According to a Chinese proverb, "Women hold up half the sky."

Hence the title of a 2009 book by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn — Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.

The couple won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for their reporting on the Tiananmen Square protests. Kristof, who has lived on four continents while reporting on human rights abuses, was once called the "Indiana Jones of our generation of journalists" by Harvard classmate Jeffrey Toobin, a writer for The New Yorker.

In the book, the couple appeals to readers to join the movement to emancipate women and fight poverty around the world by acknowledging and supporting the role of women as economic catalysts.

Kristof will be talking about abuse of women and girls — sex trafficking, forced prostitution, gender-based violence, maternal mortality — all of which squanders economic resources in the developing world, on July 7 at a benefit for the upcoming Santa Fe International Folk Art Market. (Some tickets are still available.)

More than 160 folk artists from 52 countries will be selling their work during the three-day market. According to annual surveys, these artists use the revenues (nearly $2 million in sales last year) to pay for school tuition, buy mosquito nets, build hand pumps for drinking water as well as to expand their businesses.

In a telephone interview last week, Kristof said the nonprofit world is learning that simply handing people money leads to dependency, while promoting entrepreneurship with events like the folk art market here spawns economic enterprise and develops skills that can be applied in other ways.

This year the market's focus is again on artist cooperatives — 38 of them — most of which primarily comprise women. According to Kristof, the cooperatives are particularly successful in improving life for families and communities. There is pretty good evidence, across continents and cultures, he said, that "women are more likely to devote income to children, or to starting a small business, while with men more of the money goes to instant gratification (alcohol, prostitution)."

As an example, in one survey Phezkwemkhono Bomake-Ncheka, a market artist representing Nesi Thembeni Mdluli in Mbabane, Swaziland, said her cooperative used money it made in Santa Fe to buy school shoes for 12 orphans, plant a backyard garden to grow fresh vegetables and install windows in its soup kitchen. She wrote, "My mother has sugar diabetes and I cannot afford to take her to the hospital, so she was using traditional herbs. After Santa Fe, I took her to the hospital for a medical checkup for the first time in my life. I also bought one cow."

This year, in conjunction with the market, there will be an exhibit at the Museum of International Folk Art featuring the work of 10 artisan cooperatives and showing how they bring both cultural and economic sustainability to their communities.

Half the Sky makes the case that education is the key to empowering women in the developing world where they often play subservient roles — and are often victims of honor killings, sexual slavery and genital cutting. Not only does education cause women to delay childbearing and reduce the number of children they ultimately have, Kristof said, it "gives them skills to join the formal labor force so they're not just herding goats."

Having an education also makes a woman more respected and less likely to be beaten by her husband. And she's more likely to ensure that her own children receive an education. He calls it an "escalator out of this whirlpool."

A number of aid organizations have discovered that something so seemingly minor as buying a girl a couple of $6 school uniforms every year can keep her in school — where she is less likely, Kristof said, to "end up sleeping with a middle-aged guy with HIV and end up pregnant."

The U.S., he said, could get much more bang for its buck in a place like Afghanistan if it spent even a portion of the $100 billion that is going to support American troops there on education. "Education, more than anything, is just a transformative intervention," he said.

Donors shouldn't worry so much about the content, he advised. "We'd be better off supporting informal village schools, maybe even those that meet in a mosque or (even include study of the Quran). Education breaks down fundamentalism and creates the basis for a (more robust) economy."

Microlending has also been an important tool in the battle against world poverty, and the book describes the case of an abused woman who took out a $65 loan from a microfinance organization called Kashf Foundation to buy beads and cloth to make embroidery. The woman eventually became a neighborhood tycoon, paid off her husband's debt, kept her daughters in school, renovated her house — and even bought a television.

Microfinance has become so profitable (turns out, a lot of people pay back the money they owe) that many organizations have gone into it. Some are charging exorbitant interest rates — causing people to accrue more debt than they had before — but Kristof continues to see microcredit as part of the solution because, in the developing world, people just can't get access to the capital to start a small business.

Just last week, Kristof said, he made small loans to a school that is training girls in Paraguay for work in the forestry industry through Kiva, an organization that uses the Internet to connect individuals with entrepreneurs worldwide. The group was criticized recently when it was disclosed that the loans were not necessarily going to specific entrepreneurs chosen by the lenders.

But possibly the more powerful part of microfinance, he believes, is microsavings. By encouraging people in rural villages to save money in tiny amounts, he said, "they can pay for things like C-sections and medicines for malaria."

One chapter in Kristof's book is titled "Is Islam Misogynistic?" The question is prompted by the fact that some of the worst places in the world to be female — Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan — are Muslim. On the other hand, he points out, in many other Muslim countries, such as Indonesia, women have enjoyed great progress.

"I think it's too glib to just say the problem is Islam," Kristof said. "There's always a danger of 'otherizing' a culture or religion that we don't understand. I don't think we should bite our tongues, but I also think it's dangerous to seize upon real problems in the Muslim world and say Islam is misogynistic."

Mohammed, he pointed out, was a social progressive for his time. "In many ways," Kristof said, "you get the sense (he) was much more comfortable with women than St. Paul might have been." But the religion clearly took a more conservative bent over the centuries.

Kristof argues for an international version of Teach for America that would help raise these issues higher on the U.S. agenda. "The traditional problem with this kind of oppression is it's just not on our radar screen, it feels a long way away. What really makes a difference isn't reading a great book on the topic, but something you see, a person you meet. If more Americans spent time in a village in India, or Africa or Paraguay, then that experience would get them involved."

Kristof said he and his wife, parents of three children, generally travel separately on reporting assignments. Each then writes what they've reported on and hands the copy over to the other person — who "usually edits it very heavily." At the end of the day, however, it's hard to read Half the Sky "and figure out which (stories) started on Sheryl's keyboard and which on mine."

Contact Anne Constable at 986-3022 or aconstable@sfnewmexican.com.

IF YOU GO

What: An Evening with Nicholas Kristof, New York Times columnist and author of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
When: 7:30 p.m. July 9
Where: Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 West San Francisco St., 988-1234
Cost: Benefit for the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market; $125 (includes preferred seating and a pre-event private reception at Coyote Cantina with Kristof); $40 preferred seating ($15 tax-deductible); $25 general seating; $15 balcony

SANTA FE INTERNATIONAL FOLK ART MARKET

When: 6:30-9 p.m. July 9; 7:30 a.m.-5 p.m. July 10; 9 a.m.-5 p.m. July 11
Where: Milner Plaza, Museum Hill, Camino Lejo; parking and free shuttles from downtown on market weekend
Cost: July 9, $125 (market opening party); 7:30-9 a.m. July 10, $50 (early bird market); 9 a.m.-5 p.m. July 10, $10 in advance and $15 on market day; 9 a.m.-5 p.m. July 11, all tickets $5; children 16 and under free Saturday and Sunday
For tickets and information: Call 983-1060 or 888-670-3655 or go to FolkArtMarket.org; tickets still available

EXHIBITION OPENING

What: "Empowering Women: Artisan Cooperatives That Transform Communities"
When: 1-4 p.m. July 4 (2 p.m. panel discussion with co-op artists); exhibit runs through Jan. 2, 2011
Where: Museum of International Folk Art, Museum Hill
Cost: New Mexico residents with ID free on Sunday
Exhibit tours: Noon and 2 p.m. July 10 and 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. July 11, led by guest curator Suzanne Seriff and co-op artists
Breakfast: 8:30-10 a.m. July 5, 6 and 8 with curator and co-op artists; $25; reservations required, call 476-1207

INITIATIVES

Three Initiatives that would illustrate solutions:
$10 billion to educate girls around the world (5 years)
$19 million to iodize salt to prevent mental retardation
$1.6 billion to eradicate obstetric fistula (12 years)
Source: Half the Sky


QUICK ACTIONS

Four steps you can take in the next 10 minutes:
Go to www.globalgiving.org or www.kiva.org and open an account
Sponsor a girl or woman through Plan International, Women for Women International, World Vision or American Jewish World Service
Sign up for e-mail updates on www.womensenews.org or www.worldpulse.com
Join the CARE Action Network at www.care.org
Source: Half the Sky