Required Reading

The Financial Times profiles Paul Wolfowitz, the new President of the World Bank.

A sampling:

{...}An important part of this agenda is a focus on what the bank can do to help empower women in developing countries. Education and healthcare will remain priorities for the bank, but Wolfowitz is likely to focus its efforts on girls and women. “The role of women is something that has hit me very hard pretty much since my time in Indonesia, where you have a reasonably liberated female population in a predominantly Muslim country. And you can see that the country as a whole is the better off for it... It seems to me that it is an almost arithmetic equation that if half of the population is held back, then your development is going to be held back.”

Bank insiders say his thinking on this issue may have been influenced by Shaha Riza, a bank employee, Middle East expert and specialist on gender issues, with whom the divorced Wolfowitz has had a relationship for the past couple of years. “I have sympathy for someone who says that the Swedish model or the American model of relatively far-advanced feminism is not necessarily something that even women of other countries want,” he says. “But there is a point at which it is more than just a cultural thing and that is a fundamental violation of human rights and a fundamental denial of equality of opportunity, and when you do deny equal opportunity you are trying to run a race with one leg tied, sort of. And often your best leg.”

In Pakistan, last month, Wolfowitz heard a better analogy: at a meeting in the Punjabi village of Dhok Tabarak, a woman told him that development is like a cart: it has two wheels, and if one of the wheels is not turning you will not get very far. Wolfowitz was so taken with the metaphor that during the rest of his visit to Pakistan he quoted the woman on 20 or more occasions. After the first few times, he added a horse to the story, to represent economic growth. “If the cart does not have something strong to pull it - the horse is growth - then it does not matter how fast the wheels can turn.”

Of the three full days Wolfowitz spent in India, one day was spent talking to assorted groups of rural women about bank-sponsored development programmes. Women were also notably present at all his meetings in Pakistan and India and when I asked him if this was a deliberate policy that he intended to continue, he said that it was. “We can empower people simply by meeting with them; I think there’s a tendency to think that if the World Bank president meets with people then they must be important.”

Wolfowitz told me one day that someone had just described him as a feminist. He laughed, and said: “It is the first time in my life I’ve been called that, I certainly don’t think of myself in that way. Look, we are not talking about a particular cultural way of male-female roles, but you can tell when women are denied equal rights or equal opportunities and that is not only unfair to them, it is unhelpful to the whole society.”

Such sentiments from the former Pentagon hawk might sound odd to some in Washington, but they went down well in Hyderabad, where Wolfowitz one day spoke to a hall packed with 300 women from self-help groups across the state of Andhra Pradesh. The groups help women lobby together for health and education, and gain access to micro credit loans. “Who wants to tell me how the self-help group has changed their life?” Wolfowitz asked. All hands in the audience went up. Twenty women started to talk at once, each struggling to speak longest.

There was a lot of laughter and not much translation, but the cheerful mood was killed when the state’s chief minister rose to give a 20-minute speech about his administration’s achievements. The women listened in silence, but perked up when Wolfowitz began to speak again, clapping every time he paused for the translator. The loudest applause came at the end as he told them: “The thing that has impressed me is not just the money you earn but the way it helps you to make your children’s lives better. When I see how well the women are doing here, I think you have to teach the men to walk faster.”

Later, the chief minister asked Praful Patel, the bank’s vice-president for south Asia, why Wolfowitz had received so much more applause than him. Patel said he thought the chief minister had talked at the women, while Wolfowitz had talked to them and asked questions, and that had made a difference.{...}

Go read the whole thing.