Where do we stand?

A large amount of the work of Face to Face International during the six years of operation had to do with generating donor country awareness of and support for the unmet health needs and rights of women in developing countries. We and our NGO and celebrity partners raised several million dollars in advocacy and resource mobilization campaign funds, generated an incredible amount of PR, informed a large number of policy and other ODA decision makers in numerous donor countries and produced several award-winning campaigns and documentaries.

Did it make any difference? Of course it did. But the real question should be, how much difference did it make relative to the investment of time and money or compared to the total unmet need (or problem). The honest answer to that would be “not nearly enough.”

• most donor countries still have not lived up to their 1994 Cairo overseas development assistance commitments;
• donor country public awareness of the significance of international population and development assistance is almost as low now as was in 1998; and
• many governmental officials are still un-informed of or un-moved by the unmet needs and rights of women in developing countries and the relationship of women’s empowerment to achievement of the MDGs.

Since we are not the only NGO working in the area, one might conclude that the whole population and development assistance NGO and governmental community is not having enough impact. In fact, a recent report commissioned by the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs has reached this conclusion, certainly as it pertains to the impact of the international development finance community:

“At the beginning of the 21st century, more than five decades after international development began to emerge as a field in its own right, the international development financing ‘system’ is really not much of a system. It is rather a collection of disjointed entities that lack coherence, often work at cross purposes and are not up to the task of mobilizing finance in the amounts and ways required to assist a growing diversity of developing countries in their efforts to reduce poverty and improve living standards.

The institutions that comprise the architecture of the international development system have grown and expanded by accretion, with one layer of agencies, organizations and programs being deposited on top of previous ones. This expansion has been driven primarily by inertia, special interests and, quite often, fads that have kept alive institutions that should have disappeared, and that preclude the emergence of missing ones to fill obvious gaps. This has not prevented many existing public and private development organizations from doing good work, but has certainly meant that the overall performance and impact of the international development financing system have been well below what is required to support development efforts —and, in particular, to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015.

Thus, in spite of the number and diversity of the institutions, instruments and practices that make up the international development finance system, it appears woefully inadequate to respond to the changing demands emerging from the much more complex realities of global interdependence.”

Need a specific example of the international development finance system at work? The following is an excerpt from the opening chapter of MDG-guru Jeffrey Sachs’ book The End of Poverty:

“Malawi actually put together one of the earliest and best conceived strategies for bringing treatment to its dying population, and gave an enormously thoughtful response to the challenges of managing a new system of drug delivery, patient counseling and education, community outreach, and the financial flows that would accompany the process of training doctors. On that basis, Malawi made proposals to the international community to help Malawians try to reach about a third of the total infected population (about three hundred thousand people) with anti-AIDS drug treatment within a five-year scale-up period.

Yet international processes are cruel. The donor governments—including the United States and Europeans-told Malawi to scale back its proposal sharply because the first proposal was "too ambitious and too costly." The next draft was cut back to a mere hundred thousand on treatment at the end of five years. Even that was too much. In a tense five-day period, the donors prevailed on Malawi to cut another 60 percent from the proposal, down to forty thousand on treatment. This atrophied plan was submitted to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria. Incredibly, the donors that run that fund saw fit to cut back once again. After a long struggle, Malawi received funding to save just twenty-five thousand at the end of five years-a death warrant from the international community for the people of this country.”

We at Face to Face believe that poverty is the cause of most of the problems and unmet needs experienced by women in developing countries; poverty caused in too many cases by corruption and inept leadership. What women need most is a fair (equal to men) shot at decent jobs and earned-equity and ownership opportunities. But decent jobs are in very short supply. Kirk Magleby, author of Microfranchises as a Solution to Global Poverty, observes that:

“In much of the developing world, formal jobs are so scarce that the vast majority of people are forced into self-employment in the informal sector whether they like it or not. These reluctant micro entrepreneurs operate hundreds of millions of tiny, low-productivity, copycat businesses that seldom generate profits, build little wealth, and create few jobs.

“The developing world suffers an acute paucity of strong small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), dooming far too many countries to low economic growth rates, high unemployment, social unrest, and all the other pathologies that breed in poverty.”

In most developed countries, small- and medium-sized businesses typically employ 60% or more of the population and are the key to overall economic growth and prosperity.

Unfortunately micro-loans haven’t yet made much of a dent in reducing poverty, partly because micro-loans are not usually large enough to capitalize the start-up of small businesses nor are the loans normally accompanied by experienced or affordable business development advisors.

So, in late 2005, Face to Face International decided to focus entirely on making small business ownership and operation opportunities more accessible to and feasible for low income women with little in the way of capital, education and business development experience. We spent the next two years working with the private sector developing a business model that came to be called optionsforlife.