"The Women's Crusade"

"The world is waking up to a powerful truth: women and girls aren't the problem; they're the solution," writes NY Times colunnist Nicholas Kristof and his wife (a former Times correspondent), Sheryl WuDunn. With women and girls lie the most direct and even cost-effective solutions to poverty, fundamentalism, and extremism around the world.

I'm just catching up with a story from last Sunday's Times, an excerpt from a book by WuDunn and Kristof to be published next month. The book is called Half the Sky, an allusion to a Chinese proverb: "Women hold up half the sky."

There's a brief but powerful, inspiring audio slide show available through the NY Times website. Here's a link to it. I promise you--though the subject matter is hard, these stories are success stories, full of hope, that remind me of the power of micro-loans to women (and a few good men, for sure) in developing countries. If you want to read the whole article, here's a link to that: "The Women's Crusade."