An Interview with Founder & CEO of Women for Women International, Zainab Salbi

YJIA: What inspired you to start Women for Women International?

I was in University at the time and I had to repeat my education—I grew up in Iraq, I was in my third year of university about to go to the fourth when I came to America. I was twenty-three years old and it happened to be the same month when I learned about the Holocaust in school that I saw the images of concentration and rape camps in Bosnia. Women were given numbers in camps, when their numbers were called they would have to go to the other room and get gang raped. The images, perhaps not of the rape but of the concentration camps and the survivors, were so similar. And people were saying “never again” at that time, but it was happening again. For me it was like, “but didn’t we say as humans we needed to do something about it?”

And the idea of having to do something started from there. I wanted to volunteer. At the beginning I called women’s groups and they said, “Well, come in six months. We don’t have the money.” Which I understand now, but I didn’t understand at that time. And then I came up with the idea of sponsoring women. And that’s how the idea started. The Unitarian church said, “We’ll support you for a year and you’ll go on your own afterwards.” I started from zero, nada, wala-in shi, and seventeen years later I really believe in the possibilities of change. Because seventeen years later we have distributed money to 217,000 women, impacted more than one million family members, and distributed $89 million in direct aid and loans. And if I could do it, an immigrant, twenty-three years old from Iraq, then everybody else can do it.

YJIA: The organization has helped hundreds of thousands of women and distributed nearly $100 million in aid, including direct aid and micro-credit loans. Which type of aid do you think has the most impact? Why?

I’m not sure it’s the type of aid—it’s how we deliver aid. Survivors of conflict were people, who had normal lives. No matter how rich or poor they were, the war happened and it destroyed their lives. The memory of a stable life is still very much alive. For me the question is, how do we deliver aid in a way that keeps the integrity of the person and the agency of the person receiving it intact? At the beginning, we were just distributing aid, there was no end return. And I realized when the women came to our program, they would actually embody the victim because the message a lot of aid giving gives is that if you are a victim, you get aid. And then I realized that we’re sending a negative message. In the process of helping people it’s become more about us feeling good than about sending a positive message. We need to develop some program that actually gets the women into an educational program. To remind them—not teach them—remind them of their values because the goal is not to make them dependant. The goal is to help to activate their agency by helping them stand on their feet.

Then the women said, “that’s really good, but I need to get a job, I need to earn my own income.” Because, again, the agency and her desire to be a good mother is still alive, to buy that pair of jeans, or whatever, for her child. And aid does not give her a pair of jeans.

I remember a woman called Zainaba in Bosnia, who had said that before she came to the program, her husband was just out of two years in a concentration camp. She was living on cardboards and her teenage son wanted a pair of jeans. And all that she cared about—you know it’s interesting because she wasn’t talking about her husband being completely handicapped because of torture in concentration camps, or her own poverty sleeping on cardboards—what she cared about the most was that her son wanted a pair of jeans. He was sixteen years old. And no one, no humanitarian aid will give you that pair of jeans. And she wanted to simply be a good mother because she was worried that if she didn’t get him that, he would become a thief. Now, that’s aid with agency. So it’s not which type of aid, it is how we deliver it—in a way that respects the integrity of the people receiving it, in a way that activates rather than pacifies their agency.

YJIA: How does empowering women enhance the political and economic health of their communities? How does this compare to more gender-neutral development aid? How does empowering female victims of war differ from empowering male victims?

Gender neutral is really excluding women in many ways, I think. I argue that we have looked at war only through a frontline discussion, and that is indeed led by men. And if that’s the only perspective with which we look at war, then peace becomes the ending of fighting. I argue that we really need to look at war from a backline discussion, as well. Because the discussion of war is only frontline based and not backline based, people forget that there are people, who are living day-to-day in the midst of war. Life is not in the frontline, life is in the backline. And that is headed by women, and led by women. And peace, based on that definition, is actually the building of life.

It’s interesting because usually women are excluded from peace negotiations. Worldwide, only 2.2 percent of all peace agreements are signed by women. So there is a constant question about how peace is defined. Because [women] are the ones, who are actually keeping life going, yet their voices—either during the war or after the war—are not incorporated. And we’re constantly stuck in a cycle of the ending of fighting, but not necessarily the building of peace. An example of that is Bosnia where you have a Dayton Peace Agreement that is literally the ending of fighting, but you don’t have the building of peace seventeen years later. So the inclusion of women becomes not some marginal discussion, it becomes a central discussion.

There are also the economic factors. Women reinvest their resources ninety percent of the time in their families compared to men, who reinvest thirty to forty percent. Women also hire their husbands, while men do not hire their wives, necessarily. So this is not about excluding men because I do believe we must reach out to men in more proactive and effective ways than we have. I feel men are very much excluded from the gender discussion—and when they are included it is with a finger pointed at them saying, “you are bad.” We need to shift that dialogue to one of cooperation and partnership.

YJIA: Your organization has worked with women from many different post-war countries. How do cultural and societal differences influence the work you do?

What we have is a template that is based on the principle that access to knowledge plus access to resources leads to lasting change—that they are equally important to leading a woman to stand up on her feet. Each country adjusts and adopts the template and the principles to their own cultural requirements. So to give you an example, Afghan women talk within the framework of Islam, Congolese women talk within the framework of Christianity.

But what we’re talking about is, are there cultures that are rigid against movement vis-à-vis women’s progress and access? In that regard, I argue that the vast majority of oppressive cultural practices are based on economic realities. For example when women in Southern Sudan get married, they get a dowry of cows. There is a whole family economy that is based on the currency of the daughter. So you can look at it and say, horrible, horrible culture, they’re marrying their daughters off for cows, or you can say, where’s the logic in here? The daughter is bringing assets to the family.

How about if we change how she brings those assets. How about if we prove that by having her graduate from primary and secondary school and, perhaps, university, her salary and her income will be higher than the value of the cows. When you can make an economic argument, the culture is always open to that. The majority of decisions are poverty driven, not culture driven.

YJIA: You stated in 2009 that you saw common links between Rwanda, Bosnia, and Iraq. What similarities do you see? Has anything changed in the past year and what can be done going forward?

There are patterns of behavior in conflicts. I look at conflicts as a microcosm of reality. In wars, there is a persistent treatment of women. There is always the rape of women, not only by the enemy, but also sometimes by the peacekeeping troops. There is a persistent treatment that eighty percent of the refugees in the world are women and children, a persistent fact that ninety percent of modern war casualties are civilians, seventy-five percent of whom are women and children. Those patterns of behavior—I come, I kill, I rape, I pillage, I burn—are consistent, and have been consistent, throughout the wars. The lack of outrage about what happens to women is consistent. Their exclusion from the decision-making processes is consistent.

Now, there are differences. Post conflict, after peace, there is always the window of opportunity between the phasing out of a conflict and permanent peace in which a lot of negotiations are happening.  When women are organized enough to jump into that window of opportunity, they always accomplish a lot. And that is the Rwandese case—they made sure to guarantee their rights and sixteen years later, fifty-four percent of the Rwandese Parliament members are women. When women miss out on that, either because they are not organized, they don’t have access to knowledge, or they’ve been excluded and shut down—as in Iraq or Bosnia—then they actually move backward.

That’s what happened to Iraqi women. Right now, the status of Iraqi women is worse than how it was twenty years ago. There are consistent behavioral patterns and there are consistent opportunities—what happens after that is different from one country to another.

YJIA: Finally, what do you see as the progress and/or continued challenges of U.S. and UN policies on women?

Consistency. Let me give you an example. I was in Sudan a few years ago and I was in a meeting with a Sudanese government member and lecturing him about the quality of women, representation of women, and all of that. And he stopped me and he said, until the UN delegation comes with fifty percent of its delegation as women, or the European Union, or the U.S., you need to stop talking with us about what we need to do when you are not doing your own job.

During the last few decades we have moved from not talking about women to actually talking and having the political correctness about women. But the lack of political will in gender politics is still persistent. Women and girls, according to the NoVo and Nike Foundations, get $0.02 out of every $1 in development aid. So, there is a lack of political will and a lack of consistent application. We’re still not walking the walk, but definitely talking the talk.

But it’s an evolution. This is not to dismiss what has been accomplished. Now it’s about accountability. And the biggest urgency that we have right now in front of our eyes is what’s happening in Afghanistan. So we go to Afghanistan, partially because of what’s happening to women, we talk a lot about Security Council Resolution 1325, which requires women to be at the negotiating table. And as we speak, there is a reconciliation that is happening between the Afghan government and the Taliban, and women are not included in that reconciliation process. And every single Afghan woman I have met is furious. You came, you helped us, we actually took on that help, look how we stood on our feet, look at how we have developed ourselves, and you are all witnessing us being bargained away. So the urgency for me is—do we have to wait for more women to be stoned in a soccer stadium for us to be outraged? Or do we become outraged by the fact that they are being negotiated away right now and all of us are looking to the other side. Another betrayal of women. More lack of political will to say, “this is wrong.” We cannot have peace in Afghanistan if women are not part of making that peace possible.