The Future Is Hers! 5 Ways How You Can Personally Empower Women and Girls Around The World

Twice a year, the United Nations emphasize the importance of women and girls to our world: On March 8, we celbrate the International Women’s Day, in honor of the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women around the globe. Preceding this important day, we as Rutgers UNICEF want to inspire you to start thinking on how you and I personally relate to female empowerment worldwide – and what we as individuals can do to further promote women’s empowerment.

I started writing this blog post with a clear motivation: to present you with practical, every-day actions and choices on how you can actively contribute to the worldwide strive of female empowerment. Having a background in Political Science as well as Women’s Studies, I know how gigantic our world’s problems and connected gender inequalities can oftentimes feel – compared to us as small individuals who nevertheless have big visions and passions on how the world could and should look like for fellow women around the globe. Supporting women in our community is one thing – but how can we actively contribute to something that’s going on at the other side of the globe? To bridge this gap, I therefore present you with five practical ways to empower women and girls around the world with small actions & choices in your ever-day life. I know that many of you might oftentimes feel the frustration of feeling like there’s not so much we can do with a small college budget and heavy time constraints, but I set out to nevertheless challenge you to consider areas of your life you might not have associated with female empowerment until now. No matter where you are or how big your budget is, YOU can have a direct impact on girl’s life and empowerment around the world:

1. Educate Yourself:

Our world and international political system clearly face uncountable issues and it is a real challenge to always stay up to date – but: start educating yourself on the issues that matter to you! Educate yourself on the issues that affect women. May it be climate change issues, sexual violence, or modern slavery – we can only start advocating for it and acting accordingly once we know about it. And if you get passionate about an issue: share it! Go and tell you friends, family, and community! The more people know of what’s going on in the world – the better!

2. What’s your slavery footprint?

Quite provocative – I know – but let’s be honest here: we might think that slavery belongs to the past, but the hard truth that this is not the case: According to Antislavery.org, 40.3 million people are estimated to be trapped in modern slavery worldwide. 1 in 4 of them are children, almost three quarters are women and girls. Modern slavery is all around us, and yet so often conveniently out of side. But if we dig deeper and ask “who made my clothes?”; “who curated the coffee beans of my coffee?”; “who picked the fruit and vegetables that I eat” or “who digs for the minerals used in my smartphone?” we uncover that the products we consume would not be as cheap and accessible if not the person who made it paid a high price for it: their personal freedom. Modern slavery takes many forms, from human trafficking, to forced labor and the slavery of children. I want to encourage you all to take the survey at: Slaveryfootprint.org and find out how many slaves work for you – and discover which products might drive the score.

Clearly, every single slave is too many. So by realizing which areas of your lives and consumption might be affected, you might have new inspiration and a heightened sensitivity of how you personally have a direct effect on other people’s lives through global supply chains. We oftentimes tend to forget but human rights have a redistributive character, exploitation of women and girls around the world works because we just passively support the system by buying these cheap products without even thinking about it. Let’s disrupt the system & end modern slavery!

3. ShareTheMeal

As stated in the beginning, financial giving can be a real pressure as college students without regular income and we might tend to mentally postpone financial contributions until we have high paid salary jobs. But listen carefully, there are options how we can practically, and with little money involved, make a difference: with ShareTheMeal you can support the UN’s World Food Programme’s mission to end hunger with a single tap on your phone. According to the WFP, 1 in 9 children goes to bed hungry every night; and it is estimated that 3.5 million women and children die each year from undernutrition. Importantly, according the Global Nutrition Report, women’s empowerment can’t be achieved without addressing malnutrition (see here if you want to learn more). ShareTheMeal gives you and me the convenient opportunity to quite literally share our meal. How? Download the app & find out: Whenever you’re out with your friends and you enjoy a fancy meal – or when you might simply cook for yourself at home, you can share your meal with a child in need for only 70 cents. As an inspiration: you might want to challenge yourself and share your meal every time you go out to eat – and fill many hungry stomachs with it.

4. Bring your own

We all know that global warming and our immense consumption of plastic waste have incremental effects and yet we oftentimes stay in our habitual way of doing things. Women and girls are disproportionally affected by climate change (see here). There are quite many factors where we can adapt to a more climate-friendly, less-waste adaptive behavior but I want to challenge you with a simple one: Bring your own (water bottle, coffee cup, bag, etc..). One of the easiest and yet biggest impacts you can have on your plastic waste consumptions might be to use your own water bottle and say goodbye to plastic water bottles. You’re already doing that? Great! How about you start to bring your own coffee cup to your coffee shop of choice? Get yourself a fancy reusable cup and you’ll never have to rely on a plastic or paper cup anymore. Way more stylish – way more environmentally-friendly. I love coffee so trust me when I tell you of how many throw-away coffee cups you’ll safe by this. Fun fact: They even remember me as the “girl with the green cup” at my favorite coffee shop by now and are always a little extra nice to me. ;)

Lastly, bring your own bag! I’m sure you have a nice tote in your closet somewhere – take it with you whenever you’re grocery shopping, thrifting or somewhere else. Again, a tote is way prettier, sturdier, and simply more convenient than a thin plastic bag – and you can free yourself of an additional load of plastic. This list of bring your own can be continued endlessly – I challenge you to critically rethink your everyday choices and I am pretty sure that with some of these small actions you can actually provoke some personal change.

5. Tell the women in your life that they matter!

Your goal is to empower and encourage girls and women? Start right here where you are, at Rutgers, in your home, in your community! Encourage your friends and fellow students to work hard for their dreams and degrees – so that every one of us is empowered to change the world a tiny bit with what we are doing.

At the same time, encourage each other with the personal ideas you have of how we can become active in the fight for female empowerment. Many of them might seem small in the beginning, but by encouraging each other we can collectively work for the world we want!

You have any comments, follow-up questions or ideas you want to share? I'd love to hear from you!!

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