a month, a year or five years.” Parikh says. “Design for aspiration.”

Parikh encouraged Awaaz.De to introduce a browse, search and filter capacity so the farmers could hear all the questions that were being posed to the radio hosts. In a 2010 evaluation, farmers said the biggest benefit was learning from the questions and experiences of others.

The next design step was to take users from consuming and responding to content and allow them to actually create it. Awaaz.De became a voice-based, phone-based content publishing platform that made it easy for farmers to broadcast information to each other.

Parikh envisions the next phase of design to accommodate the move to smart phones. Not because the farmers have them. But because they will.

The next frontier of designing for the user in general is to make not only interfaces user-friendly, but to design the actual databases behind the tools with the user, too.

And yet the forum served to remind the ICT4D community not to get carried away with the next exciting technological intervention without keeping the user at the fore.

“We’re constantly talking about newer and more exciting technologies,” says Lee. “But part of the challenge is, do we ourselves understand whether we as a development community can use, for example, the big data that’s coming in?”

“People forget that by inserting technology, it’s still development,” she says. Technology offers great promise but no respite from the need to adhere to conventional development principles as well. “You still need to have those in-depth discussions.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/12″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_widget_sidebar sidebar_id=”sidebar-primary”][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Joining the Call to Ramp up the HIV Response

July 24, 2014

2 min read

Smiling girls — Taking a more holistic approach to HIV prevention– like including psychosocial support and education for schoolchildren–could help create an AIDS-free generation. Photo: Mary Lynn Field-Nguer

Thousands of dedicated delegates this week called for a scaled-up HIV response to save lives at the 20th International AIDS Conference in Melbourne, Australia. The five-day conference, themed “Stepping Up the Pace,” attracted 12,000 delegates, who discussed and debated the latest HIV research and programmatic developments, working to rapidly roll out new interventions to achieve an AIDS-free generation.

In an article I co-authored in a special supplement to the Journal of AIDS, which was released at the Conference, I call for better strategies to help HIV-positive moms succeed in their efforts to protect their infants and live healthy lives with HIV.

The article urges health and development practitioners to take a more nuanced and patient-sensitive approach to treating and supporting HIV-positive pregnant women, instead of relying on more traditional clinical and medical models.

For example, using community health workers or peers as liaisons between people living with HIV and health care providers, and making care less disjointed by incorporating social services, child protection and education into packages of client-responsive services.

The improved approach would attract more mothers to seek out and stay in care, and adhere to treatment, improving their own lives and saving those of their children by preventing HIV transmission.

The Melbourne conference’s call for decreased HIV stigma and discrimination is also well in line with recent initiatives at Creative.

A newly-completed research study in Uganda, Ethiopia and Mozambique conducted by Susan Rogers, a Senior Associate in Design, Monitoring and Evaluation, examined how gender and internal stigma around one’s own perception of their HIV status affected disclosure. This is critical research, as studies demonstrate that the more individuals disclose their HIV status to their partners, the more likely they are to seek treatment.

Susan also conducted research in Jamaica and the Bahamas with healthcare and social service providers. She found that key affected populations in their care were experiencing “layered stigma”—HIV–related stigma combined with stigma toward marginalized groups. Findings from Susan’s study were published last month in the journal AIDS Care.

The message in these articles resonates with Creative’s longstanding work on HIV prevention. Since 1996, Creative has managed more than 20 projects related to HIV or Orphans and Vulnerable Children, and now manages more than $18 million in President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) funding in Africa.

By harnessing education to prevent HIV and link children to health services and policy reform, our programs in Uganda, Zambia, Nigeria and elsewhere have addressed critical structural factors contributing to young girls’ vulnerability to HIV through school drop-out prevention programs and psychosocial support for vulnerable children.

Throughout these programs, Creative is taking the integrated approach that I argued for in my article, and about whose benefits health and development experts are increasingly vocal.

Sara Melillo is Creative’s Management Associate for Health

A Hero of Her Time

July 16, 2014

3 min read

Zambia's Brigitte Syamalevwe initiated an ongoing ripple of counseling and support for hundreds of people affected by HIV. — Zambia’s Brigitte Syamalevwe initiated an ongoing ripple of counseling and support for hundreds of people affected by HIV by speaking up about her own positive status. Photo: Bradford Strickland

What Brigitte Syamalevwe noticed most of all about the beeswax chamber we stood inside was the fragrance coming from the gold colored walls. Her observation of the contemporary art installation was that it smelled milky and of honey, and comforting like a mother’s embrace.

The Wolfgang Laib exhibit at the Hirshhorn Gallery had been on Brigitte’s list of things to see while she visited Washington, D.C. in December of 2000 to participate in International AIDS Day. At 42 years old, Brigitte had already emerged from the urban Copperbelt region of Zambia as a pioneer in HIV prevention because of her courage and vision organizing grassroots campaigns to empower women and slow the spread of HIV and AIDS in Africa.

When Brigitte had tested positive for HIV in the late 1990s—after a decade of counseling local young women about HIV prevention—part of her response was to sit with her husband, to whom she had always been faithful, and ask together why this thing had come to them.

Together they explored what about their married relationship led him to pursue extramarital sexual relations. Together they questioned what about their culture had led her to be so passive as a wife, not asking for open conversation about power, sex and condoms in their marriage.

“Instead of giving in to the disease, Brigitte saw it as an opportunity,” the Guardian wrote of her. “She silenced a meeting in the Zambian capital Lusaka, where people were proclaiming that HIV only affected the poor and ill- educated, with a public declaration that she too – a respected teacher and mother, and not young – was infected.”

Her husband tested positive for HIV, and together they began a counseling campaign with sponsorship from their Catholic Diocese to help other married couples explore power dynamics within Zambian marriages that made women especially vulnerable to HIV and AIDS.

They met in their home, and eventually the homes of other church members. The counseling groups they started were open to any couple that wanted to participate, up to five couples at one time in a single counseling circle.

The only requirement for participation was that each couple had to commit in turn to create an additional counseling circle for an additional five couples. In this way Brigitte and her husband initiated an ongoing ripple of counseling and support for hundreds of people in the Zambian Copperbelt who otherwise might have remained silent about the virus and the disease.

Brigitte’s experience standing publicly to confront HIV and AIDS ensured she was spotted by UNICEF and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Lusaka as an inspired visionary in the fight against HIV and AIDS.

In 2000, as a USAID staff member in in the Africa Bureau who specialized in support to the USAID/Zambia education office, I worked with other HIV prevention staff at USAID to incorporate HIV prevention and mitigation into education, economic growth and agriculture programs. For us, Brigitte provided a model for us to draw attention to and help replicate.

I also personally advocated to support Brigitte’s 2000 International AIDS Day trip to Washington, D.C. It was there that the Honorable Andrew Young, marking the occasion at St. John’s Church across from the White House, referred to her as the Rosa Parks of the HIV and AIDS prevention movement.

Brigitte died of complications related to AIDS in 2003, but her legacy lives on in the many people inspired by her work. Among them are the development professionals serving on the UNAIDS Inter-Agency Task Team (IATT) for HIV and Education, led by UNESCO, of which I am a founding member and former Chair.

I—like many others—remember and revisit the work of heroes like Brigitte, whose legacy from decades of HIV prevention continue to help me now in my role at Creative Associates International, updating strategies that have proved successful in the past, and deserve to be carried forward.

To End Preventable Child Deaths, Look Beyond Health

June 27, 2014

3 min read

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Educating girls is key to helping every child reach their fifth birthday.

Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, World Bank President Jim Kim and U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Rajiv Shah are sharing their baby photos to honor the millions of children around the world who will celebrate their fifth birthdays. This playful effort is part of a serious initiative; the 5^th Birthday and Beyond campaign was launched by a coalition of more than 100 organizations to celebrate the tremendous progress to end preventable child and maternal deaths around the world.

Annual under-five deaths have fallen dramatically. “Every day this year 18,000 more children will live and 700 more mothers will survive compared to the daily maternal and child mortality rate in 1990,” says Shah.

Yet despite these gains, much work remains to be done. This year 6.6 million children will die before their fifth birthday. These children mostly live in poor countries and their deaths are largely preventable. In 2012, 98.6 percent of under-5 deaths globally occurred in the developing world.

Only 27 developing countries are expected to achieve Millennium Development Goal 4: to reduce by two-thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the under-five mortality rate.

Creative Associates International is committed to the goal of ending preventable child and maternal deaths. Creative’s expertise in education, especially in conflict-affected areas, provides a way in.

Education, especially girls’ education, is essential to achieving the goal of ending preventable child and maternal deaths and helping every child to reach their fifth birthday.

According to UNESCO, children of mothers with secondary education or higher are twice as likely to survive beyond age five as those whose mothers have no education. Moreover, each extra year of a mother’s schooling reduces the probability of infant mortality by 5 to 10 percent.

The benefits of girls’ education are immense, extending to decreased fertility rates, improvements in child and maternal health and increased earning potential.

Girls and women with at least some formal education are more likely to use contraception, marry later, have fewer children, and be better informed on the nutritional and other needs of their children. Furthermore, education decreases a girl’s or woman’s risk for contracting HIV or transmitting HIV to her baby.

On June 25, USAID hosted Acting on the Call: Ending Preventable Child and Maternal Deaths, a high-level forum in which it unveiled an action plan to realign its $2.9 billion maternal and child health portfolio over the next three years in an effort to end preventable child and maternal health by 2020.

The action plan delineates how 24 priority countries will dramatically accelerate progress in maternal and child survival.

The plan encourages using education to improve health outcomes. It suggests that in India, for example, partners should do more to invest in adolescents with a holistic approach to breaking down education related barriers and enhancing life skills development. In Afghanistan, it recommends including health education into the existing education system.

It points out that the immediate causes of under-nutrition in children rest atop a host of underlying factors, including: education, women’s empowerment and child marriage.

Of USAID’s priority countries, Creative Associates International works, or has recently worked, in Afghanistan, Nigeria, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia to contribute to the goal of ending preventable child deaths by improving child learning and helping children stay in school.

Creative believes that every child deserves a fifth birthday.

Join us in our commitment to ending preventable child and maternal deaths by uploading a fifth birthday or age-5 photo to the birthday album![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Shortsighted in South Sudan

June 16, 2014

3 min read

South Sudan's National Election Commission is less than two years old yet operates without international guidance or support, eroding chances of credible elections. — South Sudan’s National Election Commission is less than two years old yet operates without international guidance or support, eroding chances of credible elections.

South Sudan’s 2010 elections and 2011 referendum are possibly the only positive experiences that the South Sudanese have had with political processes in their short history – and the electoral institutions that organized them are vital to the country’s ongoing peace process and to its political future. So why has international support to the National Election Commission come to a halt?

In conflict-prone and divided societies, the independence of the election management body is a key feature that can have a significant impact on peacebuilding.

South Sudan’s Electoral Commission was established as a body independent of the government with an authority to regulate, conduct and supervise electoral events; establish boundary delimitation; organize voter registration; and deliver civic education. In other words, it will decide highly politicized issues. Any actual or perceived malpractice could undermine the credibility of elections and lead to renewed violence.

Unfortunately, the Commission’s early tasks are currently taking place without any international advice or other types of support. With South Sudan having little experience with democratic processes, all Commissioners being new to the job and the organization of elections, the chances for credible elections are low without international guidance.

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“If You Know What Happiness is to You”

June 10, 2014

4 min read

Six of the seven Central American countries mad Gallup's list of happiest places in the world, according to their latest poll. — Six of the seven Central American countries made Gallup’s list of happiest places in the world, according to their latest poll.

It seems like being happy is en vogue in the international media these days. From the crackdown on Iranian youth making a video to Pharrell Williams’ “Happy” to various indices ranking the level of happiness of people living in the countries around the world, the debate over happiness is on.

Surprisingly (or not) the recent indices come up with somewhat different sets of rankings. To my joy, the latest poll by Gallup, done with 1,500 people from each of 138 countries, put four of the places I have lived or worked among the top 10 happiest places in the world (Panama, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala).

The odd juxtaposition is that these are also four countries that have been part of Creative’s joint programming with USAID that works to reduce the high levels of violence.

How does that mesh – when the people interviewed from a variety of income levels expressed high levels of “enjoyment,” “laughing or smiling a lot” and feeling “well-rested,” while also living in three of the countries (El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala) with the highest murder rates globally?

I was surprised with such positive responses from Salvadorans, Guatemalans and Hondurans to the happiness surveys given high level of gang violence and extortion by gangs. Notably, violence likely contributed to the fact that the least happy people according to this year’s survey, understandably so, are Syrians, Chadians and Yemenis.

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Telling Stories in Tanzania

June 9, 2014

3 min read

Anne reads with children at the Chaume Primary School in rural Mtwara. — Anne reads alongside children at Tanzania’s Chaume Primary School in rural Mtwara.

In a sheltered outdoor reading space, I ask a group of kids if I can bring my book and join them. They warmly welcome me as I settle down next to them on brightly colored rugs. They ask me about the book I am reading.

“It’s called The Alligator Man, by James Sheehan,” I say. “It’s a tale about a mean, greedy man who gets eaten by a big, ol’ alligator when he is walking past the local swamp one dark night.”

Their eyes get big with excitement as they scoot closer to me on the rug.

That morning, we had traveled four hours crammed into an SUV, bumping along dirt roads while avoiding huge potholes, and swapping stories about our lives to pass the time. Luckily, it was still cool outside; the summer heat and humidity were not yet at their peak.

Finally, we arrived at Chaume Primary School in rural Mtwara, Tanzania. I peeked into the classroom entrance and smiled at the room full of children sitting obediently at their desks.

I saw the teacher using a solar powered laptop to teach her students how to read. She was showing short videos to students for early grade reading instruction. The students then practiced what they learned in small groups.

In a nearby school library, students were quietly reading books – large, medium and “pocket” sized – that are printed or even hand-made by teachers and other students. The books were colorful, with fun, culturally relevant short stories.

In primary schools like Chaume, Creative is running the Tanzania 21^st Century Basic Education Program to train teachers on engaging classroom methods and the use of technology to help kids learn to read. The program works in the Mtwara region of southeast mainland Tanzania, and on the islands of Unguja and Pemba in Zanzibar, and is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

It builds government capacity to train teachers on these approaches, and also trains administrators and selected teachers to use education management information system for improved school management.

Most importantly, Creative is trying to stimulate an interest in reading, not just for learning other school subjects, but also for fun. Having access to age-appropriate books at school and at home is a big part of that effort.

I was so impressed by what I saw at Chuame. The classroom of 60 kids in second grade was really engaged and interested in the subject matter. Most were raising their hands to answer questions. When they were split into groups of four to continue practicing letter and word recognition, they got right to work.

The school yard, clean-swept with flower beds and trees planted all around, was also painted with words and sentences for young readers to sound out. White-washed classrooms had colorful posters and slogans to capture the eye, and encourage reading.

The kids seem very interested in reading—both their books and mine. They surround me on the rug in the outdoor reading space and clamor to hear more of the story about the “big ol’ alligator.” Their smiles are large and excited.

In turn, they teach me Kiswahili for crocodile (mamba), frog (chura) and elephant (tembo). With their help, I say each word out loud and practice.

Later on, they draw pictures of the animals with their Kiswahili names so I won’t forget what I’ve learned. The kids write their names and the date below the pictures so I don’t forget them, either. Now tacked up on the wall over my desk, that piece of paper – and the memory that goes with it – means I never will.

Anne Woodworth is the Director of Business Development for Creative’s education programming.

Burundi workshop takes on electoral conflict

June 9, 2014

2 min read

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Burundi workshop takes on electoral conflict

By Maggie Farrand

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Election workshop in Burundi — Participants of the four-day workshop addressing electoral security in Bujumbura, Burundi stand together for a photograph.

Thirty participants from Burundi’s Commission Nationale Electorale Independente, the Burundi National Army, the Burundi National Police and the country’s judiciary came together from May 6 to 9 in the capital city of Bujumbura as part of a four-day workshop on Conflict-Sensitive Electoral Administration.

The workshop was led by staff of Creative Associates International in conjunction with SwissPeace, a Swiss non-governmental organization, with funding from the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA) Human Security Division.

During the workshop, participants were provided with the tools to analyze the potential for electoral conflict to occur; profile the electoral conflict dynamics; and gain techniques to prevent manage, and mediate this conflict.

The workshop’s curriculum was based on methodologies and research performed by Creative in developing the Electoral Security Framework and the Best Practices in Electoral Security handbooks for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). These two handbooks provide development professionals, policymakers and practitioners with a global overview of best practices in programming related to electoral conflict and violence.

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Tanzanian teacher awarded for classroom innovation

June 6, 2014

By Jennifer Brookland

2 min read

Asha Amour Abrahman, a TZ21 teacher, is the first-ever Global Bridge IT Award winner.

A Teacher at one of Creative’s project schools in Tanzania was awarded the first-of-its-kind Global BridgeIT Award for Teaching Excellence.

President and CEO of the Pearson Foundation Mark Nieker signed a certificate recognizing Asha Amour Abrahman for her “use of innovative and effective teaching strategies, commitment to her students’ education and personal growth, and dedication to her teaching community.”

Abrahman teaches Kiswahili, English, Science, Social Studies, Math and Sports to first graders at the Jadida Primary School school in Zanzibar, a school where Creative’s Tanzania 21^st century Basic Education Program (TZ21) is implementing an early-grade reading project with a focus on improving classroom methods.

Teachers in Tanzania are often undertrained and use outdated techniques that leave students disengaged and unmotivated. BridgeIT has worked since 2003 to provide professional development to teachers like Abrahman to help them develop more child-focused, interactive approaches.

TZ21 partnered with BridgeIT in Tanzania to marry technological interventions like laptops and e-content with early grade reading and teacher development. The partnership has created classrooms that are not just connected, but effective in boosting young students’ academic performance and enjoyment.

The project works in 100 schools on the island of Pemba, where Jadida Primary School is located.

Abrahman says she had never been exposed to using Information Communications Technology in the classroom until TZ21 came to her school with training in 2013. She learned about digital literacy and how to incorporate e-content in her lessons, and now spends time helping other teachers in her school do the same.

“The use of ICT in teaching has motivated me and eased my teaching practices,” she says.

In Nieker’s accompanying letter to Abrahman, he complimented her for exemplifying all the qualities that a great teacher should possess. The teacher and her school will receive a small prize.

Zambia welcomes 100,000 new readers, one story at a time

June 4, 2014

3 min read

Tassew Mekuria, Director of Creative's Read to Succeed project in Zambia, addresses the audience at the breakfast ceremony announcing the expansion of Reading Tools in a Box. — Tassew Mekuria, Director of Creative’s Read to Succeed project in Zambia, addresses the audience at the breakfast ceremony announcing the expansion of Reading Tools in a Box.

Trucks are rumbling down the rural roads of Zambia carrying special packages as they travel to far-flung primary schools. Thousands of young students are about to receive fun and engaging reading materials in local languages—books and materials that enliven their basic classrooms and make reading enjoyable.

At a recent ceremony in Zambia’s capital city of Lusaka, Creative Associates International announced the expansion of its Reading Tools in a Box initiative, designed to build early-grade reading skills both in and out of the classroom.

Over the next few months, Creative will send 305 boxes, valued at nearly $55,000, to six provinces across Zambia.

Each box contains 10 illustrated books in local languages, five titles on basic life skills as well as additional materials designed to boost reading skills. All of the materials are colorful and fun, featuring interesting stories that children can read aloud and enjoy.

This initiative began as part of Read to Succeed, a U.S. Agency for International Development-funded project implemented by Creative, which aims to improve early-grade learner performance in reading.

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The Best Mother’s Day Gift: Why women around the globe play a central role in creating better economies

May 12, 2014

4 min read

This blog originally appeared on the Building Peace Forum. You can view the original, posted in March 2014, here. – See more at: https://www.creativeassociatesinternational.com/#sthash.W2oUFRWb.dpuf

This blog originally appeared on The Globalist. You can view the original, posted on May 10, 2014, here.

Mother’s Day has become a commercial phenomenon in the United States and elsewhere in the Western world. People living in these countries are flooded with messages about the perfect gift for the one who loves us unconditionally. With one crucial caveat: We regale her with flowers and perfume, but not always with love and respect.

What Mother’s Day 2014 should really celebrate is a little understood statistic about women. Once properly understood, it will change our approach to economic development.

Treating mothers well in the workplace makes good sense for the bottom line. And now, it is proven that the way a nation treats its women is an indicator of its ability to grow economically and succeed.

An economic fact of life

Once upon a time, this type of data was often thought of as feminist propaganda. But this economic fact of life goes beyond women’s studies programs. It is clear that a society that neglects its women as economic actors will fall behind in its capacity to grow.

Janet Yellen, the first woman to lead the U.S. Federal Reserve, said that the benefits of the growing participation of women in the economy are “clear and substantial” as the United States continues to recover from recession.

Yellen added that the success of the United States since the 1970s, including the sustained growth of family incomes, coincided with the fuller contribution of women in the economy.

For that reason, President Obama, in his April executive order to fight pay discrimination and strengthen enforcement of equal pay, was only reinforcing a long-known fact about the way forward for the United States.

While the executive order will not right all the wrongs of income inequality, it has certainly made it harder for U.S. employers to conceal disparate salaries that once were the way women’s participation in the work force was treated.

Stunning pay gap

Women are the primary breadwinners in 40% of U.S. households but are bringing home 23% less than their male counterparts. That stunning pay gap means less for families’ everyday needs, less for investments in our children’s futures – and, when added over a lifetime of work, substantially less for a woman’s retirement.

And that pay gap is significantly greater for women of color, with African-American women earning 64 cents and Latinas earning 56 cents for every dollar earned by a U.S. Caucasian man.

What does this mean for economic development in a globalized economy? It’s really simple: Women’s participation in a community’s economy can make or break any investment made by the international community. Their participation improves lives and ensures stability and economic growth.

More important, however, is that sustaining these gains – whether in agriculture, health care delivery, or early childhood education – are not possible unless women are factored into the design and the final outcome of the investment.

And this means that governments and the private sector who invest in any given country must create a strong partnership that values the salience of women’s participation in the economy.

Across the global south, women have always borne the burden of agricultural work, child care and domestic labor. Yet, in spite of tremendous investments in women’s economic development – from micro finance programs to girls’ elementary education and literary programs – the fruits of such programs are often negated.

The reason why is cultures that would keep women in slave-like conditions through forced child marriages and/or total elimination of such simple rights as access to basic health care, primary education, or even contact with family members after marriage.

Too often, women are thought of as consumers of security, as the victims of conflict. Indeed, there is no shortage of real evidence of this type of abuse.

Women as economic producers

But women are also producers of security in their neighborhoods. They are the first line prevention of children becoming gang members. They are the ones who organize neighborhood watches when crime impedes freedom of movement.

And women are often the interlocutors with local police authorities who often seek women out to help them gain access to areas held by criminal gangs.

Partnerships with women in a community by local and national government agencies can create a powerful nexus between security and development. Moreover, more security enables a better climate for investment and growth.

Changing our understanding of women as producers in any economy is the first step to building a culture of equality. If we are to create a movement that values the work of women globally, we must start in our own country. There we must work with the wide range of government programs and civil society organizations that can help take the vision of a world of education and productive women to a global level.

For quick results

All of that is why we should use this Mother’s Day to reinforce a message that will be heard worldwide: Treat women as economic actors and treat women as an integral part of any community’s development program and the results will come quickly.

Ensuring the value of women in any society can become the best gift any mother can get – more than flowers, candy or any other material good. And this gift is affordable and in the national interest.

When our nation invests its tax dollars in helping women in the developing world, and when it encourages foreign direct investment that partners with women, the result will not only be higher returns.

Such investments will also demonstrate that ignoring half of the world’s population will not solve the problems of war, poverty and neglect.

Understanding elections through a comparative lens: How do Nigerian and U.S. elections compare?

May 1, 2014

By Tihana Bartulac Blanc

3 min read

Under the auspices of the International Law Institute, I had the privilege of meeting members of the Nigerian Senate Committee on Constitutional Reform on April 28. At an afternoon session, we spent time comparing elections conducted in the United States to those in Nigeria.

This type of gathering reflects Creative’s approach to supporting elections around the world through education and empowerment of national stakeholders to make informed choices about their own electoral and political processes.

Creative’s Elections team, which hosted delegations from Burma in 2012 and Turkey in 2008, is often asked by participants how their country’s elections compare to those in the U.S. When you consider the varying histories and geopolitical situations, the intuitive answer may be: they really don’t.

Similarities do exist – even between the most unlikely pairs, like the U.S. and Nigeria or the U.S. and Burma – and useful lessons can be drawn. In Nigeria, for example, the constitutional system is in many ways modeled after U.S. federalism.

And from a more general point of view, it is always possible to compare even the most different elections from a perspective of international electoral standards and best practices.

This week’s discussion at the International Law Institute was dynamic and informed, spurred by the questions posed by the members of the Nigerian Senate Committee. Much of the conversation focused on differences between electoral conditions in Nigeria and the U.S.

As an election practitioner, I have my own thoughts on elections in these two countries. I see U.S. elections troubled by partisanship and excessive decentralization. In Nigeria, electoral violence poses one of the main threats.

At their core, the electoral experience in the two countries is quite different: the U.S. is one of the oldest, and Nigeria a transitioning democracy. Despite all of the technical flaws in administering elections, the U.S.’s strong institutions and checks and balances still serve as the main guarantor of democratic elections.

Nigeria has made notable progress in administering elections in the span of only one electoral cycle, but their lack of comparable institutions requires that its election management bodies and related bodies fill the gap and perform at a much higher standard.

From this broad comparative perspective, the group of election experts at the International Law Institute moved on to discuss specific lessons Nigeria can draw from the U.S.

We identified two particular things that Nigeria should strive not to emulate: One relates to the two country’s similarities as federal systems. The U.S. electoral system is too decentralized, causing a lack of uniformity and standardization in electoral procedures which means that different voters are treated differently.

The second example was the weaknesses in the U.S. voting technologies, which became so notable in the 2000 presidential election. As Nigeria considers alternatives to its in-person paper voting modality, there is a useful lesson to be drawn about the impact election technologies can have on the election results and overall credibility of the election.

This visit, following one by the Nigerian Election Commission earlier in 2014, speaks well of Nigeria’s preparations for their 2015 general elections.

At Creative, we continue to serve as a resource to the Nigerian stakeholders as well as those around the world in providing analysis and advice on conducting credible and inclusive elections.

Tihana is a Senior Associate in Creative’s Electoral Education and Integrity Practice Area.