Six grassroots change leaders from Afghanistan, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru and Tanzania are turning to the power of the pen to expose injustices and inspire change.
It’s a sunny day in Mikocheni, Tanzania. Sia Fred Towo clutches a bag of reusable sanitary pads in one hand, showcasing it to a group of women in a dusty yard with a look of seriousness and pride that rarely accompanies menstrual products.
Sia is the director of Femme International, a nonprofit in East Africa, on a mission to break down global menstrual taboos. She struggled through her first periods alone—the only girl in a family with five brothers, too ashamed to talk to her reserved mom about what was happening to her body.
Fast forward to today: Towo is not only bringing period products to remote villages in Tanzania, she is bravely baring her own painful experiences in a borderless and ageless format: the op-ed.
Towo is one of six grassroots change leaders who are turning to the power of the pen to expose injustices and inspire change on a broad array of urgent issues—from climate change to education access. She joins courageous women from Afghanistan, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan and Peru who are writing op-eds about their personal experiences with these issues.
Why op-eds? The timeless format has been proven to have large and long-lasting effects on people’s views, regardless of their occupations and political affiliations, according to a Yale University study. Up to 70 percent of people who read op-eds agreed with the authors’ views immediately after they finish reading.
Yet, when it comes to life-or-death issues, vitally important voices are chronically missing from mainstream discourse. Representation of women, Global Majority and marginalized groups’ voices in publishing spaces of all kinds still lag behind white, Western men. This needs to change.
Take authorship on climate change—one of the most urgent challenges facing humankind. Climate change authorship from the Global Majority hovers at a mere 1-19 percent, according to analyses from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Society for Conservation Biology. The brunt of climate change consequences falls squarely on the very people who are excluded from dialogue about how to curb it.
Likewise, women’s voices are chronically underrepresented in opinion sections across media. One study found women made up a mere 19 percent of experts featured in news stories and 37 percent of reporters telling stories globally.
To help turn the tide, the organization where I work, GlobalGiving, invited six Global Majority community leaders working on urgent social issues to embark on an eight-month fellowship called Community Voices. The fellows received support from The OpEd Project and Energize Your Voice to amplify powerful solutions from within their communities that go unheard.
The OpEd Project has been on a mission to change who writes history since 2008. Since then, the project has produced tens of thousands of published ideas (op-eds and much more), reaching hundreds of millions of viewers, readers and listeners. And the founder of Energize Your Voice, Minna Taylor, is herself an accomplished author and speaker, who saw in her work the economic barriers that many grassroots leaders face in accessing high-quality professional development opportunities. She launched a pro bono arm of her business to address the gap.
It’s a gap that Hassina Sherjan has been laboring to close for most of her adult life.
Sherjan, another community voices fellow, founded the nonprofit Aid Afghanistan for Education. When she returned to her native Afghanistan in the ’90s, she witnessed the devastating choices and sacrifices confronting many Afghan women.
At a refugee camp, Sherjan wrote about a woman who approached her with her newborn twins and asked, “Which one do you think is healthier? Because I cannot keep both. I don’t have enough milk and no money to purchase milk.”
Sherjan came to see access to education as the key to women’s emancipation from incomprehensible suffering. She started Aid Afghanistan for Education with five clandestine classrooms for 250 girls in Kabul and eventually served more than 7,000 students. But with the return of the Taliban to power in 2021, progress for girls and women in Afghanistan is at a standstill. Currently, 80 percent of school-aged girls and young women in Afghanistan are out of school.
Take Action
It’s past time to elevate the experiences of courageous women like Towo and Sherjan and focus on their voices and solutions.
One way to help their solutions be heard now is through reading and sharing their work on GlobalGiving.
And we can’t stop there: Global Majority perspectives need to be on the front pages of our newspapers, broadcast on prime-time television, uplifted in every public forum, everywhere. It’s only the way the pressing problems facing our world will ever be solved.
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The GlobalGiving community voices fellows include:
- Sarah Ahmed of Al-Mustafa Welfare Society | Pakistan
- Bidhya Maharjan of Wedu Limited | Nepal
- Manee Ngozi Nnamani of the Nigerian Association for Women’s Advancement | Nigeria
- Paloma Rodriguez of Instituto de Montaña | Peru
- Hassina Sherjan of Aid Afghanistan for Education | Afghanistan
- Sia Fred Towo of Femme International | Tanzania
Meet the Fellows
Up next:
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