There's been a slow but steady push in recent years to improve girls' access to education in developing countries. But while education has tremendous implications for gender equality and economic and social development overall, the potential for progress is limited if girls end up staying home from school several days a month -- up to 20 percent of the school year -- because they don't have a very simple product: feminine products for when their periods come.

Education Is Key

Over the last couple years, according to founder Elizabeth Scharpf, the Sustainable Health Enterprises, or SHE team has realized that to successfully improve health and sanitation, pads have to come with menstrual hygiene and health education. "After doing a needs assessment," she said, "we realized that there was really a thirst for information about one's body, and so we put together a curriculum of best practices, of menstrual hygiene and health education."

The development of a curriculum has a double benefit: it helps girls receiving pads to understand the importance of proper sanitation, but it also enables a multiplier effect because the content can be shared and spread beyond the areas of SHE's direct impact.

"We've helped 5,000 people, but we're not going to be able to go and train, one by one, every single person," she said. "We're hoping to reach 10 million in Rwanda alone."

Scharpf said they've been working with the Rwandan government to adapt the national curriculum, which is a significant step in itself (and she said Rwanda also included sanitary pads in the government budget in 2011 and again in 2012), but SHE has also been working with global partners UNICEF and WaterAid to incorporate the menstrual hygiene content in national global guidelines as well.

Scharpf said they've also realized the importance of broadening the lessons beyond the use of sanitary pads specifically. "We know that not everyone's going to be able to have pads at the end of the day," she said. "We teach how to wash rags appropriately."

SHE is not the only enterprise focused on education. An organization with a similar mission, Empower Women in Africa (EWA), also distributes pads but in the process is also trying to pass on the skills and know-how so that girls and women can make their own pads, too. EWA tries to pair up individuals from participating communities with a foreign volunteer to teach girls, whether it's in the classroom or an after-school program or a clinic, to sew the pads by hand so they can make more when they need them.

EWA founder Lori Schippers has learned some lessons about the distribution process as well. "Over the past year, we've realized the importance of including certain things in each donation - like underwear (because many girls don't have a pair, rendering the pads useless) and a Ziploc bag (to hold dirty pads)," she said.

EWA has also begun to partner with One School at a Time, a nonprofit that works with schools in Uganda. One School at a Time director Bay Roberts said lack of access to feminine products is a well-known problem among people working with girls or education in developing countries like Uganda. Before EWA, they simply bought retail sanitary products. But because they were disposable and in limited supply, teachers would provide pads on an as-needed basis (and the need is high -- when a class is asked who needs pads, it's not uncommon for every girl to raise her hand), rather than for a girl's full cycle. Once Roberts confirmed from medical professionals that reusable pads, even when washed in contaminated water, are an improvement for these girls, she decided to partner with EWA to provide girls with the full five-day kits.

And the program manager in Uganda will be educating girls about menstruation and the importance of sanitation and their new feminine kits. They're also planning mother-daughter meetings, to help mothers help their daughters through the process and keep their school attendance high.

EWA operates a little differently from SHE and other organizations in that they solicit donations of either pads from GladRags, which sells Empower Kits directly from its website, or materials for sewing pads from scratch. Schippers organizes sewing events, and has instructions online that people can follow to sew pads on their own and send to EWA in order to be delivered to partnering schools and communities.

Whichever organization is providing them, these pads are transformative. Days for Girls, an organization that Schippers used as a role model in shaping EWA, says it has seen feminine hygiene kits change lives, from keeping girls in school to encouraging women to stand up to abuse -- and even reducing the prevalence of female genital mutilation.

Local Efforts

Women in Rwanda stripping banana fiber for SHE LaunchPads

SHE (which along with AFRIpads was recognized by global women's network Women Deliver as one of the "most inspiring ideas and solutions" for girls and women around the world), EWA, and other organizations and companies have formed in the U.S. to address this issue internationally -- but that's not to suggest there aren't efforts taking place locally in communities around the world. They're just harder to find and round up. But as two quick examples, students in northern Uganda have been staying after school to make reusable sanitary pads using cheap, locally available materials, and they teach girls to do the same.

And in India -- where a reported 88 percent of women use things like ashes, newspapers, dried leaves and husk sand during their periods, leading to reproductive tract infections for more than 70 percent of those women and increasing the risk of certain cancers, including cervical cancer -- Arunachalam Muruganantham realized that if this was an issue for the women close to him, then it must be an issue for millions of other poor women. He became set on creating a low-cost and effective feminine product. But the women in his family wouldn't test his sample products and give him feedback, so he decided to go testing them himself. The Guardian had a story on him that is worth reading in full, but the point is that there are efforts around the world focused on this issue, and the increase in local initiatives, as well as locally sourced materials, is encouraging.

Which brings us back to SHE for a minute. Education aside, the organization is also focused right now on LaunchPads, which will be made with local and eco-friendly resources. The group has worked with partners, including MIT and the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology, to figure out how to use agricultural byproducts like banana fibers to make eco-friendly pads, which Scharpf hopes will be sold for less than a quarter of the price of pads from multinational companies. On the slate for this year is bringing large-scale manufacturing for those pads to East Africa, and she thinks the focus next year will be to bring similar projects and technology to other areas around the world, like India and Caribbean nations.

The Good Men Project has called the Super Bowl a haven for sex trafficking -- others call it the most prolific sex trafficking event in the United States.

Exact numbers are impossible to pin down: like with all human trafficking, the problem is intentionally hidden. Estimates are thrown about -- with some saying that thousands, most of them underage girls, are trafficked during Super Bowl weekend and that the event increases demand for sex trafficking up to 80 percent -- but the advocates who come across as the most reliable experts on this issue usually decline to provide numbers at all because they know any figures they've heard have not been and cannot be verified.

It's an obstacle in talking about human trafficking generally, but claims about the link between sex trafficking and the Super Bowl in particular come with an extra dose of controversy. Some say the claims are overblown, some say there is no spike at all. The head of the FBI office in Dallas, site of last year's Super Bowl, said after the fact that he had seen no evidence that the increase would or did occur -- but the agency did engage in a large coordinated effort to address the issue in the run-up to the game. And there are some who argue it is entirely a myth.

But if there's an increase, whether it's one or a thousand cases, law enforcement and child and human rights advocates say that is too many.

"I don't think it's about specific numbers as much as developing a culture and systemic responses on the part of various stakeholders," said David Schilling from the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR).

So advocates are collaborating with law enforcement once again, this year in Indianapolis, to fight this problem. They operate on the premise that any demand within the commercial sex industry increases the risk of exploitation and human trafficking of unwilling women and girls -- and there seems to be no denial of increased prostitution. The debate centers largely on whether unwilling women or children are involved and how large the increase really is. Advocates say without proper attention, the problem can continue unchallenged; they highlight, as one indicator of the increase in prostitution, a study by Traffick911 in conjunction with law enforcement during the 2011 Super Bowl that monitored online escort ads. Such ads increased steadily from 135 on a Saturday in mid-January to 367 on the Saturday before the big game.

The main focus of the initiative in Indianapolis falls to educating people in a potential role to stop any incidents that do occur: hotel staff, taxi drivers, hospital workers.

Abigail Kuzma, Deputy Attorney General in Indiana, said a task force focused on this effort has more than 60 organizations involved and by this weekend will have trained more than 2,000 people since July to be on the lookout for this issue. Members of the Coalition for Corporate Responsibility for Indiana and Michigan (CCRIM) have been coordinating volunteers to educate local hotels on how to spot and report suspected incidents of trafficking to local law enforcement. A press release for the initiative said, "Because trafficking is reported to peak at large sporting events and hotels are the prime venue for prostitution, shareholders have initiated a multi-pronged campaign to keep hotels trafficking-free during Super Bowl weekend and beyond."

"CCRIM is a coalition based in Indiana and Michigan, we decided that we would address human trafficking in our own backyard because the Super Bowl was in Indianapolis," said Sr. Ann Oestreich in a call about the initiative. She said they have been reaching out to hotels to offer things like informational materials or help with training hotel staff on what to look for, and by Monday had spoken with about 200 of the 220 hotels they had originally contacted.

Organizations with a focus on socially responsible investments have also gotten involved: ICCR and Everence Financial have been using their leverage as shareholders to get companies to take more responsibility on this issue (as well as other social and environmental issues). Mark Regier from Everence said they've been active with hotels and pointed to Windham, which he said recently signed the ECPAT code against child sex tourism.

But as Schilling from ICCR made clear, policy-level decisions only have so much impact, which is part of the reason for the mixed approach they've adopted. "I think it's important for us as a coalition of faith-based and socially responsible investors to see this not just as a top-down but as a bottom-up as well," he said. "If you have really good policies in place but they're not really instituted at the ground level, the kinds of activities that we've been describing take place in communities. So you want a connection."

And it's not just the Super Bowl, these advocates say. All major sporting events create this boom for prostitution and increased risk for trafficking. So even as they focus their energy on the Super Bowl, they are also looking ahead to the Olympics.

“We are already coordinating with investor groups in the U.K. to guard against labor and sex trafficking during the games," said Schilling. "We will continue to press all companies to uncover and eliminate human trafficking abuses within their spheres of influence.”

Yet while the Bachmann-Perry spat made headlines for days on end—revealing in the process the candidates’ rather hazy grasp of the facts--the major papers never made so much as a mention of Rwanda’s pioneering initiative. Or the irony that even as social conservatives in America blasted Perry for his 2007 decision to require the vaccination of all sixth-grade girls in Texas (a mistake, he quickly admitted) one of the most Christian and socially conservative countries in Africa was celebrating 97% adherence to the so-called “sex shot.”

“We saw that we can make a great impact on women’s cancers because the biggest killers are breast cancer and cervical cancer, and for cervical cancer there is a vaccine,” says Rwanda’s Minister of Health Agnes Binagwaho. “So we designed a national plan to reduce its impact: We prevent, we detect and we treat.”

Such is the pragmatism of the government of Paul Kagame, the Rwandan president and former leader of the Tutsi exile army that took the country back from the Hutu Power architects of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. Ever since then, Kagame has sought to remake the country in the style of Singapore with policies that favor foreign investment and private enterprise, fierce anti-corruption laws and data-driven decision-making.

And like Lee Kwan Yu, the founder of modern Singapore, he has pursued this agenda with both repression and a kind of benign and often quirky authoritarianism. Examples of the latter include a ban on plastic bags; a requirement that every Rwandan wear shoes; an aggressively applied keep-off-the-grass policy; and rigorous enforcement of traffic laws, among other measures.

When the celebrated Harvard public health specialist Paul Farmer, co-founder of the non-profit organization Partners in Health, began working in Rwanda nearly a decade ago, he told New York Times columnist Nick Kristof about the first time he was stopped by a policeman. “I thought ‘Oh no! Am I going to get kidnapped, or worse?” said Farmer. “I rolled down the window, and the policeman said, ‘Put on your seatbelt.’”

Much has been written about Rwanda’s remarkable economic recovery. And Rwanda’s leaders rightly pride themselves on the country’s newfound prosperity. Per capita income has nearly tripled since the 1990s. Some 40% of Rwandans own cell phones. And Rwanda was ranked a “Top Reformer” on the 2010 Doing Business Report, the first time since Doing Business started tracking reforms that a sub-Saharan African economy has led the world.

Less talked about, however, are the massive improvements in Rwanda’s public health system—of which the campaign to prevent cervical cancer is but one impressive piece. Others include an equally ambitious nationwide circumcision campaign, nearly universal health insurance and an effort to make family planning tools like condoms and injectable contraceptives freely and widely available.

“Rwanda is determined to do what works,” says Josh Ruxin, assistant professor of public health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and founding director of Rwanda Works and the Access Project, non-profit organizations that partner with the Government of Rwanda to build critical health infrastructure and provide management oversight at health centers.

What works, though, often isn’t a top priority for international donors. According to the Washington DC-based Worldwatch Institute, between 1994 and 2007, family-planning aid dropped from 30% to 12% of overall health aid. Compounding the problem in Rwanda, one of the most densely populated countries on the planet, is the fact that the Catholic Church, which manages about half of the health centers in the country, refuses to provide contraceptives on site, even to men with HIV.

In spite of this, says Ruxin, Rwanda has made major strides in making family planning more widely available—in part by cleverly circumventing those religious barriers. As he wrote in a recent article for Nature, some government and partner programs have set up family-planning centers just outside the doors of the Catholic facilities. “In our experience,” says Ruxin, “when women are offered family-planning measures discreetly and for free, they take them.”

Yet perhaps nothing better illustrates Rwanda’s pragmatic approach to problem-solving than its efforts to prevent cervical cancer. The third most common type of cancer in women and the second most frequent cause of cancer-related death worldwide, the sexually-transmitted disease accounts for some 275,000 deaths every year. Experts predict that by 2030 that number will exceed 474,000.

And while several other African countries are currently piloting projects targeting cervical cancer, only Rwanda has vowed complete coverage. Officially launched last April by First Lady Jeannette Kagame, the campaign concluded the third and final phase of vaccinations targeting girls ages 12 -15 last month.

“We did not have a problem convincing our women to have their daughters vaccinated,” says Binagwaho. “We only had to explain to them what cancer is. The people we’ve had to work hardest to convince are our international partners because they didn’t believe we could do this.”

In addition to Merck’s donation of Gardasil—a 3-year arrangement--Quiagen, a Dutch maker of sample and assay technologies, will supply Rwanda with its DNA screening test for HPV. All women between the ages of 35 and 45 will be invited for screening. Meanwhile, doctors are being trained in radiotherapy and the specialized surgery required to treat cancers of the cervix.

“We all have friends that have died of cervical cancer,” says Binagwaho, who is also a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School. “At our time, there was no vaccine. But now, if we let those teenagers die when we can give them three injections, what kind of human beings are we? It’s a moral issue.”

Asked if she is at all concerned that vaccinating preadolescent girls against HPV might lead to promiscuity, as social conservatives in the United States have warned, Binagwaho responded sharply: “You believe that the day we have a vaccine for HIV, we are going to fight it? In Rwanda, people don’t link this vaccine with sex,” she said. “They link it with a cancer that kills women.”

But it's precisely because those deaths are preventable that gives so many people hope and the drive to work on fixing this problem. And, say women's rights advocates, women's development is at the center of all other development, making it the single most pressing issue the world continues to face.

It's been well established that women with more education have fewer children, which means that the lack of sufficient education for girls around the world is directly connected to the unsustainable speed at which the world population is growing. But it's not just a lack of knowledge: it's also estimated that if women were empowered to time their pregnancies--meaning if they had access to contraception--carbon emissions would be reduced by eight to 15 percent of the reductions necessary to avoid disastrous climate change.

One out of every four births around the world is unplanned. Every year, 42 million abortions are performed. Half of those are performed in secret, and many of those in turn are performed in dangerous conditions or by people who do not have the proper skills, and 68,000 women die as a result, according to Kavita Ramdas of the Global Leaders Council for Reproductive Health.

Reproductive health was the issue that drew Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, into politics in the first place. She got herself elected as a senator in Ireland in 1969, where one of her first efforts was to try to change the law that banned not the use of condoms, but the buying or selling of them. More than 40 years later, she is still focused on reproductive health.

"It is not a comfortable issue," she told the audience at a Global Leaders Council event on a recent Monday evening in Manhattan, "but it is a fundamental issue for human rights and for development."

Members of the Council spoke for over an hour about the stories that brought them personally into the work of reproductive health. For Malawi Vice President Joyce Banda, it was her own experience of giving birth, during which she suffered from postpartum hemorrhage, which is the leading (and preventable) cause of maternal death for millions of women every year.

"The only reason I survived was because I was privileged to be under good care," she said. It was that recognition of good fortune that drove Banda to dedicate her life to providing education to girls and empowering women and girls.

To date, Banda said she has been the force behind the construction of three schools, sponsorship and feeding of thousands of students and children, and the passage of a domestic violence bill in 2006. She's pushed a movement for safe motherhood and increased use of family planning, and she sounded like she has the energy to work for decades to come.

Jan Eliasson, former president of the United Nations General Assembly and Sweden's former minister for foreign affairs, reminded the audience that just 70 years ago, Sweden was not the prosperous nation it is today. He said he grew up in a very small apartment, and did not see his first bathroom until he was 10.

He said as better education became more commonplace for women, families became smaller, contributing to Sweden's ability to develop a vibrant economy; and that it's possible for a country—any country—to prosper "if you do the right things."

For the Americans in the audience, U.S. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin brought the issue a little closer to home. Born in Alabama, she was a physician committed for the bulk of her career to improving the health of individuals in her community. She ran a clinic that was destroyed first by Hurricane George and then by Katrina. They rebuilt it more quickly the second time than the first, only to see it burn down the day after it reopened for the second time on New Years Day. Just as Benjamin was questioning whether these were signs that it was time to quit, a young girl came up to her with an envelope containing $7 from the girl's grandmother, a donation to help rebuild the clinic once again. Benjamin said, "If she could come up with $7, I was going to come up with the rest."

Now, as Surgeon General, Benjamin has made reproductive health one of the pillars of the National Prevention Strategy, which seeks to reduce the five leading causes of death nationwide.

Fred Sai, former president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation and considered the father of the reproductive health movement (strangely, no mention of who its mother is), really drove home the urgency of maternal health. He talked about first grasping the scope of the issue after secondary school, when his "special" lady friend, who had a scholarship and tremendous intellectual promise, was given to marriage to pay off her father's debt.

As a "small man," said Sai, "why should I not recognize what I owe to women and girls who have helped me so much?"

That lack of recognition around the world is shameful, he said, and he returned to Eliasson's example of Sweden, which was able to turn itself around in 70 years. Sai, who was born in Ghana, related the issue back to his home continent, where maternal and child survival rates and available healthcare are among the worst in the world.

"I challenge African leaders—political, religious, and traditional—to get up and do it. To say, 'we can change.'"

Dowser: What are Maternova's products and how do you bring in revenue?
Meg Wirth, founder: There are two main revenue streams. The first is the product for midwives and frontline providers. We sell things either individually or bundled – such as a 'Power Pak' – headlamps and a rotary mobile phone charger – so the midwife is able to see and also call for help. We have another more clinically-oriented pack.

The other revenue stream is the mapping tool that is basically software as a service. That’s something people like to license. It’s a data visual-mapping tool that allows a group to keep track of a set of facilities –where they are, what the quality of care is. One place we’ve done is in Mexico – where for Chiapas, we’ve done 42. The data has to come from on-the-ground organizations, so in that case it’s the Safe Motherhood Committee.

Do you follow up with health care workers to see how the products have been used?
We did a lot of testing of the products, and different bundles. We got feedback from a midwife on the border of the Congo. They evaluated the paks and provided detailed feedback in English.  They noted, for example that the towel we had included for the mother to deliver on would be better utilized to 'catch' the baby and warm the baby.  In many cases the nurses use their own neck scarves to wipe and catch the baby.

Then our favorite story: in Haiti, the packs have become the standard gift for midwives graduating from their programs. It helps to keep midwives safe – having light and power to call when they are working in refugee camps is really critical. It’s got the dual purpose of protecting these valuable women – trained midwives can be rare.

What led you to identify the need for the services Maternova provides?
I’m not a clinician or an OBGYN but I looked around and no one was doing this. I lived in a maternity hospital in Borneo (Indonesia) for six months, because I was working on a Safe Motherhood project and that’s where they felt was the safest place for me to live. It’s a heavily Muslim area and a single woman living alone would be seen as very strange and dangerous. So that was quite an immersion experience. I have a degree in International Development and I’ve worked in global public health for the past 20 years. Recently I worked for a social venture capital fund, Commons Capital, looking at the role of innovation in global health.

How do you distribute the product? How do you reach midwives and maternity hospitals?
We sell them through multiple distribution channels. One is directly to countries through organizations or governments. We also sell to groups in the U.S. or Canada that work overseas – we call those the globetrotting clinicians, the more everyday Paul Farmers of the world, and there are quite a few of them. And those are the people who are spreading skills, technologies, and new ideas. It’s a very common practice for people to stuff their bags with medical supplies so we’re formalizing that practice and bundling some key obstetric products together.

How much does a pak cost, and what about using the data map?
The ‘power pak’ is $20 – but if you buy in large volume the cost goes down.

The map service is a customized formula. It depends on where you are – if it’s a U.S. based group or in Sierra Leone, there’s a different price. It depends on how many indicators are being tracked, number of points on the map, number of users on the map. It’s a sliding scale, based on location.

Is it complicated to manage an international network of staff and clients?
[We have] about 30 people that work on contract one way or another, but they’re not employees.

My admin assistant is in the Philippines. It’s kind of neat. We use translators because often you’re getting somebody who’s from another country, located there, and it’s kind of empowering to have a truly global staff.

Interview has been edited and condensed.

In rural Uganda, where 95% of the homes don’t have electricity, solar technology is a distributable energy source; so, it’s a very good solution to clean rural energy or actually, rural energy period.  It just happens to be clean as well.

Also, the technology that we were using – the solar panel, the pvc, etc., was very 'techie' and we were in homes where there was no technology.  So, the women didn’t have a comfort zone with the technology that we were bringing into their home.

We realized that the women are responsible for the solar panel – it’s a household utility.  So, there’s a gender gap there for technology.  And that’s not specific to Uganda.  It’s an issue here at home as well when you look at the gender ratio in science and math.  It leans towards men.

That’s how I started thinking about how we can close that gap.

And the solution?
The AVON model for solar energy.

At the time that I was developing this idea, the design of the solar lamps became micro-solar.  These are designed for specifically for BoP application.  They’re rugged, very intuitive to use, affordable, and readily available.  And it’s not as 'techie'; it’s really just a light.  So, the gap bridged.  All of a sudden it’s a lot easier for women to use.  You stick it out during the day; you bring it in at night; you flip a switch and you have light to read, cook, and even a source to charge your phone.

It’s also one-tenth the cost of a home solar system so it’s within the price point of these homes.  They can range from $15 USD to $50 and when you’re already paying $2 a week for kerosene, it’s an investment that will pay off in a few months because you’ll no longer have to pay for an energy source.  They use those extra funds then for better food, health care, and schooling fees.

And the price continues to drop as the technology evolves.

Did Solar Sisters pair with an micro-finance institution (MFI) to provide women entrepreneurs the initial capital needed for this 'business in a bag' model?
No. Rather Solar Sister uses a 'micro consignment' model versus micro franchise.  These women don’t have to pay the franchise cost up front and we don’t work with MFIs.

For example, we had a lady, Viola, who signed up to be an entrepreneur.  But she had just had a baby so was not able to sell immediately.  If she had taken out a loan then she would have had to start paying back within a week or so.  That would have been difficult in her situation and put her collateral at risk – her home.

Rather, we want them to sell and our intent is not to make money off the interest rates.  So, we extend a loan ourselves by providing them the inventory.

In handling the finances, do you utilize mobile banking or other forms of banking?
Yes!  In Uganda, 5% of people in rural Uganda have electricity but 80-85% have a phone.  Not only do they have one phone but four phones for different calling plans and mobile carriers to get the cheapest rates.  In fact, with solar energy, many women are able to charge the phones of their neighbors for 25 cents and provide a service.  So, it’s another source of income.

And yes, we use mobile banking and SMSs to communicate with the entrepreneurs and streamline funds.  It makes the operation much more efficient.

Have you had any default cases?
Yes, we’ve had women who have sampled it and decided it’s not for them so they’ve bought the lamps themselves that are in inventory or returned them to us and that’s alright.   That’s not a problem.  We understand.

What propelled you to focus on this particular issue – energy poverty?
My background was in energy so I was sensitized to the idea that energy is fundamental to development.  My work experience was on a much bigger scale though – developing large plants and big scale economic development.  But as I left that post, I knew that the same principles apply at the home level, the grassroots.

I was really interested in microcredit and how it was giving access to financial services.  But I saw that there was this same need on the energy side- access to energy in a way that they could do it at the grassroots level.  The will of government wasn’t there; waiting for the government to solve the rural energy problem was not the answer.  We needed a solution that was closer at hand.

Solar is the most democratic – we all live under the sun.  Energy is free and the equipment is a one time cost.  Compare that with cost of burning wood or kerosene and health issues involved. The cost is extremely high.  That’s why I went with solar.

When you come back to the States, do you wonder why can’t we do some of these ideas on a more grassroots level at home?
For those in Uganda, the cost of solar is much cheaper.  They’re paying 20-30% of their income on energy already.  We don’t pay that much.  And if we were to put in solar equipment, it would require us to spend a bit more.  So, we think of solar as a luxury, which makes it harder to implement here.

You’ve been in this startup mode for a year, any hiccups along the way?
Oh yes.

We met this one lady who seemed like a great businesswoman, had a lot of potential, and we thought she’d make a great entrepreneur.  But after the initial box of lamps she took from us, we never heard from her again.  So, we got back in touch and asked her how the experience was.  She told us that she’d sold the box and it was a wonderful opportunity.   But why didn’t she ask for more lamps?   She, responded, that she thought it was just a one-time opportunity.

So, I found myself wondering how did we not convey this correctly that this is an ongoing business opportunity, not a one time thing?

Sometimes, such simple details make you realize flaws that you couldn’t have conceived because we just assumed that these ladies would come back to us when they wanted more inventory.

With these lessons in mind, what do you say to other budding social entrepreneurs?
Be committed and open to learning.  That’s the key.  Just stick with it and be open during the process of developing your idea/organization.

You’re working with Ashoka as a changemaker.  How do you see this model as being scalable?
We’re partnering with women’s groups who have been working in the community for 10-20 years.  By doing such partnerships, we’re able to use their foundation and their local knowledge.  The biggest challenge in scaling is actually identifying funding partners: should it be a developing impact investor, philanthropic organization, or some other entity.  So, what we need to do is really become the experts in our business.  Women can sell a lot of items.  Solar energy is one of them and it’s one mode to economic freedom.

Image: Men's Story Project

Why are gender-based issues primarily considered “women’s” issues? Josie Lehrer founded the Men’s Story Project (MSP) to rethink this faulty truism. Intended for local replication, the MSP uses performance and dialogue to create public spaces for men to share their experience of male gender norms and masculinity. Below, Dowser talks with Lehrer about creating platforms for men’s less-often-heard stories and how sharing more of these stories can contribute to broader health and justice.

Dowser: Why look at social change through the lens of masculinity?
Lehrer: I believe that dominant-culture prescriptions for 'manhood' and gender relations are a key part of the system shaping many local and global preventable challenges to well-being, health and social justice. Traditional ideas about manhood are often entwined with other oppressions. Men who buy into traditional ideas about manhood are more likely to engage in harmful behaviors. And when men who buy into hazardous gender norms hold positions of power in male-dominated institutions, gender inequality and patriarchy become entrenched through policy -- affecting the ability of all people to live to their fullest potential.

There are few public forums where traditional masculinity norms are critically examined, and where more healthy and human approaches are highlighted. The MSP helps fill this gap through educational films, public story-sharing, and a growing Youtube library. We want to create a counterpoint to the limited and often oppressive messages of the mainstream media, and to highlight more sustainable forms of male gender expression.

How did the idea for MSP emerge and how has it evolved?
I was working as a community educator at San Francisco Women Against Rape in 2008, and sent out an email inviting people to a benefit presentation of the Vagina Monologues. At the end of the email, I added: '…and if you’d like to help me put together something similar for men, let me know!' People responded with enthusiasm, so I put out a formal Call for Submissions. As the submissions came in, I quickly saw that this could be a great, replicable way to bring men’s less-often-heard stories and critical reflection on male roles into public forums.

The first MSP event had a hugely positive response. We were invited to present universities soon thereafter. Our first film was in the San Francisco IndieFest, and I was invited to speak about the MSP on CNN. It’s been gaining momentum ever since. Our first film is being used around the country for teaching purposes. Our second film is almost finished – it is of an MSP production I directed in Chile, sponsored by Amnesty International. Several groups are currently developing MSP productions.

Image: Men's Story Project

How do MSP’s performances and community dialogues work?
In each presentation, a diverse group of local opinion leaders, artists, activists and first-time presenters share personal stories with an audience, followed by discussion. They discuss things men don’t often publicly talk about, and challenge stereotypical notions of manhood. We recruit participants through a combination of open calls and targeted recruitment. In Chile and California, participants’ stories have addressed topics including fatherhood, violence, homophobia, HIV/AIDS, bullying, aging, disability and sexuality, and the healing power of self-acceptance, community and love. Mediums have included slam poetry, prose, music and dance.

What do you think is most innovative about your work?
The MSP helps meet a widespread need to collectively examine and transform male gender norms, by fostering men’s public reflection on masculinities and gender relations. Few public projects have overtly addressed this area. The structure of the MSP model is innovative -- it’s replicable and adaptable, is grounded in research and social change theory, bridges public health and the arts, and views people as having a fundamental orientation towards goodness. It brings real men of different walks of life together, in public acts of self-revelation and solidarity.

Why did this project have to emerge at this place and point in time?
There is a steadily-emerging global movement of work to foster healthier gender-equitable masculinities. This movement stems from and stands in solidarity with women’s movements for empowerment and rights. There’s an increasing awareness that issues often referred to as ‘women’s issues’ are at least as much, if not more so, men’s issues.

What is key to a presentation of the MSP being useful or successful?
It needs to be real and presenters themselves need to give it gravitas. It needs to be locally and culturally relevant, and involve respected opinion leaders so that it can’t just be written off as marginal. If presenters discuss changes they made it’s important they describe what led them to change and how they did it. It’s also important to include genuine humor and celebration, so people can laugh and breathe and not be overwhelmed.

Paint a picture of where you envision your work in five to ten years’ time. What is your strategy for getting there?
I envision the MSP as a live discussion and film initiative created and evaluated in thousands of places around the world. Regularly-occurring MSP events, such as yearly productions on college campuses, will contribute to normalizing critical dialogue about masculinities as part of the mainstream social landscape. Over time, MSP films in different countries will yield a global-view film series on masculinities, health and social justice. Funds raised from live productions will support aligned causes. (You can support us now at our Kickstarter campaign!) Evaluation of local projects will help ensure that we are always a learning enterprise, creating relevant and effective initiatives.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Dowser: Just Vision is best known for its two award-winning feature-films, Budrus and Encounter Point, but its aims are wide. What are Just Vision’s central goals and how did they emerge?
Avni: Just Vision surfaces success stories of people who are catalyzing change. My background is in human rights work and the arts. After working in partnership with Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations for three years while at the human rights media organization WITNESS, I began to feel that I wanted to work in my own backyard. I am both Israeli and North American. After 9/11 and the collapse of the Oslo process I felt that my backyard was burning, that it was time to apply the skills I’d acquired to the issue for which I felt most responsible. I spent two years interviewing Palestinian and Israeli nonviolence leaders, peace-builders and human rights activists who overwhelmingly expressed that they felt invisible within their own communities and internationally. They felt very silo-ed in their own fields. I decided to launch Just Vision to highlight their untold stories of nonviolent activism, to connect these people to one another, to journalists, to thought-leaders and to the world.

What distinguishes Just Vision from other human rights organizations or other film-based human rights work?
The human rights field operates by identifying a victim, a violator and a violation and shaming the violator into compliance. But in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the parties don't agree that they are violators and everyone sees themselves as the victim. Just Vision does not mean to replace other human rights work, which is critical, but rather to complement it with models of success and with stories of people working for change in order to motivate others to act. We also seek to highlight the range of nonviolence and peace-building work in the region.

What were your original projects for Just Vision and how have those changed?
I originally intended to just make one film, Encounter Point, about several Israelis and Palestinians who have lost something precious as a result of the conflict and who still are pushing their communities in the direction of peace. The plan was to create learning tools with which to use the film in educational institutions and communities to educate people about nonviolent activism in the region. The reach of the film completely exceeded my expectations – we reached tens of millions of people in Israel, Palestine and the United States and kept winning audience awards. Many audiences were moved to act and wanted to know how they could get involved. We made Budrus, our next film, to show an example of a Palestinian-led nonviolent movement that succeeded, so that people could see and learn from it.

Your films and newly-released slideshow of Unsung Nonviolence Leaders focus largely on the individuals who are making nonviolent change. How do the stories and actions of these people relate to larger-scale structural and political change?
Social change on a broad scale requires massive participation on every level. It requires that an educator rethinks how she teaches history; it requires bereaved families to decide how they want to heal and whether they ask for accountability; and it requires nonviolent activists who are willing to put their bodies on the line to make a statement. As we see in Egypt and Tunisia today, it takes every kind of person. Through our interviews, films and slideshows we hope that viewers can find themselves somewhere in the stories and types of activism we present and recognize that everyone has a role to play.

What is the importance of presenting these stories? How does that lead to change and peace in the region?
People engaging in nonviolent activism in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are often isolated and under-appreciated. We hope that when we present their stories journalists will want to write about them, members of their communities will recognize the value of these efforts, students will want to study their approaches and perhaps volunteer with them, and even those who disagree with their methodologies will do so from a place of knowledge rather than ignorance. Gaby Lasky, for example, is one of the great unsung heroes of this work – she is in the Israeli courts day in and day out defending human rights activists and nonviolence leaders, straining the resources of her firm, and sacrificing a significant part of her life to make this work possible. She deserves broader support.

How does Just Vision hope to build on this work going forward?
As we grow, we are able to cultivate deep relationships with community leaders, educators and journalists in Palestinian and Israeli society. We have a broader reach and greater capacity to facilitate strategic relationships than we did in the past. For instance, we brokered a meeting between a group of 55 women from Bethlehem who wanted to show support for the women of Budrus and learn about their key role in the successful nonviolent movement depicted in the film. Similarly, we are taking our materials to classrooms, refugee camps, and other strategic locations to catalyze discussion, engagement and learning.

What connections and opportunities has Just Vision presented that would not otherwise be available to activists in the region?
We act as a megaphone by amplifying the voices that are critical but aren’t being heard. Before the film came out many Palestinians did not know the story of Budrus, about the success nonviolent activists had there in facing down the Israeli army, or about the role of women in that movement. With an issue of this magnitude it is about connecting the dots – the layer upon layer of activism that media and storytelling can help to link together. The very current example of Tunisia shows just how much one successful nonviolent resistance movement can be a catalyst for another. We want to keep making those catalysts possible; to make people see examples of human agency.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Images: Just Vision.

Findings of the 2010 Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report; Tier one represents the most compliance with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act; Tier three, the least.

Talk about a single girl who's been trafficked from her home country, held captive, and forced into servitude -- and your audience will naturally listen and sympathize. But talk about the number of individuals around the world who face a situation like hers every year -- and you're likely to get blank looks. We process personal stories instinctively, we are pulled in, we empathize. But when we add the crucial layers of analysis necessary to make sense of problems -- when we plumb the data that can tell us how to better assist trafficked girls -- some of the energy and attention dissipates.

Which is why we need to redouble our data gathering efforts -- especially for problems, like trafficking, that stir the deepest emotions. Nobody knows how many people are enslaved globally. Numbers vary, but an oft-cited estimate is  27 million people.

A UNESCO trafficking statistics project summed up the situation: "When it comes to statistics, trafficking of girls and women is one of several highly emotive issues which seem to overwhelm critical faculties. Numbers take on a life of their own, gaining acceptance through repetition, often with little inquiry into their derivations. Journalists, bowing to the pressures of editors, demand numbers, any number. Organizations feel compelled to supply them, lending false precisions and spurious authority to many reports."

If organizations don't know how many people are currently being trafficked, or are likely to be in the future, how can they develop a credible plan -- not to rescue just a few individuals -- but to eliminate the global problem entirely?

Claude d'Estrée, founder of the Human Trafficking Clinic at the University of Denver, says that accurate figures and reliable methodology are essential not only to shaping effective domestic and international policy, but to earning respect from academics regarding the scale and severity of the issue. His goal is to establish a methodology for gauging the problem and train a generation of activists to implement a scientific  approach in their work, rather than depending on anecdotal evidence.

Unlike most other programs, the clinic requires students to take at least three statistics courses and a methodology class in addition to their subject-specific studies. "The focus is on really first-class research methodology," said d'Estrée. "Otherwise, they can't go out there and do the research."

The clinic's "taxonomy project" is a good example of the emphasis on research methods. Associates are compiling a dictionary of terms relevant to human trafficking. The existing definitions for such terms, according to d'Estrée, are all legal in nature -- which doesn't really help people working in the field. Outside of the legal system, use of terminology varies and can cause confusion among activists as well as more serious complications, like a general misunderstanding of what, exactly, the problem is. Establishing a single resource of terms and their official definitions is high on the clinic's agenda: what exactly does "slavery" mean, for example, and how does it differ from "forced labor" and that from "bonded labor"?

Improving the quality of research and data on human trafficking -- the second largest criminal industry in the world -- would go a long way toward informing and improving policy so that traffickers can be identified and prosecuted, and their larger networks compromised and deactivated.