Speaking of the importance of recognizing gender differences, as Makhete discussed in the below post, Oprah’s South African school has drawn much attention since its opening a few years ago–both positive and negative. Aside from the recent scandal, the concept of the school has been both scrutinized and praised since its inception.

The school, a $40 million private boarding center featuring state of the art facilities including yoga and art studios, has been a blessing from an educational standpoint, says Gene Sperling, director of the Center for Universal Education at the Council on Foreign Relations. Sperling is quoted in a Christian Science Monitor article as saying:

“I think it’s very important for people to recognize that the lack of education for both boys and girls is a crisis in Africa…But the benefits of girls’ education, in terms of improving health, women’s empowerment, and family well-being, probably does make girls’ education the highest-returning social investment in the world.”

Similarly, there is published research that dictates the benefit of improving education for girls, as it increases per capita income and improves female health, lowers fertility rates and HIV, as well as infant mortality. In other words, when women are educated, they are less likely to contract disease or get pregnant, and they are more likely to contribute positively to the workforce and provide for their children.

Statistically, less than half of southern African girls remain in school. Because of extreme poverty and disease, many are forced to drop out before reaching the secondary level to take care of their families, and contribute to the family income.

While Oprah has no doubt recognized in a positive way the need for long-term funding to support girls’ education across South Africa, she has been criticized for instituting such a high-profile, exclusive school and I can’t help but agree. Forty million dollars could have gone a lot farther than 50 acres, and it seems the money could have been used to build some sort of educational system or series of schools that would benefit many more girls. It could have also been used to improve existing schools across the country.

It can be argued that the school is too exclusive and advanced for the needs of the world that these girls will be returning to after they graduate. These girls are coming from the poorest of the poorest areas of South Africa. How will they really benefit from knowing yoga poses? Will art classes really provide viable life and work skills these girls need to support themselves and their families?

1.      Why should organizations understand gender and development

Organizations that work in communities and try to address development and to empower people, should take the issue of gender very seriously. Many development activists see “the people” as their target group and do not try to understand the different realities of men and women’s lives. Even in cases where women are specially mentioned as the most important target group, proper analysis is seldom done about the impact a project or policy will have on the lives of women.An example is a rural job creation project that aimed to deal with the fact that 40% of people in a community are unemployed. The planners failed to further analyze this figure and did not realize that in fact only 20% of men were unemployed while a massive 60% of women had no work. About half the poorest families in the area were also headed by single women. The project involved employing people to build a 20km road and required that 30% of the workers should be women. Because of the higher percentage of men employed and the lower level of unemployment, the project made a big difference to the economic situation of men and their families. The economic status of single women who headed families was hardly affected. Women who did work on the project also had great difficulty because they worked long hours and could not attend to all their other responsibilities such as childcare, cooking, housekeeping, fetching wood and water, etc. A proper analysis of the needs and conditions of women may have lead to a project that employed more women for shorter hours.Understanding gender and applying a basic gender analysis are essential tools for development activists. You do not have to be gender activists who want to work for the emancipation and equality of women to use a gender analysis. Every community or development activist who wants to improve the lives of people should know how to use these tools.

2. Important things to know about gender and development

The position of women in South Africa

Women perform two thirds of the world’s work
Women earn one tenth of the world’s income
Women are two thirds of the world’s illiterate
Women own less than one hundredth of the world’s property
- United Nations statisticsIn this section we will look at the facts about women in South Africa. We will give figures to show the inequalities that still exist and that affect most women’s livesWhere do women live?Women make up just over half of the population in South Africa, but when you look at the population in the poorest areas like rural areas and informal settlements there are always many more women than men.Just over half of all women live in the rural areas where they can barely survive. Access to land and support for small-scale farming is a major problem for African women.Family lifeApartheid and the migrant labor system tore apart African families. 30% of African and 26% of all households are headed by women - this usually means that there is no man contributing to the family income.In most families women work outside the home and take full responsibility for housework. They work long hours to cook, clean and care for their families. Almost all families have young children as well as old or disabled people who are cared for and nursed by women.Women and educationAlmost half of all African women have grade 7 or less education and many women have no schooling at all.In high schools there are more girls than boys, but the boys have a much higher matrix pass-rate. This may be because girls have more responsibilities for childcare and housework and less time for studying than boys. 

 Sustainable development is concerned with creating a sustainable build that should be exactly that i.e. “sustainable” and lasting. It should really be about ‘less is more’. Therefore, in order to create your ideal living space without going over budget, it’s important to bear these thoughts in mind when you get to the initial stage of planning.

http://www.sustainablebuild.co.uk/BudgetingYourSustainableDevelopment.html

Planning Essentials

No building project which involves money should be undertaken without careful planning first, if you want to keep within a budget. When considering financing sustainable development projects, you need to do your research. Check out the basics of green building, the internet is a useful resource for this, and read through some case studies of others who have undertaken similar projects and how they were able to stick to budget and make economic savings, which is, after all, what sustainable development should be all about. It’s not simply about installing energy efficient and environmentally friendly appliances, some of which can be expensive and where the paybacks may not materialize for some time but also about recycling and making the most use out of natural materials and other materials which may have been discarded or dismissed. You also need to set out your own individual environmental goals and tailor them to suit your own personal budget.

Stick to Your Philosophy!

You’ve made the decision to create a development which is sustainable and have formulated a plan. Now that it’s time to put the plan into action, you need to keep hold of your philosophy throughout the duration of the project so remember, it’s all about ‘less is more’ and ‘recycle, recycle. Visit construction and demolition sites to see if it’s possible to obtain any unwanted items which can help save you money. Things like discarded doors and window frames could come in very handy and even old carpets can be used for insulation purposes. If you need to call in expert help from a tradesperson, obtaining a number of quotes and choosing the least costly one will also save you money. However, it’s also important to remember that anyone you bring in to help needs to also be reputable as well so don’t just rely on price alone as it could end up costing you even more money.

Useful Things to Consider

Check out what financial assistance might be available to you. Other articles in this section tell you about some of the grants, loans and subsidies that are set aside for both individuals and companies who are looking to build a sustainable development. There are also certain banks and building societies that have begun to market certain financial products specifically to those who have an interest in sustainable living. Attending educational workshops which will teach you more about the practicalities of sustainable developments and knowing more about the uses and features of natural building materials such as earth, stone, straw and wood can come in very handy and also help you reduce costs. Ultimately, the bottom line is that you will get out far more than you put in to creating your very own sustainable development as it’s not just a structure you’re building for living or working in but you’re building a whole way of life which inspires you and which demonstrates your commitment to creating a more sustainable future for yourself which entirely fits in with your environmental values and your vision of how you want your world to become.

No one entity can fully support the needs of young people, it is essential that families, schools, community- and faith-based organizations, government agencies, businesses, and other community groups work together to help youth grow in healthy ways and to provide the safe and supportive environments they need to thrive.
One way to develop a comprehensive approach for helping youth is to create a community partnership. Ideally, such a partnership will draw its members from many different backgrounds and sectors of the community. The aim of the partnership is to work together to assess the needs of youth in the community and develop a coordinated response to these needs. Working with community partners to improve the lives of youth offers many advantages. Many youth issues and risk factors are interrelated. Working together helps you deliver consistent messages and reach youth through a variety of channels. It also presents valuable opportunities to share resources, develop joint goals and objectives, and learn from each other.
Building a community partnership can be challenging. Disagreements can arise in establishing project goals or strategies. Turf and boundary issues may exist between organizations, or groups may have competing demands for other worthy projects in the community. Different opinions and perspectives can sometimes bring things to a halt. Try to find the right balance between broad representation and having people who work well together.
Look around in your community to see if partnerships already exist. Consider whether you should join with them or build something new. If you’re forming a new community partnership, this section will help you get started.

by John McKnight

Each of us has a map of the social world in our mind, and the way we act, our plans and opinions are the result of that map.
The people who make social policy also have social maps in their minds. They make plans and design programs based upon their map. Indeed, if you carefully examine their programs, you can detect the nature of their mental map.
Using this method, we have found that the most common social policy map has two locations: institutions and individual people. By institutions we mean large structures such as corporations, universities, and government mental health systems. These structures organize a large group of people so that a few of them will be able to control the rest of them. In this structure, there is ultimately room for one leader. It is a structure initially created to produce goods such as steel and automobiles.
In the last few decades, the structure has also been used to design human service systems. While these newly designed hierarchical, managed service systems do not produce goods such as steel, they do produce needs assessments, service plans, protocols, and procedures. They are also thought, by some policymakers, to produce health, education, security, or justice.
If it is correct that these systems can produce these service commodities, then it is possible to imagine that there are consumers of their products. For example, we have all heard that there are now people called “health consumers.” They are the individuals who are the other part of the social map created by most social policymakers. They make a complete economic world by acting as the users (consumers) of the products of managed institutional producers of such commodities as mental health, health, education, and justice. Thus, we can see that it was necessary to create health consumers once we had systems that could produce health. Otherwise, there would be no purpose for these large hierarchical, managed systems.
Once we understand this social map of institutions and individuals we can see why we have mental health providers and mental health consumers. We can also see how our developing service economy works.
Because the gross national product is the sum of the goods and services produced each year, many policy experts have come to believe that the well-being of our society significantly depends upon the amount of the commodities called services that are produced by institutions and used by consumers. For example, a person with a perilous and extended illness (a health consumer) contributes significantly to our economic growth by using large amounts of the commodities produced by the health system. Indeed, a very ill person disabled for a considerable amount of time could cause production of much more medical dollar value through their illness than the value of their own production were they healthy.