Convention Day 2 – Women & Children First!

Many of the programs of Rotary are focussed, either by design or by inevitability, on improving the lot of children and more prominently women. Whether we are providing safe water or helping with literacy programmes these inevitably tend to beaimed at children as the most vulnerable and on women as the driving force for improvement in communities.

Our day started with breakfast with our RIBI (Rotary in Britain and Ireland) colleagues. Our talk from past Rotary International Bill Boyd drew together the multiple impacts that education can have; raising the hopes of slum children so they can have a better life; the importance of the education of girls & women – more educated mothers have lower incidence of HIV/AIDS, fewer and more healthy children. And yet in the countries at the lower end of the economic scale education rates amongst children of secondary school age is below 30%, with girls below 20% or lower.

The day’s plenary sessions continued the theme – with Fr “Rocky” Evangelista focussed on his work with street children of Manila and Marie-Irene Richmond-Ahoua presenting an award for Rotary’s work in immunising the children of West Africa against polio. Fulbright & Rotary Peace scholar Marios Antoninou set out the role of education in reducing the perpetuation of past conflicts in the minds of today’s children. And finally, award-winning author Greg Mortenson spoke of his work with Afghan villages in building education as a “weapon of peace” Partly as a result of his work, there are 10 times as many Afghan children in education now compared with 10 years ago, although there remains much to be done.

With all this talk of the importance of women in building healthy communities it is shocking to find that Rotary has only one female Director this year and none next year. Seems like something needs to change!

On a lighter note we finished the day off with dinner at Bonaparte in Vieux Montreal (fabulous food – you must go there!) in the company of Irish expatriate John McGuinness, an ex-colleague from the early/mid-90’s at Deloitte where we set about building the consulting practices of the emerging former Soviet-bloc economies. Great company as ever - gift of the gab now available in 7 languages