Category Archives: Empowering People

My Heroes: Unity Dow, Botswana

Empowering People, Leadership, The Glass Ceiling

Sydney, Friday 4th March 2011, UN International Women’s Day Centenary Breakfast.

I was among 1,700 people who were blown away by Unity Dow and her story. Humble and funny, quiet and determined, a village girl who took on the constitution and existing national culture and won. When her American husband went back to college and became a dependent, their children were then deemed to have become non-Botswanan citizens. If it had been the other way round, that would not have been the case.

So Unity gave her government 30 days’ notice that she was going to sue them, did so, and won every stage of the legal arguments over the next 5 years.

To their great credit, the government then accepted that there was something wrong with their constitution and started a national consultation exercise. One village chief was incensed by the perceived weakness of her husband in allowing her to be the head of her family … so came down strongly in favour of allowing the constitution to be changed to give women equal status, as she had proved that this was now the reality!

Unity is now Botswana’s first female High Court judge and a living example of how to combine traditional values, respect, and citizenship with a burning sense of justice – and success in changing things permanently for the better. My hero!

What’s The Big Idea? 1. Save the World

Empowering People, Leadership

Jeremy Rifkin spoke last week at the Behaviour Change for Sustainability Congress in Sydney. He took me from feeling that we are all going to crash and burn to feeling that we are about to evolve successfully into a new kind of civilisation, and all in 40 minutes! Along the way, just for fun, he shared research that shows that we, along with many mammals, have an ‘empathy neuron’ which means that if we are watching somebody struggle with something, like cracking open a walnut, (for example), our brains fire up exactly as if we were having the same struggle ourselves. What a rollercoaster.

I was really interested in Europe’s new economic gameplan, which he has helped to shape. It starts with the usual ‘surely you don’t mean me?’ goal (20% reduction in carbon emissions by 2020), but then gets specific. All new buildings will be energy neutral or positive, so can actually feed energy back into the grid – resulting in a boom for construction, design and green technologies. Energy needs to be stored – so there’s going to be an 8 Billion Euro rollout using various technologies like hydrogen conversion. 1 Trillion Euros will be spent developing communication systems so that they will be capable of sending energy peer to peer across cyberspace and continents. And, of course, transport will become much greener.

His point is that we have two key things almost in place to help us to evolve into our next phase, following the pattern of human development over the ages. We have a new, distributive (not top down) communication system through the web; and new sources of (also distributive) energy from sunshine, wind, water and other renewable sources.

But how do we make it happen in time? Or is it already too late?

Check out his book (by clicking the image below) for yourself and make up your own mind.

Lovin’ books that make a difference,
Hugh