WUNRN
"It was the mobilisation of these Liberia
women micro-entrepreneurs and their political vote that brought Sirleaf into
power"
LIBERIA - THE WOMEN BEHIND PRESIDENT
ELLEN JOHNSON- SIRLEAF
Liberia's transformation
rested on its female micro-entrepreneurs and has lessons for other economies
India chose well to confer
the Indira Gandhi peace prize on the president of Liberia, Ellen
Johnson-Sirleaf, who was also awarded the Nobel prize for peace in 2011. I
could not help recalling the earlier painful history of Liberia, where the former
president, Charles Taylor, was known for his cruelty and corruption in diamond
mining. Sirleaf turned the war around, and managed to begin addressing
corruption in war-stricken Liberia.
A striking feature of this
turnaround and of Sirleaf's political success that needs to be highlighted in
India and the rest of the world is that she was elected by a majority vote of
women petty vendors: women who sold anything and everything from Lux soap to
food, cooked and uncooked, women engaged in business in the streets of the
capital, Monrovia. The coffers of the Central Bank of Liberia were empty, as
the chairman of its board told me when I visited in 1998, but, as he said,
"The cash is all in the streets."
It was the mobilisation of
these women micro-entrepreneurs and their political vote that brought Sirleaf
into power, indicating that small businesses run by women in developing
countries like those in Africa and Asia are the backbone of these economies,
providing livelihood, production and exchange. In Liberia, they may have
transformed the political set-up, but will the new initiatives to strengthen
the country's economy continue to see them as an engine of growth? Will the
government build social and economic infrastructure to support them? Or will
the rush to tap the mineral wealth of Liberia turn the state's attention away
from these women and into the kind of unequal and "world-led" economy
that we are witnessing in other mineral-rich countries?
Until recently, Liberia and
its neighbour, Sierra Leone, were in the news for all the wrong reasons.
Liberia had the largest number of child soldiers who had experienced such
brutality that, when those wars that used child labour faded out, these young
men were left damaged and brutalised, and continued to disrupt peaceful
society. Graca Machel, the wife of Nelson Mandela, chaired an eminent persons
group that reported on the terrible experience of child soldiers used in war,
in Liberia and Mozambique, and laid down a foundation for the rehabilitation of
these children.
Many of us visited these
war-torn areas and saw, firsthand, what the war had done to these societies.
And now, to see Liberia and its president striding across the world receiving
the Nobel peace prize, enabling the country to not only normalise, but succeed
economically, is a bright example that there can be successful outcomes from
grim, almost irreparable damage.
It is here that the
international community of development aid and financing, both individuals and
institutions, needs to reconsider the way it operates. Many of the countries
that have accepted the definition of "advancement" put forth by
international financial institutions now find that their societies are crippled
by deep inequalities and the loss of livelihoods. In Liberia, we have a country
that has petty vending at the root of its economic progress, which reveals,
more than anything else, that petty vending — which doesn't demand huge
infrastructure, power or fuel, and is largely populated by women, a phenomena
that runs from Liberia to Bangladesh, if not Thailand — needs to be seen as the
core economic space from which broad-based economic prosperity can bloom in the
most inclusive manner imaginable.
The writer, an economist, was
a member of the eminent persons group chaired by Graca Machel to look into war
crimes and child soldiers in Liberia