the home and blames it on the fact that they spend long hours doing jobs they are not paid for whether they want to do it or not. I found this on gatesnotes.com in a post titled 'if you could have one super power what would it be?' by Bill and Melinda Gates while surfing the internet and it made lotsa sense which is why i've brought it here to share with y'all. Bill talks about how provision of cheap and clean electricity would help make education and life in general easy for those who still live in the interior parts of third world countries while Melinda talks about how innovation can pull the girl child out of unnecessary unpaid labor into gaining reading abilities. Below is an excerpt of their article
MORE ENERGY
by Bill
At some point today, you’ll probably do one or all of these things: Flip a switch for light. Take fresh food from a refrigerator. Turn a dial to make your home warmer or cooler. Press a button on your laptop to go online.
You probably won’t think twice about any of these actions, but you will actually be doing something extraordinary. You will be using a superpower—your access to energy.
Does that sound ridiculous?
Just imagine, for a minute, life without energy.
You don’t have a way to run a laptop, mobile phone, TV, or video games. You don’t have lights, heat, air conditioning, or even the Internet to read this letter.
About 1.3 billion people—18 percent of the world’s population—don’t need to imagine. That’s what life is like for them every day.
You can see this fact for yourself in this photograph of Africa at night taken from space.
Africa has made extraordinary progress in recent decades. It is one of the fastest-growing regions of the world with modern cities, hundreds of millions of mobile phone users, growing Internet access, and a vibrant middle class.
But as you can see from the areas without lights, that prosperity has not reached everyone. In fact, of the nearly one billion people in sub-Saharan Africa, 7 out of every 10 of them live in the dark, without electricity. The majority of them live in rural areas. You would see the same problem in Asia. In India alone, more than 300 million people don’t have electricity.
If you could zoom into one of those dark areas in that photograph, you might see a scene like this one. This is a student doing her homework by candlelight.
I’m sorry to say this, but if you think that, you’re wrong. Unless things change, girls today will spend hundreds of thousands more hours than boys doing unpaid work simply because society assumes it’s their responsibility.
Unpaid work is what it says it is: It’s work, not play, and you don’t get any money for doing it. But every society needs it to function. You can think of unpaid work as falling into three main categories: cooking, cleaning, and caring for children and the elderly. Who packs your lunch? Who fishes the sweaty socks out of your gym bag? Who hassles the nursing home to make sure your grandparents are getting what they need?
Now, this work has to be done by somebody. But it’s overwhelmingly women who are expected to do it, for free, whether they want to or not.
This holds true in every single country in the world. Globally, women spend an average of 4.5 hours a day on unpaid work. Men spend less than half that much time. But the fact is that the burden of unpaid work falls heaviest on women in poor countries, where the hours are longer and the gap between women and men is wider. In India, to take one example, women spend about 6 hours, and men spend less than 1 hour.
Most girls in poor countries don’t have a triangle kitchen. Instead, they move in long, straight lines, back and forth, because they have to walk miles to fetch water and chop wood. The geometry of their footsteps is different, but it’s still based on the assumption that keeping the household running is their responsibility. The massive number of hours these girls spend on these tasks distorts their entire lives. It’s almost impossible for those of us lucky enough to live in rich countries to understand how unpaid work dominates the lives of hundreds of millions of women and girls.
Culled from the article 'two super powers we wish we had' by Bill and Melinda Gates.
What's your take on this? Visit www.gatesnotes.com to read complete article.
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