Washington National Cathedral

Sam Lloyd: Good morning, and welcome to the next in the series of regular conversations here at ten o’clock on Sunday morning, living and thinking and reflecting about the crossroads between faith and public life. Today we’re going to explore an absolutely critical issue for the state of our world. Today, as you may know, we are hosting a landmark event—something called “Breakthrough: The Women Faith and Development Summit to End Global Poverty.”

We’re here to talk about ways to address the plight, the struggles, the issues of women and girls, particularly in the developing world, as a critical approach to addressing the problem of severe global poverty. And we have a distinguished guest with us this morning to help us navigate the relationship between empowering women and ending poverty and the role of religious institutions in that as well. Thoraya Obaid is the executive director of the United Nations Population Fund, the most prominent international agency focused on reproductive health and women’s rights.

A citizen of Saudi Arabia and a Muslim, Dr. Obaid has spent many years involved with international agencies, including the United Nations, advocating for women’s empowerment and the ways [in which] that benefits not just women but everyone. She is someone especially attuned to the cultural, religious, and social differences that make our world so complex and make it hard often to move things along. Dr. Obaid, we are delighted to have you with us today.

Dr. Thoraya Obaid: I’m very happy to be with all of you here.

Lloyd: Great. Well, let’s start with your work, the work you do with the United Nations Population Fund. Tell us a little bit about that and what your role is.

Obaid: Well, the United Nations Population Fund has two major areas of work. One is straightforward—it’s about data collections, census, using data for policy so governments know what they have in terms of the size of their population, age group, etc. The other one, which is the more sensitive one, is on reproductive health. On reproductive health, and here I want to demystify the word reproductive health by saying it’s about the benefit and the welfare of women throughout their life cycle. It’s to have a comfortable life both in their private life sexually and in the life outside. And in this program it includes dealing with issues of family planning, spacing, issues of teenage pregnancy, dealing with complications of unsafe abortion, violence against women, and prevention of HIV-AIDS. This is the package that is reproductive health that we work with governments to implement.

Lloyd: A large agenda.

Obaid: Very large agenda.

Lloyd: Let me ask you to make the connection that I have pointed to but I’d love to hear you talk some about it. There is no question that there are gross inequities between men and women across the world and particularly in developing nations. How is it that addressing this particular problem, the particular issues that women have to struggle with. How is it that that will be a major piece of addressing the larger problem of global poverty?

Obaid: Well as you know, almost seventy percent of the poor people are women.

Lloyd: Seventy, not fifty percent. Seventy percent.

Obaid: Seventy percent. Women do lots of work at home and outside of the home. Often it’s not valued or recognized. Women… in fact, one indicator I think that shows the disparity is the issue of maternal death—the death of women as a result of pregnancy and childbearing, and here this indicator has not changed in the last thirty years. And this is why the Millennium Development Goal is so important—number five, on maternal health—because it’s the indicator that shows disparity between the rich and the poor in the same country and among countries.

So empowering women with education, being able to have an income, to be able to decide freely how many children they want, what kind of spacing they need for their children, decisions about marriage—not to be married very early—decision about not to have female genital mutilation. All of these issues together, women have to be empowered first as human beings, as women, and then the society could take them on board in terms of education, economic opportunities, etc. This all feeds into fighting poverty.

Lloyd: Something as simple as owning property is often very difficult for women in these countries, isn’t that right?

Obaid: That’s very true and—

Lloyd: Any enterprise, any effort to try to get some way of saving money and investing money is almost impossible.

Obaid: Well we have for example figures. We know when women have income, comparing how women spent money compared to men. Women spend their money first on their children, education, and health, on the household, and at the very end they take care of themselves. Men don’t do that particularly. So here you see, if women can own land, if women can have an income, the family is better, the community is better, and the country certainly is much better.

Lloyd: Doesn’t say much for men, but it sounds credible anyway to hear that. Well, if… well, one more statistic before we move on. I came across, somewhere, reading that something like for every year beyond the third-grade level that a girl is still in school and gaining literacy, a whole set of social factors improved markedly. Something like, for every year she is there, twenty percent less likelihood of an early pregnancy.

Obaid: Yes.

Lloyd: A stronger likelihood that she will be able to ultimately find a place where she can earn income for herself. So something as simple as keeping her in school when often the education of women is quite discouraged, I guess, in these countries, can have a huge impact in building social capital in a village or community.

Obaid: Well, education is the key to a women’s movement, a girl’s movement. To keep her out of school, it not only impacts on her. Usually the more girls are educated later in life, children themselves have a better quality of life, and certainly she will then be better fit to be economically active. And you had asked me to just link this a little bit to my personal life, well, for me I think if it wasn’t for my education, I wouldn’t be sitting in this Cathedral as the head of the United Nations Population Fund.

Lloyd: Tell us your story. You’re from Saudi Arabia, born in Medina, is that right?

Obaid: No, my parents are born in Medina.

Lloyd: Well, tell us your story.

Obaid: Okay. Well, my father and my mother are born in Medina, which is the holy city, the second holy city. My father has a fifth… a primary school education, I think. He went to school in the mosque, so he has been educated religiously. My mother has a third-grade education, but I call her the first feminist of the Arabian Peninsula, and she just passed away, but she has… she said I was her dream. She invested in me everything that she couldn’t do for herself. But certainly the fact that my father, as a religious man, believed that a very important basis for faith is knowledge… If you don’t have knowledge, you cannot be a good believer, and therefore you cannot make decisions about right and wrong, and as a result he decided to educate all of us eight children, because he felt that, if he educated us, we’ll be better Muslims, and therefore we can make decisions about our life.

And he sent me to… he was a middle-class man, you know, and he sent me to a boarding school, which was very costly for him, in Egypt, and it was a Presbyterian missionary school, and I grew up with Presbyterian missioners for eleven years. It never changed my religion. In fact, I got the best education I could hope for, and I am very grateful to many of them who educated me.

But the important part was that my father never felt that sending me to a Christian school would be against his religion or my religion. He kept on telling me throughout that, one, they sent me to boarding school because they loved me—my parents loved me—it’s not because they were shunning me, and they wanted me to get education. But the other one was that God is one, and it doesn’t make a difference whether you are Muslim, Christian, or Jew, or whatever, God is one. And he was very… The option that was available to him was the Presbyterian missionary school, and we went there. We had happy memories there and if we have time, I will tell you a funny story later.

Lloyd: We always have time for a funny story… tell us.

Obaid: Well, we were about ten… boarding school was made up from girls from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Coptic… the Coptic girls from upper Egypt. And these girls were from Cairo, and we were closer traditionally, culturally to the girls from upper Egypt, the Coptic, than the Muslim girls from Cairo. It was very interesting.

Lloyd: Coptics were Christians.

Obaid: Yes, Coptics were Christians, and anyway… But we always had night prayers with the teachers. And one time, just before Easter, they told us in the prayer that, you know, they were going to pray for our souls, so we will know Jesus Christ, our Lord. And we were ten, eleven, twelve—something like that—and we lived on the second floor, and the teacher lived on the third floor. So I remember we all dashed very quickly up to our second floor, we did the ablutions, we started praying, because we thought if our prayer got to God before their prayer… (laughter) he won’t convert us! (laughter)

And what we were worried about the conversion is not the conversion. It’s, what are we going to tell our parents?! They prayed and converted us? But we had lovely discussions about Islam and Christianity throughout. It was very good for all of us.

Lloyd: I’ll bet you did. Well, tell me, you have become such a strong leader and such a strong woman leader, do you… has there been any tension between that and your own Muslim faith?

Obaid: Well, you know, I think because I was brought up thinking of religion as part of one’s life—I am a practicing Muslim. I don’t wear the hijab, but I’m a practicing Muslim. In Islam, in Koran it says that Islam is the religion of the middle. It is the moderate, it’s the middle road. And my father brought us [up] that way, and so I don’t believe that I personally had tension between this because, in my own life, I was able to choose my husband, my two husbands actually. I was able… I didn’t marry them at the same time— (laughter)

I was able to determine how many children I have. I have two girls. I was able to choose my employment, and so on. So in many ways, what we preach in the UN, according to the Cairo Agreement International Conference on Population and Development, in many sense I represent that—women from developing countries who are empowered through education, [supported] by the family and the community to find ways in her life and to develop her life.

However, of course, I have lived, and part of our work is dealing with many different reactions to the agenda of reproductive health. And certainly here is what we need is to listen to the people, see what they want and how they can be empowered. One thing that I’ve learned throughout my life is change never comes from the outside; change has to come from the inside.

And so what our role is, is to work with communities and to ensure that communities understand their own needs. And we all together need to work to meet those needs. If women in a community look at the issue of fistula and I’m not sure how many of you know what a fistula is. A fistula is this ability that happens to women because of obstructed birth when a girl gets pregnant at the age of 12, 13, 14, 15. Basically it’s obstructed. There is a hole that happens where the baby is pushing and she becomes incontinent for the rest of her life.

And, you know, when you find that this is… women have been discarded basically. They live outside the family. And when you know that the surgery costs them $300 or $400 for us to do it… to do it… and one woman will have one surgery, you will see the whole community responding with their girls wanting them. So we have to respond to the needs of what the people want.

A story that also I heard when visiting villages, the men tell us in the village… I was asking, why [are] so many women dying? How do these know why women are dying when they give birth? And the man said, one of the older, wise men said, “You know, we really don’t understand. They take the women to the hut to give birth, and they come back and they say she is gone, but we don’t know why. We know she died, but we don’t know why she died.”

And so working with men to understand, what does birth mean, and the dangers of birth, and where women should access better health services, having emergency obstetric care if there is a problem. Certainly, you know, again, makes the community respond positively when they find a woman has not died. And so, and the same thing with female genital mutilation. You need lots of advocacy and you need for the people to take the agenda themselves—internalize it—and make it part of their thinking and their system.

Lloyd: Explain a little bit about female mutilation, which is quite a problem in some of these, I guess, African countries?

Obaid: Well, it’s not only in Africa. It’s mostly in Africa, but it’s also in some Asian countries and some of the other countries.

Some attribute it to… In Islamic society, they attribute it to Islam. In Islam, it is not there. In Al Isra University, which is the theological Islamic university, has put a fact saying that FGM is not part of Islam. Certainly, if is it was part of Islam, the Arabian Peninsula would practice it. We don’t have it.

So it’s much more a pharaonic African tradition that has been carried on and here basically what happens is that—I’m sure many of you know that a surgery is done on the girl when she is… excision when she is very young, which supposedly the whole purpose of it is to control her sexuality, basically to make less desire and so on. And as a result, it has health hazards.

They die—little girls die. If… and if it’s full infibulation, and they sew up most of the female sex organ except for a little hole, when she gives birth, she will bleed and die, but it also has the psychological impact as well.

And so, working with parliamentarians to put laws that will be against it will be very important, but to a great degree, you need to get the faith-based groups, the religious leaders, to also talk about it. An example of that, I think, is Senegal is a good example, where we worked with the Islamic religious leaders, because it was interpreted as being a Muslim issue, to educate them not only on the haram and the halal—the right or wrong—but rather to give them basic medical information about what does FGM do to women so that they would promote it, understand it and when they talk against it, it will be talking out of knowledge.

And certainly the Islamic religious leaders in Senegal played a very important role in lobbying the parliamentarians to put laws against it. So again, when you get the community itself convinced, they can mobilize. It’s not for us to mobilize. It’s for the communities themselves to take it on and to mobilize their own leaders.

Lloyd: Tell us a little bit, then, about how the UN Population Fund works, because what you’re describing is a lot of structural, cultural, religious practices that need to be addressed, and a lot of it needs to happen on the ground. But you also mention working with parliamentarians. Do you all work a lot with the governments in these countries? Are you working with religious communities on the ground in these developing areas? How do you find… What’s the best way you’ve found, or best ways, to leverage your resources to bring about this kind of change?

Obaid: Well, since UNFPA was established, it made a decision long, thirty-plus years ago, that it would remain small, and it will work through the local governments and civil society and so on, and that’s how we continue to work. Our international staff are very small. We are one-third international, two-[thirds] national staff. The whole organization from me to the, you know, most junior staff in a country office on the regular post were about a little over one thousand only. If you go visit many countries, you will find, only the representative might be the only international staff. The rest are national. So we believe in building on the national capacity that is there, and if it’s weak, we need to work with it. So at the local level we work with governments, we work with national NGOs, we work with community NGOs, and we work with faith-based groups, wherever they are.

Lloyd: A relatively small team for such a massive undertaking, it sounds like.

Obaid: Well, people keep on saying that we’re small, and I keep on saying, but remember, small is beautiful too. But at the same time, if you count the people we work with, we will be larger than anybody else, because if you work with the community, the community becomes your base.

Lloyd: You were saying to me just before we walked out how excited you are about this Breakthrough summit, because it’s bringing together some players who have not come together before. What would be your hope of what could come out of not just today, but the kind of collaboration we’re looking at here?

Obaid: Well, you know, we are, as I told you before, we are very good at criticizing each other and we’re not very good at—

Lloyd: Different organizations.

Obaid:—Yes. The different voices of this agenda. And we’re not very good at trying to find common areas of work respecting each other where we disagree.

Lloyd: Government, NGOs, faith communities—

Obaid: Women activists, women’s organizations, and so on… and I’m hoping that with this summit… We work with each other bilaterally or in smaller groups, but this is a large group that is coming together, and I’m hoping that through working together we will come out with some sort of an agreement, code of conduct, whatever you want to call it, that the needs to empower women and to end poverty are so huge, and our agendas have many aspects in them. We might agree on some and disagree on others, but at least we can have a core commitment to a core work, and we agree that each one of us can do their own other work that we may not agree on.

Lloyd: And that’s a step forward.

Obaid: That’s a very step forward, especially that we know when we analyze the situation of women. Basically women feel dangers throughout.

And I mentioned some of them, but maybe I just need to mention a difficult one. And if you allow me to mention it here, you know, you know that one of the main causes of death, one of the three causes of death, or the highest cause of death for women in Africa, is unsafe abortion and therefore—

Lloyd: It is?

Obaid: Unsafe abortion.

Lloyd: Unsafe abortion. Right.

Obaid: Women bleed to death, and they just go. And what we have, according to government—our own governments—when they agreed in Cairo, was that, if we expand family planning services, women can plan their children. They can have the spacing they want, and therefore you decrease the possibilities of women dying as a result of unsafe abortion. And it says that these decisions have to be made by governments, and just for your information, only—out of the whole world, only four governments that forbid abortion. Other ones allow it under life of the mother, life of… you know, different… rape, incest, etc. So there are laws there to govern it, and it’s a national agenda that we agree upon, that the government does itself.

Lloyd: Part of the challenge, I gather from reading some of the material, is working with different governments’ constraints, of different religious faith constraints. You’re trying to organize and move something like this care for the women and population control agendas along, but also being respectful about how far people will go and how far they won’t go in collaborating with you.

Obaid: Well, you know, again, you know, we say family planning and spacing, and not population control.

Lloyd: Family planning is what?

Obaid: Family planning and spacing, rather than population control. Population control is kind of the pre-1994 lingo, before that—

Lloyd: You’re right. You’re right.

Obaid: —and the logic also. Okay. You know, one example that I always love to mention is work we have in Honduras with faith-based organizations on prevention of HIV. I’ve attended many global religious group discussions, and faith-based organizations like to work with treatment, they like to work with care, orphans of HIV and so on.

But they don’t like to work with prevention, because prevention poses very difficult issues. It poses issues of sex, because HIV is mainly a sexually transmitted disease. It poses issues of young people having sex out of marriage, and therefore it poses issues of women controlling not to have sex or making decisions about sexuality. So it’s a very difficult area for faith-based organizations to work with. But in Honduras, it took us a year to bring together different Christian sects to work together. We had the Catholic Church, we had Episcopal, Methodist I believe, and what they call moderate evangelicals.

And I went and met with them once they reached an agreement about working with the issue of prevention of HIV among young people. And again, this was a very interesting story. We met for breakfast and, you know, we sat, we introduced each other, and they were all sitting, waiting, they want to eat, but they needed to say grace, and they didn’t know whether to say grace while I’m there or not! So I asked one of my colleagues to ask whoever is the leader to say grace. So we said grace, and then that opened the dialogue very nicely I would say.

Anyway, they agreed among themselves that all three… the four of them would provide the same information to young people—abstinence or delaying the age of sexual onset; be faithful, one partner; and the third one, of course, is the use of condoms. The Catholic representative said, look, we cannot provide condoms, which everybody respected that. As a result the others said, look, we have clinics.

So we established a referral system. So those who cannot, allow the others who can, and linking with the health system of the country. So this was kind of a very nice arrangement between faith-based organizations, to help young people receive the correct information and be able to receive services that don’t impact on the conscious of the priests or the religious faith people, and it’s really an example where religion and faith-based can play a very important role. To look at the reality of life and the objective is, how do we save young people? And they found, among themselves, they found a way to do it.

Lloyd: To collaborate with each other as they can.

Obaid: And respect each other’s constraints.

Lloyd: Yes, very good. We should go to our audience now for questions. Any questions for Dr. Obaid?

Davis: If you have a question, I’ll come to you right up here. I’ll ask others if you would come down and form a line. Stand, please.

Question 1: I was pleased to hear you refer to Esther Duflo’s work about the power of giving funds to women instead of men and what they spend it on. I would like to hear you comment if you know anything about Michael Koenig’s work. He’s finding that in Northern India, women who, in their families, have more money, are much more likely to be beaten by their husbands. How do we deal with that one?

Obaid: Well, violence against women is also, as I said, one of the agenda items that we work on, and we work on with many partners. We have in the UN an interagency task force on violence against women, and certainly we work through different ways.

One is the whole area of putting in place, helping governments, providing evidence, examples from other countries, of laws that protect women against violence, or, if they are violated, what can be done, which means zero impunity. Certainly, working with the health system also to deal with that. Counseling women themselves to be able to get the necessary legal support that they need, should they be violated, or they would be beaten up. And, of course, you have to deal with the men.

Often our messages on violence against women, we just address women, when we need to address men. So lots of work has to be done with men beginning when they are young, when they beat their sisters. I think we need to work with young people throughout.

Lloyd: Are you finding… just to jump in here… are you finding cooperation among local faith communities, among churches or judicatory leaders willing to try to work with their pastors to develop some awareness of the problem of violence…

Obaid: I think this is an area where faith-based… there is no contention about it… and this is an area that all of us can work together around violence; especially that many of the faith-based organizations do provide health services and educational services. So integrating anti-violence messages and behavioral changes—it requires behavioral change, basically, and this is a long-range activity. It’s nothing that happens overnight, and that’s why zero tolerance for violence is important as a rule, but also working with people who do violence is very important.

Question 2: Good morning. Question is, you had talked so much about the real powers in mobilizing from the inside, and for the people that are actually on the ground. What is the best way for those of us that aren’t there to support your efforts?

Obaid: Well, there are two… or a few things you can do. One, such a gathering is a very important message to say that the work we do is good work. Two, write to Mr. President to provide support to the United Nations Population Fund. As you know, the U.S. hasn’t supported us for seven years. (applause)

Lloyd: I’m sorry, you said the U.S. has not supported you?

Obaid: No.

Lloyd: Why is the U.S. not supporting the UN Population—

Obaid: Well, I think whenever there is a Republican president, this tends to happen. Whenever there is a Democrat president, it tends to be different. The issue is basically is our program in China? There is something called the Kemp-Kasten amendment, that says that no U.S. funds should go to any organization that participates in the management of coercive population policies, and they consider the pop—and we all consider the population policies in China as being coercive.

It’s dictating how many children a couple can have. And basically the difference is that we want to engage the Chinese in a dialogue to bring about change, while maybe the administration feels we should be out, rather than into a dialogue, and that’s a difference that we have. When we have a president who is a Democrat, what happens is the money we give China—which is peanuts; three million dollars is a small amount annually—we give it to… We don’t give it to China, but we develop programs with it—advocacy programs. Changing the whole way family planning services are provided, modernizing counseling, having a greater choice of contraceptives, etc. Taking away the quota of one child in 36 counties as a model to show that, when women have a choice in their lives, they make the right choice for themselves. And so these are all models that we, you know, try to show the Chinese and we have moved a lot in this agenda in China.

Anyway, when we have a Democrat, what they do is, they give us the money, but they deduct from it the amount we give China. We put the U.S. money in a separate account not to be spent over China, and then we are accountable to the government on that. That happens when we have a Democrat president. But with a Republican, it’s kind of, they take the whole amount out. So that’s one thing you can do. And the other one, of course, that, you know, with all these faith-based and NGO organizations active in the fields, any support you give, not only to us, but to any of the partners, is certainly very important, and your voice is very important.

Lloyd: I was very struck in reading some of the material about the question of population… not population control—what should I be saying?

Obaid: Depends what you want to say. (laughter)

Lloyd: Trying to reduce population growth in China, and a lot of Chinese… something that’s being imposed by the government itself, but that when women get the education and the resources and understanding, they, in fact, choose something like what the Chinese government is trying to achieve anyway—one child, maybe two children at most.

Obaid: That’s what we have found out in the counties where we worked: that when the quotas were removed, women didn’t have more than one or two because of the economic area. Can they support the children? Can they take care of them and so on?

One rule—and you have to know also that these rules really apply in cities more than in rural areas. Rural areas, you know, it’s not as much implemented at all or with minorities. It’s more of an urban phenomenon. And there is a… you know, I think part of the issue is to empower women to make decisions about their life.

That’s the dialogue we have with the Chinese. Let people decide. If we were out of China, there wouldn’t be a voice to say the rights of women, the human rights, the human rights. So we feel engagement is better than isolation, and we will continue to do that.

Lloyd: Yes. Thank you.

Davis: Microphone two.

Question 3: First, I want to say hello to friends and family in St. Louis, Missouri, and St. Mark’s Church specifically. It seems like a lot of your work is working against historical, cultural and especially religious beliefs and practices that inhibit spacing in healthy childbirth and increased problems with environment and other issues. How are you able to, without breaking any religious taboos or restrictions that a UN agency would have, persuade governments and people to be more appreciative of the benefits of spacing and healthier population growth?

Obaid: Well, all you need to do is provide evidence, and we work through evidence. I think governments respond to information and data. When you provide them with examples of countries where, for example, you take what’s called the Asian tigers. You know, why did they rise?

They rose because they were able to invest very early in young people, in education, and in health. They were able to have community-based services that includes family planning. And as a result, they were able—not that government enforces the decrees—but people see the benefit of spending the amount of money they have over two or three children rather than ten children. There is a health benefit.

For example, we have an example of Egypt where they said, by lowering maternal mortality, they were able to save $31 per person in education, health and hospital services, and so on. So, once this evidence information is provided to governments, but more importantly—not only governments but parliamentarians, and we have a long program with parliamentarians, because they are the ones who put the laws in place. So the more you engage the community, and you engage the parliamentarians, and you engage the ministers with information of different experiences, we believe they move towards putting the correct policies in place and we’ve seen that in many countries already.

Question 4: I’m going to be working this fall on a lecture series, and one of the women is the ambassador from Oman, who is a woman—

Obaid: Yes, she’s a friend too.

Question 4: —Can you tell me anything about her? I can’t pronounce her name.

Obaid: It depends which… I don’t know name she using now here. Her maiden name or her married name.

Question 4: I don’t know.

Lloyd: Did you have a question?

Question 4: Yes, I was wondering do you know her, could you tell me anything about her?

Obaid: I know her very well. She lived with me in the same building, but I forgot her name right now. I’ll have to remember it. I’ll remember it and I will tell you.

Lloyd: Let’s go to the back.

Question 5: Thoraya, you are one of the most courageous voices in this entire area, and I think we know that the polarization around reproductive health rights has effects that go far beyond in preventing faith communities and development communities from working together on issues for women. I would be interested in your sense of the trend. Do you think that some of the poison is coming out of the debates? You gave the example of Honduras, of practical agreements at field level, but can you give us any other inspiring examples?

Obaid: Well, I agree with you that there is lots of poison sometimes, and it shouldn’t be, actually. In the sense that, if we accept that we all have mandates and different mandates, whether they are spiritual mandates or earthly mandates, that we should be able to implement them. Well, whether… maybe a gathering like that I wouldn’t have dreamed of it seven years ago.

So there is more and more opening of faith-based organizations to understand what it is for me to come to a Cathedral and talk about reproductive health is really… we have moved together quite a bit. There are still pockets of anger and resistance maybe. I do receive letters that are not very nice from time to time. But we believe that we are coming a long way.

I think part of the issue is that we, as nonreligious institutions, have kind of ignored the faith base for a long time. We kind of stigmatized them as being conservative: they are Godly, forget about them. And they have stigmatized us, too, as being ungodly, and we are doing things against God. And I think what’s happening now is all this dialogue is where we’re trying to find a common humanity between us to get together and find ways to work together.

You know, for us to realize that, in many countries, faith-based organization provides up to seventy percent of the health and educational services. So if, at the community level, these faith-based organizations are providing health services to the community, if it doesn’t include reproductive health to protect women through the life cycle, it will not be sufficient, and it’s not addressing the issues. So maybe the faith-based are beginning to realize slowly that the agenda is much bigger than what they thought, and we are trying… beginning to discover that faith-based people are also trying, you know, to understand us and find a way to work with us.

But as I said, the most important thing for us is to agree to disagree on certain issues, but let us work on issues separately, and not keep, if you want to say, the anger and the anguish and the war between some groups going on. I hope that this kind of dialogue would lower that resistance.

I know when I first started this program seven years ago, I had almost a rebellion inside my own organization. People stereotyped me as coming from Saudi Arabia, therefore, conservative. They didn’t know me then. And so there was lots of resistance in-house. I usually manage democratically, but this was I can see maybe this is the only organization… I mean the only decision that I had made undemocratically. I said, we’re just going to do it. And we established a program called Gender, Culture, and Human Rights, because culture and human rights clash or seem to clash around gender. That’s where it’s most obvious. So I agree with you. I hope this thing will go away, and that this initiative by the Cathedral and by the whole summit will open a way to find common areas of working together and respecting each other’s individuality.

Question 6: Good morning. I too am a product of Presbyterian education in Egypt, so…

Obaid: Maybe we went to the same school!

Question 6: Yeah, my question is in regard to HIV-AIDS and adolescence—a key vulnerable population in terms of their access to… or their acquirement of the epidemic and also as a way out. They represent an opportunity of the way out. However, one of the key challenges in working with… for adolescents rather in government, especially in developing countries where there are competing problems in terms of poverty, economic issues and otherwise, that tend governments to relax about adolescents, about the seriousness of the epidemic that’s being fueled. Examples are in transitional countries in Central Asia and the Middle East as so forth. So what is a compelling argument, if you will, or a key leading role that UNFPA is playing to convince governments and policy makers about the issue?

Obaid: Well, the most important thing, when we talk to governments about young people, you know, in developing countries, young people is about sixty percent of the population. It’s a very youthful population, and so part of the argument is the demographics. Is to tell them, look, if this your workforce… your future workforce… and if this force is going to have HIV, like what’s happening in some African countries, where the working-age population is going away, then we should start by prevention and not wait for it to come.

The argument for prevention is very important. The hesitancy of governments to go into this area is basically a cultural and religious hesitancy. Can they work with young people without the mufti making a statement against them or the priest making a statement against them? The other one, of course, is the fact that they have to deal with parents and the whole idea that, how can they promote the ABCs, especially the B and the C—be faithful and condom use—among young people in a culture that is very conservative or closed.

So this needs lots of work, and that’s where the NGOs play a very important role. They are at the community level, they can work on that. We have developed a peer-to-peer education. Young people talking to young people and educating them. And I keep telling my colleagues what we need to also establish is parent-to-parent education. So that they also… those parents who are aware, can educate the ones who are not aware. And so also that we do not create a gap between young people and their parents. We need them all to be on the same page so that they understand each other.

So working with NGOs of the community to help change and bring about behavioral change at the same time provide evidence to the government of the calamity, examples from Africa, of where HIV has hit so bad, is a very important thing.

Lloyd: Two more questions will probably be about it. So let’s go to the back.

Question 7: Thank you. We know that the incidence of HIV transmission without condom use is a big factor in Africa for sure. Our benighted government has denied United States distributing condoms. This was one of Bush’s first decisions. What is… do you do anything to increase distribution of condoms to the people who can’t afford them and thus saving health of women?

Obaid: Well, let’s be a little bit more accurate. Well, let me tell you something. The figures say that in Africa there are a maximum of five condoms per man per year. So you can see how serious the situation is. Certainly it is not only us, but also with other partners, responding to HIV includes the provision of condoms. We have a program called Reproductive Health Commodity Security, which we work with governments to study the needs and demands of the governments and be able to help to support some of it, and not all of it is sold. Lots of it is given for free to clinics and so on. So there is work done on that, but it’s never sufficient, and so there are many of us and governments—donor governments as well as NGOs—who provide condoms as well. But it’s a big gap and it’s a gap we’re trying—all of us—to fill.

Lloyd: Final question.

Question 8: I lived in Saudi Arabia for 38 years and it fills my heart with hope to hear you speaking here today so beautifully. But I wanted to ask you, and I don’t know if you address this problem, but the terrible prevalence of rape against women as a weapon in war.

Obaid: Well, yes… Well, I’m glad you lived in Saudi Arabia. It’s a country that has its own contradictions. It’s trying to deal with these contradictions and we hope that we will succeed.

In terms of rape, yes, there is a huge initiative of UN as well as NGOs working together on issues of rape as an arm actually… a way to fight the enemy. You know that already there is a decision that rape is considered a crime and therefore punishable. The problem is not there. The laws are in place. The problem is how do you catch these people, and so the whole issue of impunity is a very serious issue.

So lots of the work that takes place regretfully is aftermath. You know, we prepare health workers, military, etc., etc., to deal with the issue after it happens. There is quite a bit going on in trying to, for example, in the inter-Asian standing committee on humanitarian response, which includes NGOs, Red Cross, UN, etc. We have clusters and, for example, under the cluster of shelter—how can a shelter be, a camp, be organized to be safe for women so they don’t walk and get raped while they are walking. Things like being able to bring in burner[s], you know, to cook rather than have women collect wood and get raped on the way.

But rape in war itself, to prevent it is still one of the shameful things that all of us carry on our conscience in the 21st century. It will take a long time. We work with the Blue Berets to educate them before they go, but the problem is the warring factions, and to educate the warring factions on this is… we have not found a way yet on that.

Lloyd: We’ll have to stop at this point. We hope you’ll come back next week, when we continue to explore, addressing some of the volatile places in the world. Next week we have with us Walter Isaacson, former CEO of CNN, editor of Time magazine, and currently president of the Aspen Institute, who has undertaken something called the U.S.–Palestinian Partnership, looking to expand the rights and opportunities for the Palestinian people. So come join us for that next week.

For now, Dr. Obaid has agreed to stop by coffee hour taking place in the west end of the Cathedral and just to the left. She’ll be there for a few minutes.

And we hope you will join us for the worship service today, which is part of the Breakthrough Summit itself. And by all means be here with us at 2:30 today when the Breakthrough Summit officially begins. Please join me in thanking our wonderful guest, Dr. Obaid.

Obaid: Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure. (applause)