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(upbeat music begins) (bell dings) - Good afternoon and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

I'm Cynthia Connolly, Director of Programming here.

Today's conversation is a critically important one.

Over the last few weeks, our country has witnessed conflict unfold in Afghanistan.

After decades of progress, many are left wondering what the future will hold for Afghan women.

Today, we are joined at the City Club by Karen Sherman, author of "Brick by Brick: Building Hope and Opportunity for Women Survivors Everywhere".

Karen Sherman has spent her life advocating for women in war torn and transitional countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Congo, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Sudan, Kosovo, and the former Soviet Union.

Throughout her 30 year career in global development, she has met and interviewed thousands of women.

Their stories are ones of strength, courage, resilience, resourcefulness, and they fuel what Karen Sherman believes to be true.

Championing women's education and economic opportunities has the power to transform the lives of women, the future of families, communities, societies, and ultimately the world.

Karen has spent her years in this work in field offices, in boardrooms with leaders at all levels, including heads of state, ambassadors, business leaders, academics, and non-governmental organizations.

Karen is now president of the Akilah Institute, Rwanda's only women's college.

In her book, Karen uproots her family from Bethesda, Maryland, and moves to Rwanda for a year.

There she would oversee the construction of a center that would help women survivors of war.

Her book chronicles her time there and tells the powerful stories of women who are rebuilding lives despite brutal challenges of war, genocide and inequality.

Guests members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Karen Sherman.

(audience clapping) Karen, thank you so much for being here today.

- I'm thrilled to be here.

Thank you for having me.

- I guess we should probably set the scene really quick and maybe tell us a little bit about the nature of the work that you do and kind of how it's been going on over the last few years.

- Absolutely.

Well, I have been working in global development for about 30 plus years, of course, dating myself, but really started working in the former Soviet Union for about 15 years as the country collapsed and was transitioning.

It was really the women who were the society and became very enamored with what women could do with education and income to change their lives and in turn the lives of their families and communities.

After 15 years working in the former Soviet Union, primarily with women entrepreneurs who were driving the country's forward progress economically, I moved to working with a group called Women for Women International, which works with women survivors of war in conflict zones around the world.

And really helped to transform our model from one of right space development to also really looking at women earning income and how that could change their lives and really carried that work forward over the last almost eight years with the Akilah Institute.

And what I love about this model is that it isn't just education, not that education is a bad thing, but education for education sake, but one that really leads to economic outcomes for women because we find that the combination of education and income, those two things together are what's transformative.

- Yeah.

As you know, in the intro we talked about some of the locations where you have done some of your work, Kosovo, Bosnia, all these places that we know to have a lot of conflict and challenges.

And we often hear about child brides as being one of the huge issues that we see coming out of these countries.

And in your book, you spent some time talking about how elusive legal marriage is for Rwandan women.

Could you explain how big of a problem that is and what are some of the other top issues you're seeing in these countries today?

- Absolutely.

Just for those of you who don't know, in Rwanda at the time a marriage is defined as a civil marriage meaning it's blessed by the government between a man and a woman.

But there's all sorts of traditional marriages that are not sort of legally sanctioned.

And because women, many women in the country were not legally married, they were not entitled to their rights, inheritance rights, property rights, even custody rights.

And so it's been a big challenge and a push by the Rwandan government to get women legally married.

And you see this frankly not just in Rwanda, but in many other countries, or you see the situations in places like Afghanistan, where girls as young as 8, 9, 10 are being married off to older men to settle family debts.

You see also arranged marriages, particularly in places like South Sudan, where women have absolutely no choice in determining who and when and how they get married.

And it's really kind of a cows for bride transaction.

I talk about in the book as being more of a business transaction, but of course, early and child marriage are not the only issues facing women.

We estimate that there's about a billion women and young girls who still need access to the education and skills.

They need to be able to participate in the labor market.

That four out of five victims of human trafficking are girls.

One in three women are victims of violence, sexual, psychological, domestic violence over their lifetime.

You still have instances where most of the African girls are getting married before their 15th birthday, but even other issues such as women doing the majority of unpaid care and domestic labor, which we know really impacts their ability to engage in productive work but also their overall empowerment and agency.

And we're still seeing a digital gender divide that is widespread spread across the world.

So there are a lot of challenges.

And I also don't mean to leave you and say that there hasn't been progress for women and girls because there absolutely have, but there is also as Hillary Clinton likes to say a lot of unfinished business.

- I know one part in your book you had in the training session at one of the centers, they had the women kind of list out what their roles were at home, and then their partners or husbands, what their roles were at home and then realizing like how much value they have in that relationship and using that to empower themselves, to ask for their worth.

- Absolutely, I don't think women necessarily think about it.

It's just you get up in the morning and they were listing out every thing they do in a given day.

And it's startling where as you're talking about, this is South Sudan in the middle of a training session.

I'm just setting the stage a little bit where a lot of the women are innumerate and illiterate.

And so the visual image of this list-making made a huge impact for the women.

And so when they started sort of just working out, "What did you do all day?"

And it was like two pages for the women and the men's were like three lines.

And they were like, I think it's just women in a lot of societies suffer from this chronic sense of insufficiency.

And I think we do in this country sometimes too, like, "I'm not doing enough, I need to be doing more."

But I think to sort of the visual reminder of just how much you do every single day.

- Yeah, and we've seen this definitely here for the COVID-19 pandemic where we have women who disproportionately were forced out of the labor market to care for school aged children, for sick family members, because they personally fear for their health.

And we know that that is disproportionately impacted women in low-income jobs, right?

So, hospitality, retail, where women make up a large portion of the labor sector.

So kind of like pulling into that question, how has COVID-19 impacted women and girls over in Rwanda?

- It's having some of the same impacts.

You're seeing more and more women dropping out of the labor force and women's employment rates were already pretty stagnant or on the decline globally.

So basically COVID exacerbated these disparities already.

And so that's been a huge challenge.

And part of that is yes, they're in lower paying jobs and in different sectors of work, but also part of it is that men have not been doing their fair share of the child and household responsibilities which puts a disproportionate impact on women.

And particularly in the United States, we talk about women didn't necessarily want to drop out of the workforce, they felt forced to drop out of the workforce because they didn't have the means to, they didn't have childcare, the kids weren't in school, they had lower paying jobs, many of them, as you said, in the social service sector.

So it's a big issue.

But you've also seen, and this is pretty horrific, the devastating impact of COVID on girls.

One of the Akilah's ambassadors is the former president of Malawi, Joyce Banda.

And I was on a call with her and she said 15,000 school aged girls have become pregnant since the lockdown.

And those girls will never go back to school.

In Kenya, 50,000 school aged girls again have been the subject of rape because of success of lockdowns.

And you have some parents who have had to force their teenage daughters into sex work because there's no money to support the family.

And so you think about the girls and their futures, and once they're getting married or once this has happened to them their lives in terms of their futures are really over.

- Yeah, that's really striking.

And we see a little bit of that in your book too about how women are often kind of working these low paying jobs on these farming jobs that just aren't making ends meet and they're forced to do things like that because they need to feed their families and they need to keep food on the table.

What can other organizations, agencies do to really improve the type of jobs that women are getting to make sure that they're able to provide for their families?

And again, we see this a little bit here about how women just aren't able to make ends meet because of the cost of childcare.

But we see this echoed and again, your book is all kind of about parallels and how things, women are just everywhere working hard to just survive.

- That's right.

- So what kind of things can we do?

I know you had talked about government aid and agencies.

You made a really great example about a bad company.

That kinda changed the way they did business.

Is there any promise there?

- Yeah.

I mean, it's interesting.

I think putting more women into the formal employment sector versus informal employment would go a long way obviously.

I think, what you see globally is that women are the first to be fired, the last to be rehired.

Some of it is that they don't have enough status in the companies or they're informally employed.

We've even seen that in Rwanda with some of our graduates who had great jobs but when push came to shove and the economy was tanking due to COVID, they were the first to be laid off.

And when the companies did want them back, they put them into contract jobs.

So they were being paid hourly and they didn't have any benefits and they didn't have any support.

And so I think really moving women into formal employment, higher paying or at least equal paying jobs would make a big difference and then providing those supports that they need in terms of structural supports, paid leave, childcare, obviously access to education for folks.

And then again, back to men doing their fair share of the work and not just men but boys too learning early on that they are also responsible for contributing to the household.

I have three sons, my boys know that very clearly.

(Cynthia and Karen laugh softly) So I think, I talk about in the book and I really believe this it's about, my goal was to raise good men and good global citizens.

And I think for those of us who do have sons that that should be the expectation that you inculcate in them as they're growing up.

- I wanted to talk about this a little bit later but I should bring up now is kind of some of the policy solutions that were proposed in Rwanda to kind of heal from the genocide that they saw.

One example is the 30% quota on government positions going to women and that they have far surpassed that quota, but yet they're still seeing some of this kind of entrenched patriarchy still causing a lot of issues.

Is policy enough?

- No, never actually.

My husband and I have this argument all the time.

Policy is a piece of the puzzle and it's important, but also you need, it's all about implementation and action.

And what you see in Rwanda is such an interesting dichotomy.

It's a fascinating country because it is a country that has put women at the top of the development agenda.

They have the highest percentage of women in parliament, anywhere in the world, and yet you still have the majority of women working as subsistence farmers earning less than $2 a day and women having to take a back seat to their husbands at home.

So you've got this interesting dichotomy there.

And the government is really genuine in terms of wanting to put women forward.

And some of that was post genocide, the population became 70% female because so many men had died in the genocide or were incarcerated or in refugee camps that women were the ones responsible for rebuilding their homes and their families and society.

But you still do have this entrenched patriarchy.

And so the government has been leading public relations campaign, putting male advocates out there to help bring other men along and show them basically a different way of engaging with women.

- We have 50% percent of the population that we're not really talking about.

And then when we talk about women's rights and women's advocacy, we often kind of treat the women in which we should be because they have been victimized in just such a disproportionate rate to men in the countries that you serve.

But are we talking enough about men in this situation?

- No, no.

And in fact, I remember so clearly at Women for Women, the women would come up to us and say, "It's so great that you're training us, but if you're not training our husbands, our brothers, our uncle, we're going back into the exact same dynamic and it's not enough."

It was after that we really started a men's leadership program.

So men could hear from other men, from male leaders in their particular country contexts.

They could be elders or tribal leaders or religious leaders, as in the case of Afghanistan or government leaders to really talk about how you behave with women.

And I remember sitting in Nigeria after one of those training programs and this man came up and he said, "I didn't know.

I mean, this is the way my father treated my mother.

This is the way his father treated his mother.

And we didn't know there was a different way to treat women."

And so, I mean, we assume that there's something maybe insidious or malicious or anything about that, but really it may be just as simple as exposure to a different way.

- We were talking about some issues and this has become a hot topic globally about systemic issues, systemic racism, systemic sexism.

And I think that that is certainly at play here and policy helps, right?

(Cynthia laughs softly) - It does.

- It certainly helps.

- And it's important.

And it gives people something to hold onto, absolutely.

So, a policy is very important for setting the standard.

And then it's a question of enforcement and prevention, and that's where you see a big gap.

And particularly when you're talking about let's say gender policies, or let's say there's a police hotline, but women in rural areas might not know about it.

They don't know they have particular rights.

It's not enforced at a local level.

So you see a big split between policy and practice, which is where grassroots efforts really need to pick up and make sure that women know their rights, that they're able to access their rights.

- Yes.

Pivoting a little bit, but you had mentioned Afghanistan and I do wanna take a moment to talk about Afghanistan here.

We've all seen the conflict coming out of the nation over the last three weeks and you have experience working there.

In your book, you share a story about Sweeta, and I would like for you to share that story with us today.

- Sure.

Just like all of you watched in horror with what was going on in Afghanistan and was really devastated.

I spent several years going back and forth there and it's a country that has so much progress and incredible potential but never really realized.

And women in particular have made such good progress there over the last 20 years.

So it was really devastating to see.

Now, Sweeta is a woman that I worked with back in like 2006, 7, 8.

And she was the Afghan Country Director of Women for Women International at the time.

And she's working and the organization was working with some of the most marginalized women in the country.

These are women some of who didn't know how old they were.

They didn't know the ages of their children.

Most of them were illiterate and innumarate and really were some of the most marginalized women in the country.

And so Sweeta was really working on the front lines with these women to help them gain some new skills and build a better life.

And she called me and she told me that she had received a death threat.

It was a letter that was delivered from the Taliban to our office, to her attention, basically telling her that she needed to cease on her anti-Islamic issues and activities because they were providing misinformation to women.

And that if she continued her life and her destiny was in her own hands.

And that was followed by two phone calls from the Taliban directly to her and saying, "We know where you are.

We know what you're doing."

And threatening the life of her seven-year-old son and her baby girl.

- In different locations?

- In different locations.

They knew everywhere.

They know where her parents were.

They knew where her family was.

They seem to know where she was at all times.

And so I did what anybody would do which is try and get her the heck out of the country and really spent a month using every political connection I could think of to try and get her into the country.

As you can imagine, they'll post 9/11 and I know we're just celebrating that milestone.

Celebrating is the wrong word, commemorating the milestone.

But they were letting few Afghans into the country because they were obviously looking to flag potential terrorists.

And so it was very, very difficult, but we in the end managed to get Sweeta and her two children into the United States and then her husband was able to come over too.

And this recent, "I Stand with Afghan Women" march on the White House, Sweeta was out there with her bull horn really trying make sure that her sisters in Afghanistan were not forgotten.

But obviously you're not going to be able to airlift your way out of this challenge.

You're not going to be able to bring enough people anywhere to this country or any other country for refuge.

So it's really a question of what can we do now to support Afghan women?

- 'Cause Sweeta is one woman and it ended very positively hearing that she's in DC trying to still make change for her sisters and her family over in Afghanistan.

One quote in your book that really stood out to me that I like clocked away on my laptop and I need to bring this up today was, "It was always one step forward and three steps back.

Our small gains practically wiped out with each new surge."

And you think you were talking about, was it South Sudan?

- It was about Congo.

- Congo, yeah.

And that really resonated with the situation in Afghanistan right now.

And a lot of folks here had a feeling that it would eventually turn, but not as quick as it had.

So seeing what is happening there now, how are you feeling and what are you hearing from your colleagues that are still in this work?

- Yeah, I mean, I think having been around the block a few times and really seeing a lot of these protracted conflicts in places like Afghanistan, and Congo, and South Sudan, they may not be in hot conflict all the time but they're like a trigger away.

And I know people were saying, "Oh, the government's not gonna fall for 6, 12, 18 months."

But when the government falls and the army feels unprotected, it was just a matter of time before that happened.

And I just feel like we collectively, the world community has done such a disservice to places like Afghanistan.

And I think everybody's talking about Afghanistan now, the same way that everybody was talking about Syria, and then everybody was talking about Congo, and South Sudan and the thing... - Boko Haram.

- Exactly, and the thing is once the cameras turn off and people turn away and they invariably do because life is busy, people get distracted, it's really hard to keep your attention on one conflict, that's when I really worry because people aren't going to be paying attention.

And so I think it just, what I know about this kind of work, it takes a sustained level of effort and attention.

Not to be able to do this work ourselves, but to make sure the people on the ground aren't forgotten, that they have the tools, the resources, the support they need to be able to help themselves.

And that's what I see for Afghan women.

There's only going to be so much that we can do and really it's going to take Afghan women and men working together.

If they want a different outcome for their country, they're going to have to make that happen with the tools and support that we can offer them.

- I think that's what made the Women for Women center and some of the other centers that you've been working with in various countries really successful is how the training cohorts were set up, like as cohorts.

It may be kinda touching a little bit right now on kind of that social network, that ingrained social network that these training programs put in, and how is it important?

- I think what you see in war and conflict, particularly in places like Congo where 2 million women have been raped over the country's protracted war.

I mean, think about 2 million women raped.

It's such a staggering number and what you have in instances like that is a deep sense of shame and isolation among the women.

They're not the perpetrators, but they have to walk around with this.

And some of their families have abandoned them because of the stigma associated with that.

So we used to have women coming to the program in Congo that were so traumatized.

They literally could not say their names out loud.

Think about that.

And so this idea of coming together in these training groups of 25 where women are able to get comfortable and just have a sense of emotional support, where you can share your story in a safe place.

And it's really a lifeline for many of these women.

And what we have found, certainly not just in Congo is the actual grouping of the women together is just as important as the training that they're receiving themselves.

And there's something about the dynamic too.

I remember hearing this story in Nigeria where this women's group got together and one of the women was being beaten by her husband.

And so the women got together, all of them and they marched over to this guy's house and said, "If you're beating her, you're gonna have to be all of us because that's what's going to happen."

And sort of that sense of what we used to say at Women for Women, "One woman can change many things, but many women can change everything."

This idea that there is strength in numbers.

And so whether it's cooperative development, like the brick making cooperative that made the 500,000 bricks for the Women's Opportunity Center, to the agricultural co-ops, to the professional networks, and in this country too, even the book clubs and the other ways that women come together to support each other, all of that is really important.

- You mentioned that the 500,000 bricks, I think that's the source of the name of your book.

- That's right.

- They literally were building the center brick by brick, quite literally.

And what was the name of your participant there who was managing the brickwork?

- [Karen] Angelique.

- Angelique.

Absolutely incredible story.

And to see how she not only empowered herself by starting this brick business which is a traditionally male centered business.

And just really revolutionized it and even hired people and almost created her little mini ecosystem for women.

- And then she went to this Goldman Sachs training and got trained in sort of business management and started all sorts of reciprocal businesses and put her kids through private school.

And so that's why the book is called "Brick by Brick" because it's literally brick by brick, but also a metaphor about how women can rebuild and build their lives a brick at a time.

And you see that over and over with survivors, but pretty much true for a lot of women everywhere.

- Yeah, and we're seeing some of the women come together too.

Right now in Afghanistan, I know some of them have been standing up making sure that they don't want things to go back to how they were.

Do you see it being a little different this time around?

- I hope so, I really do.

I think it's a good sign that women are not just going to their homes and hoping for the best that they're on the streets and they're demanding their rights.

I think it's going to take men and women working together as well as pressure from the international community to try and make change.

And I suspect it's probably going to get worse before it gets better, but I also think the change, what I have seen is systemic change isn't going to come from outside.

It's going to come from within and even your Sweetas and others that I've talked to, they were saying, "We didn't expect America to stay forever.

We know that we need to take care of and lead our own country.

We just didn't like the way the withdrawal was handled."

- Yeah, yeah.

So, let's talk about the best of intentions.

So we have a long trail of stories of organizations, NGOs, missionaries, et cetera, going into these war torn countries that are in conflict and just not really understanding what's happening, understanding the culture of the people, the systems that are in place and really just making it worse.

(Cynthia chuckles) Do you have any examples of best practices for organizations, groups, or individuals who want to genuinely make a difference, a positive difference?

- Yeah, I think it starts out quite well-meaning on the part of people who want to make a difference in their life.

I think though that sometimes well-meaning donors though can push for quick impact projects, including the US government.

Quick impact projects, make a difference, spend down the pipeline, go ask for more money without really thinking about the implications of their work.

And what they often fail to do is they tend to plop in a bunch of expatriates and set it all up and show people that this is what's working but it wasn't working because it wasn't designed by local people, didn't have the right input from local people.

There wasn't the level of ownership that there needed to be from those people.

And because of that what you see littered across countrysides all over the world are defunct projects.

Projects that start out with a lot of hope and a lot of potential but ended up just being assigned there with nothing else there.

And it's not only depressing.

I believe that it's destructive because you've raised expectations that something in fact is going to be different and then you leave.

And so I actually just read this piece, which you'll appreciate which was about sort of white women and international development, which was really good.

And it was written by a black woman who is in the global health sector, and she said, basically, two white women such as myself, check your privilege, give up your privilege regularly, check your biases and also forward real allyship with those who are on the ground.

You don't have to do it, you don't have to lead it, you can support it.

And I just think that's really good advice frankly, whatever your nationality, whatever your color to really have that approach and that level of humility and honesty and integrity when you're approaching this development work.

- And understanding there needs to be trust too, right?

- Absolutely, and frankly, top down doesn't work.

It never did.

We just kinda realized that.

- Oh yeah.

So I wanted to actually take a little bit of time to talk about your work now with the Akilah Institute.

You spent your year in Rwanda and now you're back there serving as president for the only women's college in Rwanda.

Maybe talk about what is different with the approach of Akilah Institute versus the work that you had done in the past.

- Well, it's interesting 'cause when I think about the young women who come to Akilah, I think of them as kind of the proverbial daughters of the Women for Women women that we were serving in the sense that it was really their mothers who sacrificed everything for their daughters to be able to have an education, a college education and a pathway to a better life.

And the demographic for these students at Akilah, over 50% of them come from rural areas, 78% are their first in their families to go to college.

College was a big dream for them.

They never assumed that that would happen.

And so it's really meaningful to these young women.

And so what we did differently is rather than starting with the supply, which is this idea that so many girls need education, we started with the demand which was the private sector and the skills gap in the labor market and we worked backwards to make sure that the education that we were offering was market relevant so that when these young women graduated with a high quality education that they would be able to transition directly into the workforce.

And we did that with the majors that we were offering, hospitality management, sustainable tourism, information systems, or IT, and then small business management and entrepreneurship, which really was a catch all for a lot of different industries.

And so... - Which is also one of the more lucrative industries.

- It is, exactly.

This is a pre-COVID statistic.

But 86% of our graduates secure a job within six months of graduation.

And we're earning about four times the national meeting income.

- [Cynthia] Wow.

- But here's the kicker.

They were also, 90% of them were paying for healthcare, school fees for other family members.

So you're really seeing them pay...(indistinct) - [Cynthia] Multiplying effect.

- Absolutely.

Which is why again education and income to me is the recipe for lasting change.

- Which is why it's so important and kind of the whole crux of your book of why it's important to fight for and defend women and to invest in their lives and making sure that they have the means and to earn an income.

I know you had mentioned that was one of the key things to ensuring that a country succeeds is a woman earning an income.

- Absolutely.

I like to say this well education gives women voice, it's the income piece that gives women choice.

Choices around how money is saved and spent, choices if a woman is suffering from violence or abuse in the family, choices about keeping their daughters in school.

It's primarily the women who are paying the school fees.

And so when a woman is earning an income, she can keep those girls in school longer.

And we know when they're in school longer, they're earning higher wages.

- And as you said that the statistic from earlier, least likely to get pregnant and then continue their careers.

It all goes full circle.

Today at the City Club, we're listening to a forum in our Authors in Conversation series, featuring Karen Sherman, author of "Brick by Brick: Building Hope and Opportunity for Women Survivors Everywhere".

We're about to begin the audience Q&A.

We welcome questions from everyone, City Club members, guests, students, or those of you joining us via our live stream or the radio broadcast at 90.3 Ideastream Public Media.

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And our staff will try to work it in the program.

Supervising the microphone today is Bliss Davis, Content and Programming Coordinator.

May we have the first question please.

Go ahead, Mike.

- Getting back to the question I asked you earlier, do you think immigration reform would help these women?

I take it you would like to see more women be able to come to the U.S but it's not the total answer.

They must learn to do things at their home, right?

- Yeah.

I think it's a discreet part of a solution.

But what I see being even more important is women being enabled to make change in their own societies.

I think it's really even with open immigration or immigration reform, you're talking about a drop in the bucket in terms of people being able to leave their country and make change in another place.

And I'm thrilled for all the young women and older women who were able to leave Afghanistan.

But I think about all those women who are remaining in Afghanistan.

The would be doctors and engineers and athletes and what is their future gonna be like?

And then also the marginalized and poor women who would never ever have been on an airlift to begin with and don't really warrant the attention or the protection of the American government or any government.

And so when I think about systemic change, it's really happening in those countries themselves.

- Good afternoon.

Thank you for being here.

I appreciate your comments about being advised to check your privilege and to check your bias.

And people of color have not always had very positive relationships with white people.

So here's a white lady going into this African nation, what steps do you take to build that trust when those relationships haven't always been very positive?

- Such a great question.

I spent a lot of time listening (chuckles) and not talking, taking a lot of notes.

If you saw all the notebooks I've collected, it's just so many notes.

So I think making sure that whoever I'm working with in any country that they feel heard and listened to, and that their ideas have resonance and value, that I'm not coming in in any kind of top down way.

But to really think about my role as being a catalytic one to support, to assist, to garner resources, to advocate, to maybe provide new tools and resources that were not at their disposal.

But when I think about norm change or any kind of change, and even as we talked about sustainable development of projects, it is those folks on the ground, black or white, leading that change.

- Yeah, just really quick if I could squeeze in here.

I know that you had talked about a little bit where people can be most helpful is like when the cameras turn off where they should be more tapped in, where are those places they can go to become more educated and inform themselves and also be more effective in their advocacy as you said?

- There's a number of organizations who are doing really wonderful work on the ground again when the cameras have turned away.

And I would really seek out, it may not be Afghanistan, it may be another country, or it may be another issue.

We're not single tracked.

And I know that for myself, I've worked on everything from not just education, but human trafficking, violence against women, any number of issues, and so whatever your thing is that moves you to want to do more to take action, find those resources out there.

There's an organization called InterAction in Washington, D.C., and they're kind of a clearing house of organizations that work all over the world on all different issues.

My son works on global health issues and is very interested in reproductive rights.

My other son is very interested in bridge-building and access to markets and schools and other things for people who don't have, who are isolated in isolated communities.

So I think everybody has their thing, their bent, but to stay involved, pick those things that are important to you and to try and make a difference.

- We all have computers in our pocket.

Is that true?

- Yeah, yeah.

(Cynthia laughs softly) I mean, like when something new comes to light, the first thing I do is like Google it.

- [Cynthia] Let me Google that for you dot com.

(Cynthia and Karen laugh softly) Go ahead.

- Yes, thank you for the work that you're doing.

I wonder if you comment, since the withdrawal from Afghanistan, I've heard a number of interesting discussions about the urban-rural differences in these countries, just as we have very significant differences here between attitudes and values, patriarchy in rural versus urban areas.

And part of that discussion has touched on how women in rural parts of Afghanistan are not that eager about getting education and moving into employment.

What they're concerned about is their families, the effect of the war, members who have died.

So I'm wondering if you might comment on that if you've seen these kinds of differences.

- Yeah, it's a great question.

Absolutely, I have.

We sort of have this point in time of before Taliban and then after Taliban and then now with the Taliban again, but even after the Taliban in 2001, when there was a different kind of government, you still had a major split between urban and rural.

And Sweeta, the woman we were talking about, she likes to talk about two Afghanistans, one in Kabul or the capital areas where women are gaining access to education, political and economic opportunities, and then really sort of what's happening in remote areas where women are not allowed to study or work or even really to stand on their own.

And what I don't know is is that by choice or is that by opportunity?

Because what I can say in Afghanistan is the farther you get from Kabul, it's so much more restrictive and the rights of women are not protected at all.

So, is it that they don't want those things or they've never had access to those things and can't ask for them?

Of course, they're motivated to be able to support their families and that makes perfect sense.

But I think part of the issue is really just the lack of exposure to some of the things that women in more urban areas have access to.

But one of the most startling statistics around Afghanistan, and this is not a Taliban statistic, is that 87% of Afghan women have experienced at least some form of abuse, about 50% of them at home.

So I do suspect that what you're seeing is really repressed desire in many of these areas where women are not allowed to move, speak and participate freely.

- Hi and thank you.

My question goes back to something you mentioned earlier about how you thought raising your sons and how can we raise strong, respectable men.

I work in child abuse and sexual assault, and that's always something that comes up is like, what can we do for the future?

Is it education?

Is it X, Y, Z?

And we come back to a lot of it's raising children, raising the next generation to maybe think differently than us.

And I was just wondering if you could speak, it's a loaded question, but how have you done this?

And how do you see the work you're doing, other people maybe also doing this work and how they're raising this next generation to maybe not make the mistakes that we have in the past?

- Yeah, no, thank you.

You know, it's hard.

I mean, I raised my kids in Bethesda, Maryland, so I have to say, and it was hard.

I mean, it was one of the reasons that when I moved to Rwanda I wanted to yank them out of Bethesda and take them to a different place and show them a different way that people live and also just how much they have that they take for granted, as we all do, including myself every single day.

And I realized that not everybody is able to take their children and move to Rwanda with them.

But I think there are people in every society.

I'm sure there are people in this city who live very differently than the people in this room here today.

And I think that you can always show your children a different way to think, to experience, to see because the most extreme form of otherness is what happened during the genocide in Rwanda where people were otherized all the time.

And so, because there was no empathy, no understanding.

I could not see those people and so we can dehumanize them.

They're less than human.

So, what we need to do as parents, as educators, as activists, as people who care about these issues is to humanize them, to make sure that people really see what's around them.

And I remember this statistic when I was doing a lot of work in the former Soviet Union.

There was a public opinion poll taken at the time, it's middle of the Cold War.

And the public opinion poll was interviewing Americans.

And the majority of Americans said that they thought that Soviet people loved their children less.

Can you imagine?

That they loved their children less, because the Cold War had framed that whole dialogue that we've otherized them.

How could they possibly love their children as much as we love our children?

But we do that all the time in big and small ways.

So I think for children and you're raising good men and citizens, don't let them otherize.

- Hi, thank you.

I just wanted to know like how you became so interested in working with women and in such a global scale.

- Yeah, I feel like I got really lucky.

I ended up moving to Washington, D.C. right after I did my undergraduate work.

And happened to end up going to the Geneva Summit talks and meeting General Secretary Gorbachev when everything was changing in the former Soviet Union.

I was like 22 years old and I just became enamored with what was happening in that country in that transformation.

And then when I started doing work there, when everything had collapsed, the political system had collapsed, the economy collapsed, it was really the women who were really working to build up their societies.

I was running a microcredit program out on the Russian far east in the late 1990s.

And we'd have these men come in and they'd say, "I've got this great project and I need a million dollars and it's gonna be great."

And then these women would come in and say, "I've got this great project and I need $50 and I can start this thing and I can create this business."

And I mean like, but who are you gonna bet on?

You're gonna bet on the women because brick by brick, step by step they're making that change.

And I have seen that play out in every single country context that I've ever worked.

It's not that I don't like and appreciate men, but when I think about real change agents and those with the greatest multiplier effect, hands down it's the women.

- If I could squeeze in here once more too, I wanted to talk about feminism and one question a little bit earlier touched on that a little bit about how is there a rule, urban divide.

And you mentioned that feminism is not a monolith.

It differed from country to country, woman to woman.

Context again was everything.

Just maybe really quickly touch on what that means to you.

- Yeah, I think the American brand of feminism for example, and even somebody like myself doesn't resonate in a lot of countries.

A lot of people think American women are too bold.

They're too out there, they're too this, but it doesn't mean that they're not advocating for themselves and for women.

It just doesn't necessarily look like our brand of feminism.

And so I think what I have learned about this work, and it goes back to this question about how do you go into a country?

You have to meet women where they are not where you want them to be or where you think they should be.

Some people, when they look at Afghanistan, they only look at the burka and they say, "We gotta get rid of the burka because it's anti-feminist."

The women there might say, "That's the least of our problems frankly.

We wanna go have an education.

We want to be able to move freely.

If moving freely means I have to wear the burka, great."

But you might come in with a different lens and say, "That's the way it should be."

And even, I've heard from a lot of women across Africa too saying, "We approach feminism very differently.

We're not confrontational with our husbands.

We actually get a lot farther if we do it in a different way."

So I just think there isn't a brand of feminism and I think like anything context and culture matter.

- [Cynthia] Absolutely.

- Thank you very much first of all for coming to Cleveland and doing this address.

I've been impressed with a lot of the stuff you've said, all of it really.

And I'm also impressed with the expertise and empathy you show with intercultural situations.

Seems you have a pretty good understanding of how to communicate with somebody from a different culture.

And I think that's very important especially when you go overseas.

In all your remarks, you have said how, and thanks for all the work you're doing for women, but you always have said that that men are a critical part of the change.

So I have a very practical question for you.

My question is in your college in Rwanda or elsewhere, are you doing anything to educate the men about the dangers of the gender dynamics they are engaged in and how bad it is for them and for their children's future and for society at large?

So I think it is a natural followup in terms of, okay, so if we do everything we can to educate women, that's great I think, that's wonderful, and please don't ever stop, but maybe you'll expand a little bit and say, "Okay, can we talk to the men and explain to them some of the downfall of what their behavior is."

- That is a fantastic question and a great segue which is that in 2020, we launched Davis College, which is our co-ed offering exactly for that reason because same thing as the women would say, "Well, it's great that you're training us, but if you're not training our brothers and our uncles and our fathers, you're not really making that level of change."

We would hear from the girls who would come to Akilah, young women who would come to Akilah and they would say, "Well, what about our cousins and our uncles and our brothers?

What about their education?"

And so we started this college which was a co-ed offering to be able to take men and women together as well as having our all women's college to be able to do that very thing.

And we worked really hard to create a gender responsive pedagogy.

So we really worked backwards to take some of the secret sauce of Akilah and bring it into Davis College to really be able to do what I did as a mother which is to create good men who really understand sort of the gender dynamics and where it's really positive and where it might be destructive so that when they go out into the world too, as they're getting jobs and starting families that they're thinking about those things.

- We need a comprehensive approach of 100% of the population.

- [Karen] That's right.

- Yes.

Well, today at the City Club, we have been listening to a forum part of our Authors in Conversation series featuring Karen Sherman, author of "Brick by Brick: Building Hope and Opportunity for Women Survivors Everywhere".

We welcome guests at tables hosted by Beaumont School and our strategy group.

We're happy to have you here.

Today's forum is the Nathu Aggarwal and Roy Blackburn forum.

It's established in memory of Mr. Aggarwal and Mr. Blackburn who set inspiring examples and exhibited a lifelong commitment to education in particular women's and girls' education.

We are grateful for the support of City Club and member Raj Aggarwal and his family who have made this annual forum possible.

Be sure to join us next Friday, September 17th.

We will be speaking with Michael Deemer, President and CEO of the Downtown Cleveland Alliance.

He will be in conversation with City Club CEO, Dan Moulthrop, about how Downtown Cleveland has fared over the last year and the priorities that will move our city center forward in this new era of leadership.

Tickets are still available for this forum and you can purchase them and learn more about our other forums at cityclub.org.

And that brings us to the end of today's forum.

Thank you, Karen Sherman.

- Thank you.

- And thank you members, friends of the City Club.

This forum is now adjourned.

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