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We've always heard that microloans were a good idea — in fact, we gave to Kiva earlier this year. But Tanglad at Racialicious asserts that microcredit may be too good to be true: More »
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Those Rwandan women who are employed making "peace baskets" for Macy's — a job that helps them to repair the fissures of the ethnic civil war that saw the deaths of some 800,000 people fourteen years ago? They are part of a wave of women helping to lift Rwanda out of the poverty caused by the Hutu/Tutsi conflict. Not surprisingly, the economic and political contributions of women are the main fuel for Rwanda's current economic revival. According to Washington Post's Anthony Faiola, the genocide of Tutsis by Hutu militias and subsequent retributions left Rwanda with a population that's 60% female. This, along with new laws passed in 1999 that allowed women to inherit property, left the door open for more women to start businesses, even though in Rwanda's more patriarchal society, many women must still ask their husbands for permission before making economic choices. Now, women are running coffee plantations and graining mills, and often, they're out-earning their male counterparts. More »
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The US government awards $400 billion a year in contracts to small business. In December, the Small Business Administration announced new rules to insure that 5% of those contracts would go to businesses owned by females. The problem? Out of 140 industries, only four are listed by the agency as those in which female-owned companies could be preferred for contracts. (A study found that women were underrepresented in a whopping 87% of all the industries where the government awards contracts; so the Women's Chamber Of Commerce sued in 2004.) And speaking of businesses run by women: We put our money where our mouths were and helped finance a Ugandan jewelry maker named Night Kituka via Kiva.org! More »
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