Don't forget the men

The UN Secretary-General’s new strategy to achieve the MDGs incorporates a truth that has been well-documented for the longest time now- that subsidies and benefits focused on women and girls have a multiplier effect that positively ripples throughout the family, community and society in which the point beneficiaries reside. Personally, I endorse this vision and more than a value judgment, the above notion has proved itself to be a verifiable fact. One of the strongest examples that come to my mind is the principle that Muhammad Yunus’ Grameen Bank followed in its micro-lending model: target the women, and you will get maximum bang for your buck. There can be no stronger empirical argument than the success that Grameen has had over the decades in alleviating poverty. So, by all means, you must know where my sympathies lie.

However, there is a caveat that’s worth issuing at this point of time: Don’t forget the men. True, programs targeting women beneficiaries yield maximum social benefit. True, the empowerment of women is the greatest social mobilizer that one can imagine at this moment. True, the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. However, beyond these truths and adages, there lies a more fundamental reality, the reality that all societies in the world, except for the most enlightened, follow patriarchal systems. The wielders of power in most parts are men, and if we leave them out of the development equation, we risk unacceptable failure. The empowerment of women should be our goal; but the keys to that empowerment lie with their male counterparts.

With the new UN strategy, there is the risk of the development fraternity (if you’ll pardon the usage of the term) launching into an all-out offensive, keeping women and girls on the frontier. This would mean programs targeting women in their marketing campaigns, distributing subsidies and benefits only to women and portraying women as the most important piece in the MDG puzzle. I call this a risk, because one chances the alienation of the other party on the chromosomal divide- the men. Men are still the major decision-makers in most households, and a purely woman-centric strategy would not lead us anywhere. We need to target men as forcefully as we target women. The message doesn’t change much. We still put out the headline that women are the central piece of our development strategy, but men are our esteemed guests as well. You may accuse me of mollycoddling the male ego, but the truth is, the inflated male ego is a practical reality.

Done with the rhetoric and theory, I’d like to offer you a real example of how this works. While I worked on the field in Talasari, India, the program that I was a part of was sought to improve maternal and child health. The largest component of our activity was community-level advocacy and behavioral modification. The first couple of months provided frustrations. The adolescent women and pregnant mothers we spoke to nodded their heads in agreement, but we repeatedly saw them relapse into their old, dangerous practices surrounding pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing. I had my Eureka moment at one such session, educating mothers huddled together in a small little hut that was the home of one of the women. Her husband, who wasn’t feeling too well, hadn’t left to plough his land that day, and stayed home. As I talked to the women, this young man who could hardly be older than me, listened in rapt attention to what I was saying. The most surprising part was when he asked me questions about the information that I was doling out that morning. I went back to our Center with an idea. Why not bring husbands into the equation as well? They were, after all, the decision-makers.

What followed was a year of male participation in our program. The director of the program and I created a system where we would speak to the pregnant woman and her husband, as a couple, and bring them to buy the idea that it wasn’t her that was pregnant, but that it was them who were pregnant. Again, to my surprise, this was an idea readily acceptable to the men, and almost immediately we saw improvements in our compliance rates. It turns out, that all we needed was to convey to the men what their wives needed to be doing, and the changes happened.

I’d like to issue a caveat to my caveat. The ultimate endpoint is to have a situation where women follow healthy practices, without needing the permission or nagging (yeah, right!) of their husbands. The ultimate goal is to have a society where each woman is empowered enough to take her own decisions, and informed enough to make sure that those are the right decisions. However, till we reach that goal, let’s keep the men in the game as well. We aren’t all that bad, you know.