Hillary Pennington, the vice president of Ford Foundation, an independent, nonprofit grant-making organization, recently visited Nigeria. In this interview, she explains what her foundation is doing to end gender based violence, strengthen democratic values, reduce poverty and injustice, promote international cooperation, and advance human achievement.
Amid several laws aimed at addressing gender-based violence, sexual harassment remains a global concern. How can this be curbed?
There are laws against this, but they are not doing enough to stop these practices. So, we are trying to focus on some things. The first is to improve the knowledge and the models that we all have access to about preventing violence from happening. The second is to work on cultural norms, and that is why the meeting that we had with traditional and religious leaders was very important.
The last step is to work on laws, policies, and government funding because no matter what a foundation does, our resources are small compared to resources that are at the government’s disposition. I think this country has more to do in terms of how the government could be committed to gender equality.
To what extent are you working to ensure inclusion for people that are excluded from systems that affect their lives?
Political inequality (where people don’t have representation), as well as economic and cultural inequality, are cardinal issues. Everywhere around the world, there is work to do on that. We have been making plans across multiple political evolutions in Nigeria, and we would continue.
Our job is to keep working with the people and to ensure that there is progress for representation, fairness, and equity. Currently, the two areas that we are focused on are very central to inequality. One is climate change, and the second is gender. Gender equality and gender-based violence go together.
In what way can the foundation address traditions that perpetuate gender-based violence?
We work on shifting norms in all kinds of ways. For instance, we have funded a lot of work in arts and culture, and Nollywood. So, part of it is popular culture. We have investments in journalism because the profession plays an important role in investigating, analysing, and covering things that happen in the country.
Also, we are focusing on working with traditional and religious leaders because they are the shapers of culture. Therefore, there is no single intervention that you can make or a single switch that you can pull to change the narrative automatically. I think it is something that takes time, but we are here for the long haul and are committed to it.
Are you considering new strategies to end GBV and advance positive change in policy and social norms globally?
There have to be laws and enforcement of the laws, which is why we feel that culture change is so important. In many places around the world, if a woman, for example, is a victim of domestic violence, and she goes to the police, very often the police will send her back home, saying it’s a domestic dispute. Slowly, these things are changing, and it’s the reason every important segment of society has to do more. The business community is stepping up to this issue by helping employees that are struggling with abuse at home.
Around resource governance, what are the strategies that the foundation has in place to effectively make the voices of resource-rich communities heard in Nigeria?
In general, our diagnosis is that indigenous people that sit largely over massive natural resources are the first defenders of those resources, but they don’t have legal rights to their land and are not equipped to have power and sit at tables where negotiations are being made.
Our overall goal is to make sure that they are at those tables, and that when they are there, they know the laws; have negotiation skills and policy backgrounds that would help them to be effective advocates, and fund research and advocacy organisations that can go to affected communities and give them more power.
In some parts of the world, we are using our grants to give indigenous leaders access to technology. We are also trying to build the idea of what a just energy transition looks like. To achieve this, we are funding universities and fintechs around the world.
One of the challenges for us is that very often, those communities are not organised like professional civil societies organisation (CSO). So, we have had to learn how to fund them in ways that are legal because very often they don’t want to evolve to become traditional CSOs.
They are powerful, but reject the idea of a single leader in the community. They have been teaching us a lot about models of leadership and organisation that are important for true civil society activism over time.
How can we address the issue of inclusion of women, and people with disability, especially on political issues?
We do a lot of work on the inclusion of people with disabilities. You may have seen some of the writing of our president, who when we began the work on inequality was taken to task by people from the disability community for not including disability justice, and that has become a major focus of our work in these last years.
Continue reading from the source: The Guardian