© Carl De Souza | AFP/Getty Images
For once the experience of the African women who have refused to die for Africa and are living for Africa cannot be ignored. WAHU KAARA
Wahu Kaara
The Life Economy
the experience of the African women who have refused to die for Africa and are living for Africa cannot be ignored. We are ushering in a critical mass of new economies filled with life.
Her Vision
WAHU KAARA is a renowned expert on debt, aid, privatization, and
Today, I see Atieno, a single mother of three who works in one of the corporate multinational flower farms that dot and pollute Kenya’s Lake Naivasha. She lives with her children in a shared single room divided by a curtain. She has no idea of what “Valentines Day” is, yet she works close to 12 hours a day and earns a meager pay to satisfy the emotional passions of the West. But with all this gloom, she has a radiant smile and is full of generosity. Through the local self-organized women’s group of workers, she has hope for a better future for her children. My future economic vision is imprinted by the resilience of Atieno. It is in the likeness of a woman’s face, voice, and control. A living economy founded on a vision of equity and justice that is satisfying and fulfilling, based on access to the goods of life for all. Despite dispossession and powerlessness, Atieno is finding a way to transform power through creative and innovative alternatives. The women of her collective are forging community, participatory democracy, and mobilizing their collective resources. Their strategies for allocations of support are fundamentally based on meeting needs, not wants—and this is happening across numerous small women’s groups in Africa already.
human rights, and the Executive Director of the Kenya Debt Relief Network. With Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, she launched the Global Call to Action Against Poverty, the single largest global mobilization of citizens against poverty in history.
RESOURCECENTER Visit the following sites to learn more about our contributors and their projects. Center for Partnership Studies | partnershipway.org International Society for Ecology and Culture | isec.org.uk The Gift Economy | gift-economy.com Portfolio 21 | portfolio21.com
How We Get There We are in an historical moment in time to construct a blueprint for a life economy. It is time to replace our current dysfunctional economic blueprint of domination, control, and profit. In order to get there we need to strengthen and sharpen linkages between agents of transformation who are organizing and mobilizing social movements. We must bring critical visibility to demonstrate the alternatives based on living economies that are already a reality—especially the examples from those who are dispossessed but still holding their lives together. For once
38 | worldpulse.com
Global Call to Action Against Poverty | whiteband.org CPS’s Full Spectrum Economy Campaign partnershipway.org/caring-economics To learn more about gender budgeting (see next page) visit UNIFEM’s gender responsive budgeting site | gender-budgets.org WEB EXCLUSIVE! View this article online to read more economic visions from thought-leaders Jacqueline Novogratz and Hazel Henderson.