Unleashing Half the World’s Potential

Twenty years ago, I befriended a five-year-old girl named Samya. She had long black hair, almond eyes, and the most infectious smile I have ever seen. Samya slept on the sidewalk outside my building in Mumbai, India, with her five siblings, her parents, and her grandparents. Every night, nested into her brothers and sisters, she tried to shelter herself from the oversized rats and crows, a permanent fixture of outdoor life in Mumbai. Her job was to fetch water, wash her family’s clothing in a small leaking bucket, and help her father sell cigarettes by the unit.

It turned out that people in my building were adamantly spiritual: They claimed an absolute respect for all forms of life. They wouldn’t eat root vegetables, such as onions and carrots, because they felt that yanking them out of the ground would be offensive. They walked barefoot to avoid stepping on insects and refused to fumigate even during the monsoons, when mosquitoes were most likely to transmit malaria. In the mornings, they left for work, sparing the scattered cockroaches but ignoring Samya, as if her abject poverty was an immutable fact of life. The two realities were painful to reconcile. I felt angry and powerless, but those feelings didn’t help in the least.

Every morning, little Samya greeted me with her magic grin. She would take the sweets and treats I brought her and diligently share them equally with her siblings, making sure everyone received the same number of candies before she ate her own. One day, I excitedly bought Samya an Indian Barbie with a set of dazzling outfits that belonged to another caste. My husband warned me against this gesture. He said that the doll would be sold right away and that it would be a well-intentioned but cruel gift. He explained that with the combined cost of that toy and two expensive meals in Manhattan, one could transform Samya’s life forever, making her life on the pavement a distant memory.

I couldn’t give the money directly to her family either — that too would have been used for other purposes — but with the help of the right organization, I could save Samya by sending her to school. We all could.

Because in Samya’s radiant grin, in the dutiful way she distributed her treasures, I couldn’t help but see potential — a promise, even — specific to her gender. I was reminded how women (and girls) in low-income groups typically reinvest 90 percent of their income back into their families and communities, while men reinvest about 30 to 40 percent. Girls like Samya inspired me to focus my journalism career on supporting women and girls and harnessing their transformative power. This isn’t only a moral imperative; it’s also a strategic economic investment with broad-reaching benefits.

The Ripple Effect

“Educating a girl is a problem you’ll have to solve only once,” says Safeena Husain, executive director of Educate Girls, an NGO that brought 400,000 girls back to school in India in 2023 alone. “With only 60 dollars per student, we can close the gender and literacy gap forever,” she says.

It’s the proverbial ripple effect: Given an education, girls can break the cycle of poverty and patriarchy in their lifetime because they tend to send their own children to school, regardless of gender. Each additional year of schooling for a girl can result in a nine-fold return on investment in terms of community and national economic benefits. An educated girl will also stand up to violence, earn more money, and significantly reduce carbon emissions by having fewer and healthier children. (In fact, climate scientists rank girls’ education number six out of 80 actions to reverse global warming, ahead of electric cars and solar panels.) Educating a girl directly contributes to nine out of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

There are many inspiring examples of women who have lifted themselves out of extreme poverty, often through sheer determination, innovative thinking, and access to opportunities and social support programs.

Take Tererai Trent, born in rural Zimbabwe, where poverty is rampant and access to education for girls is practically non-existent. She was married off as a girl and had four children by the time she was eighteen. Still, Trent taught herself to read and write and, with the help of a humanitarian organization, applied for a scholarship in the United States, where she earned a PhD. She is now an internationally celebrated scholar, author, and advocate for education, particularly for girls in sub-Saharan Africa.

Here’s another example: Habiba Ali grew up in northern Nigeria, where women face significant economic and social challenges, but she pursued a career in the male-dominated field of renewable energy and founded a company that provides solar and clean energy solutions to thousands of people living in rural, impoverished communities. Sosai Renewable Energies also employs women to distribute solar products, empowering them economically. Ali has become a leader in the renewable energy sector in West Africa.

How many potential Tererai Trents and Habiba Alis are out there? Women and girls, often standing alone at first but who, with a little help, will tackle some of the world’s most dire issues. According to McKinsey Global Institute, if we had properly invested in gender equality in 2015, we would have added up to $12 trillion to global GDP by 2025. Likewise, if women had the same access to productive resources as men, 150 million people would be lifted out of hunger and poverty.

How to Help

Extreme poverty for women comes with other disastrous consequences, such as intimate partner violence (one in three women suffers from it), child marriage, and unpaid domestic labor. But there’s good news: Many aid organizations are combating extreme poverty and gender-based oppression in strikingly effective ways.

Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) provides evidence-based solutions in the fight against extreme poverty. IPA uses randomized evaluations, just like in medical trials, to figure out what works and what doesn’t. “For instance, microcredit loans are not proving to be the miracle tool against poverty that we once believed them to be,” says executive director Annie Duflo, “mostly because not everyone is an entrepreneur.”

GiveDirectly, an NGO that distributes cash unconditionally where deprivation is greatest, also challenges conventional giving wisdom. “We believe people living in poverty deserve the dignity to choose for themselves how to best improve their lives,” says Kayla Fishman. Cash transfers prove to be life-changing and scalable, with unexpected benefits like reducing mortality rates and intimate-partner violence. The money is distributed digitally, and those without devices are provided a basic cell phone for just seven dollars, enabling them to bank and conduct business.

Real Change

Unleashing half of the world’s potential by supporting women and girls is not only the ethical thing to do, but also a source of joy and fulfillment as you witness economic growth, social development, and poverty reduction — even for people far from sight and living different realities.

“It’s a normal tendency to want to give to those closest to us,” explains Annie Duflo, “but our philanthropic dollars achieve much more when we give to women and girls in extreme poverty than if we give locally.”

After I left Mumbai, I never saw Samya again. Ten years later, I returned to Dongarsi Road. The building’s residents were still going to work barefoot. Samya’s father was there, looking old and decrepit. Outdoor life had taken a severe toll on him, but he was still selling cigarettes by the unit. He told me his daughter now had three children of her own.

I prayed that someone like you or me had donated the handful of money needed to send her and her children to school, breaking the cycle of poverty and steadily undoing a world where, in the words of Safeena Husain, “a goat is an asset and a girl a liability.” To this day, I wish Samya knew how she’s been my muse in the way she so gently and conscientiously made sure the world she knew was a fair one.