Grace Brown’s Reviews > The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World > Status Update

“When you look at a farmer, you’re looking at a mother. Household labor not only takes time away from farming but keeps the woman from attending meetings where she could get tips from other farmers & learn about improved seeds, best practices, & new markets. As soon as you see that most farmers are women, and that women are beneath men, everything shifts.”

Farmers need 5 things to succeed- good land, good seeds, farming supplies, time, and know-how. There are barriers standing between women and each of these things simply due to gender

“Look out the window and see who’s working in the fields. They’re almost all women. If you listen only to the men, because they’re the ones with the time & social permission to go to the meetings, then you’re not going to know what the women really need, and they’re the ones who are doing most of the work.”

“Identifying and removing moral blind spots is a conversation that can be facilitated by outsiders, but it cannot be manipulated by them, because the people themselves are discussing their own practices and whether they serve their goals according to their values.”

“Agricultural equipment that had been donated was resting out, health clinics were sitting, empty, and customs like FGM and child marriage continued unchanged. People often get outraged by certain practices and developing countries and want to rush in and say “this is harmful stop it!” But that’s the wrong approach. Outrage can save 1-2 girls, she told me. only empathy can change the system.”

“It’s important to be able to save girls from marriage, but it’s more important to address the incentives that prompt parents to marry off their underage daughters in the first place.”

“one of the brides – who looked about eight years old – told me that school was the only path out of poverty, and when she married, the path closed”

“as the years passed, a child bride is likely to have more and more children – perhaps more than she can afford to feed, educate, and care for. With so many children, she has no time to earn an income, and the early pregnancies leave her body weak. This puts her at risk of being poor and sick for the rest of her life, and perpetuating that cycle of poverty for her children.”

“When a girl has no voice” you mean when a girl has a voice just like everyone has, she just has no means of using it

I have so many thoughts on this chapter. It’s not lost on me that she never mentioned once the Biblical foundation for marriage and how men have been placed in a position of leadership as heads of household. There was so much lost potential in the conversation about the time women spend gathering water as unpaid work. The answer isn’t to make men take a turn so women can work a job, it’s access to clean water.