Education in Muslim world

WHY should the subject “education in the Muslim World” be different from simply education in developing countries? What is it that warrants the problem of education in the world of Islam a separate treatment? Why fresh money from western donors has begun to support reform of the educational systems in the Muslim world? The United States in particular is poised to commit a significant amount of assistance for this purpose.

It has indicated its willingness to provide $100 million in grant to Pakistan to reform its system of education. During a three-hour visit by US President George W. Bush to the island of Bali on October 21, he promised to provide $250 million to improve the quality of education in the schools run by the public sector as well as those managed by Islamic charities. Bali was the scene of a terrorist attack in October 2002 in which more than two hundred people were killed.

It is significant that the U.S. announcement for assistance to Indonesia was made in the meeting President Bush held with a group of moderate Muslim leaders of that country. Washington, in other words, was making an explicit connection between its declared war on international terrorism and the quality of education being provided by the schooling systems in the Muslim world. Is it correct to make this connection especially when it was recognized many months ago that the nineteen hijackers who flew planes into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 were not the products of the madressah system of education? Most were educated in the West and most belonged to the upper strata of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the countries from which they came.

Nonetheless, I believe it is legitimate to address the subject of educating the Muslim populations not as a part of the problem confronted by the rest of the developing world.

There are significant differences in the way education has been handled by Muslim countries and there are also significant differences in the results that have been achieved. I will take up these two issues in turn; first, the approach to education in the Muslim world and, second, the outcome of that approach.

There are three things that stand out which are different from the way in which the Muslim state and society has educated its citizenry.

One, there is a much closer association between religion and teaching in general in most Muslim countries. Even in the system such as that in Pakistan which was built upon the approach the British had adopted in developing education through the public sector, Islamiyat — the study of Islam — was introduced as a compulsory part of the curriculum in the seventies and the eighties.

This was done by the state in order to placate a small but influential segment of society. This concession may have won the leaders of the day some political returns but it resulted in seriously distorting the curriculum taught in public schools.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with teaching religion in schools. It is done in thousands of parochial institutions in the West, in particular in the United States. What is important is to ensure that instruction in religion does not give a message that conflicts with the teaching of science and other modern subjects. This separation has to be made explicitly and deliberately. Unfortunately this has not happened in Pakistan.

Two, in most of the Muslim world non-government organizations — in particular the charities funded by Islamic societies — have traditionally played a significant role in providing education. This is the origin of the madressah as an educational institution and its advent goes back many decades. The curricula followed by the madressahs reflect the objectives of the sources of the funds they receive. In more recent times many madressahs were established with support from Saudi Arabia to teach Islam along Wahabi lines. This was done to the neglect of other subjects that are vital for training and educating people so that they can operate in the modern economy and become members of a global economic and social system.

Three, female education receives much lower priority in Muslim countries in large part because of the way the Islamic faith has been interpreted by many influential scholars over the last several decades. This is particularly problematic since economists have recognized for sometime now that of the many determinants of economic growth and social change, none is more important than the education of women. Societies that neglect female education are condemning themselves to eternal backwardness.

What have been the major outcomes of these approaches to education? One way of answering this question is to look at the several measures of education — in particular adult literacy rates, youth literacy rates, the rates of participation at various levels of schooling, the expected years of schooling, and the amount of public sector expenditure on education in the Muslim world. In order to draw some important conclusions it will be useful to compare the situation in Muslim and non-Muslim countries.

Before providing a whole set of numbers, it is interesting — and distressing — to note that the statistics from the Muslim world about the various aspects of education are not as good as those from the non-Muslim world. This is an indication of the relatively low priority given to education by the Muslim societies, including the governments of these countries.

Even when information is available, its coverage is poor and the data are not very reliable. One thing the governments can do is to improve the data base without which good and effective policies cannot be developed and implemented. But this is not the subject of today’s article. Today I want to focus on the state of education in the Muslim world. Let us now look at some data.

Adult illiteracy rates are still very high in Muslim countries — 50 per cent for males in Bangladesh, 42 per cent in Pakistan, 33 per cent in Egypt compared with 31 per cent in India, 13 per cent in Brazil and only 5 per cent in the Philippines. What is even more troubling is that adult female illiteracy rates are considerably greater than that for males.

The ratio is very high for Saudi Arabia. For every illiterate male adult there are two illiterate females in that country. The ratios for Pakistan and Bangladesh are 1.7 and 1.4 respectively.

While youth illiteracy rates — youth being defined as people between the ages of 15 and 24 — are considerably lower than adult illiteracy rates, they are still higher in the Muslim world than in non-Muslim countries. A fairly significant difference between adult and youth illiteracy rates is a good indication of progress and this is noticeable in many Muslim societies.

In Bangladesh, 43 per cent of male youth is illiterate while the proportion for Pakistan is 20 per cent. The comparable figures for India, Brazil and the Philippines are 20, six and one per cent. What is worrying, however, is the ratio between female and male youth illiteracy — the ratio for Pakistan is more than two, in Bangladesh it is 1.4. For Pakistan, for every illiterate male youth there are two young females who are not literate.

Improvement in youth literacy is largely the outcome of increased participation by various age groups in education. Of the eight large Muslim countries, four — Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia and Turkey — have achieved universal primary education with participation rates of 100 per cent or more.

A rate of more than 100 per cent implies that the country is catching up with what was neglected in the past; that the students are attending school even though they have passed the age group for that particular level of education.

The fact that Indonesia has a participation rate of 110 per cent for primary schools means that ten per cent of the students at this level are older than the relevant age group. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran are three countries that have participation rates of well below 100 per cent which means that they continue to add to the pool of illiterates. The primary enrolment rates for these countries are 68, 77 and 86 per cent, respectively. This relatively poor performance is the result of low enrolment rates for girls.

The available date on expected years of schooling in the Muslim world is very spotty. In the World Development Indicators published by the World Bank, there are no entries for Pakistan. But there is information for Bangladesh according to which the expected years of schooling for both boys and girls is now eight years, while it is 12 years for Malaysia. It is interesting and encouraging that for Bangladesh girls have caught up with boys; in their case the time they can expect to spend in school has doubled from four to eight years over the last one decade.

Since this was also the period when Bangladesh saw an explosion in the output of its garment industry, and since this industry employs a large number of young women, a connection can be made between the demand for education and the prospect for finding well paying jobs. Since the labour participation rates for women in Pakistan is still very low, families don’t have the incentive to send their girls to school or to keep them there for a reasonable period of time.

Although participation rates at the primary level have improved considerably, there is evidence that in the Muslim world quality of education provided remains poor. With the increasing importance of madressah education in some of the Muslim countries, particularly in Pakistan, these ratios don’t indicate that the educational system is producing students who would, over time, be able to play a meaningful role in economic development and modernization.

Noticeable improvements in participation rates at various levels of education and a considerable decline in youth illiteracy were achieved as a result of increase in inputs into the educational system, the consequence of a significant commitment of public sector expenditure in education. Malaysia and Iran are two large Muslim countries that have made education a high public sector priority. In 2000, the latest year for which statistics are available, nearly 27 per cent of the government’s budget was spent on education in Malaysia. The proportion for Iran was a bit more than 20 per cent. In this respect two Muslim countries have done very poorly. In Egypt only 8 per cent of total public sector expenditure was committed to education. In Pakistan the share was even lower — only 7.8 per cent.

With the donor community — in particular the United States but also institutions such as the World Bank — providing more money for education we will probably see some improvement in the flow of public funds into education. What should be done with this new money? I will return to this subject next week.

Another myth of free trade: Comparative advantage

THERE is a popular perception that Pakistan’s comparative advantage lies in agriculture. It usually follows that the only way we can develop is by adding value to our agricultural production. Thus, fruit juices should be packaged, and cotton turned into garments. Such arguments, while partially true, can be dangerously misleading for two reasons.

First, these perpetuate the myth of comparative advantage or the benefits of specialization, thereby consigning us to the fate of other underdeveloped countries rather than that of the developed ones. Secondly, these present a highly limited and flawed view of ‘value-addition’ as a development strategy.

In this article, I will argue that Pakistan’s salvation is only possible if we throw existing understandings of comparative advantage out of the window as soon as possible, and embrace a more strategic view of the journey ahead.

The theory of comparative advantage is perhaps the most important concept in international trade theory. The WTO refers to it as “..arguably the single most powerful insight in economics.” Very simply, it suggests that a country should focus on producing whichever good has the lowest opportunity cost in comparison to its trading partners. The opportunity cost of the production of a good (say cloth) is defined as the amount of another good (say sugar) that must be given up in order to produce one more unit of cloth.

Thus, if Britain and Pakistan trade in two commodities, cloth and sugar, even if Britain is more productive in both (i.e., it has an absolute advantage in both), it should focus only on the commodity in which it is ‘most best.’ Thus, if it is twice as productive as Pakistan in cloth and three times as much in sugar, it should specialize in sugar. This way, the theory suggests, if the terms of trade are appropriate, both countries will end up having more of each good than if they were both to produce both goods.

It should be obvious that the theory, if put into practice by an underdeveloped country, will seek to make its economy reliant on a single, or a handful of commodities. If the price of one of these commodities takes a beating, the entire country will suffer because of it.

However, more critical is the fact that if we relax some of the assumptions underlying the theory, it completely collapses. The theory of comparative advantage is based on the following five assumptions (which apply to any one country in question): there is no government; the ‘gainers’ from trade compensate the ‘losers’; wages are equal throughout the country’s industry; capital and labour are internationally immobile; and there is no trade deficit.

Let us take just one of these: the immobility of capital and labour. It is evident that if capital were to be mobile, it would be invested in the country, which enjoys higher productivity levels. Only if capital is not allowed to flee a country will it be invested in an industry within that country. In terms of the two-country, two-goods example given earlier, if capital is mobile it will most likely move to the clothing and sugar sectors in Britain which are both more productive.

Thus, Pakistan will lose out because capital investment has no ‘national loyalty’ and will seek the most advantageous position no matter where it is. Thus, both in theory and practice the effect of global capital mobility is to nullify the Ricardian doctrine of comparative advantage. Yet we see that the strongest advocates of development according to comparative advantage are also the staunchest supporters of free capital flows.

The fact is that those touting the theory of comparative advantage, and thus recommending that developing countries specialize in the production of commodities where they have a comparative advantage are sending us to our deaths. They tell us that through trade everyone will benefit, but forget to mention that this will only happen if the terms of trade are fair, or that the gains need to be widely redistributed.

The terms of trade are highly unlikely to be fair when the two goods in question are coffee and F-16s. Similarly, the assumption that the gains will be redistributed is akin to saying if your next-door neighbour wins the lottery, everyone on the block will get richer. Instead of getting richer, the underdeveloped countries have only become poorer, while the wealthy have become more prosperous.

Developing countries like Pakistan should ignore the advice of western economists promoting the theory of comparative advantage, as Japan did when told that its comparative advantage did not lie in heavy industry since it lacked important raw materials like coal and iron. Japanese planners wisely ignored this advice and continued with their broad-based industrialization strategy. The United States is an even bigger example of a country which refused to listen to pro-comparative advantage as suggested by the British economists. Instead, the US chose common sense.

The reason developed countries have an absolute advantage at everything compared with us is not because they went the way of specialization. In fact it is exactly the opposite. Developed countries were successful because they industrialized broadly. Thus, rather than specializing in the growth of agricultural commodities, they developed capabilities in the mechanization of agriculture. This is why Holland has an absolute advantage over us in agriculture.

Similarly, instead of developing their industries based on the raw material that they possessed, they sought to make their trading partners sources of raw material while undertaking more complex value adding tasks themselves. The competitive advantage of their firms in production as well as marketing outweighs any advantage that the developing countries can give their firms through cheap labour and land.

The fact of the matter is that developed countries do not even think in terms of comparative advantage. They think in terms of value. Specifically, what link in the value chain in any industry should they be dominating? Should they be making semiconductors or keyboards? Naturally, in order to make semiconductors one needs not only high quality engineering universities, but also massive highly advanced infrastructure.

Strategies based on comparative advantage are unreliable. Specialization is extremely risky without a broad based technological infrastructure to sustain your advantage. Take, for instance, the Dutch flower industry, whose members collectively dominate the $ 40 billion (in 1995) world flower market. This is despite the fact that the Netherlands has extremely expensive labour and land, apart from a limited supply of irrigation water. The reason for their dominance is their ability to set up the most advanced research institutes specializing in flowers, highly developed transportation and storage facilities as well as a state-of-the-art auctioning infrastructure. Thus, despite having major factor weaknesses in flower production, their technological development has enabled them to capture most of the value in this trade.

Capturing value in agriculture, textiles or any other industry requires development on several fronts. To begin with, it requires a highly developed public infrastructure as well as specialized institutions of research and development. It also requires a highly trained labour force and above all a sophisticated domestic market. Scientific knowledge only moves forward when its base is broad enough. In order to make any technological breakthrough in medical diagnostic equipment for instance, one may require robust research not only in medicine but also knowledge of electronics, optics and chemistry.

The Dutch were able to recapture value in the flower industry not because they knew the most about flowers but because they had the technological capability to develop highly complex electronic infrastructure for the trading of flowers.

Free capital flows make comparative advantages redundant. The theory is merely another myth propagated by free trade economists. The governments which suggest they are following a development strategy based on their country’s comparative advantage are merely putting a positive spin on their failings. In the 21st century, any country relying on agricultural commodities has failed to develop, and will not come out of its underdeveloped state until its policy makers realize that development has to have a broad foundation, not a specialized, narrow one.

The writer is assistant professor of strategy and policy at the University of Cambridge, UK

Private grief, public outrage

ABOUT three weeks ago, A. B. S. Jafri sent me a copy of his latest book ‘Diary of a Wicked War‘. The inscription was simple: “To O. K. Affectionately A. B. S.” It was typical, a short-hand way of saying much without using too many words.

A. B. S. was a close friend of mine. I respected him as a journalist, admired his independence and valued his advice, which he gave generously but only when asked for it. He was not intrusive. He was my well-wisher, not only to my face but behind my back. He and I were both of the same age and, therefore, of the same generation, a generation of high hopes that saw these hopes dashed as “ignorant armies clashed by night”.

He may have been an angry young man once but he had mellowed, still unbending but finding accommodation by taming his combative pen. He followed the path of gentle persuasion without compromising what he devoutly believed.

A. B. S. had lung-cancer and he had all but lost his voice and he spoke in whispers. He never considered this to be a disability and he was articulate. Most of all he was cheerful, there was not an ounce of self-pity in him. My association with him was a long one, going back to the 1950’s when I. H. Burney had first brought him to our Friday Night at Air Cottage.

As I remember, he and I had argued about something or the other and the late M. B. Khalid (Pista) who was our own version of an Irishman, had joined the argument but this is what Friday Night was all about and later we all went to the Skyroom at the airport to reinvigorate our spirits, the argument forgotten and a friendship established.

The friendship endured and it turned to affection sustaining us through strife-torn times. A. B. S. had a quality of goodness, that unique something that impoverishes the world with his passing away and makes us lonelier. I was devastated to learn of his death. I will miss him. The grief we show at the death of relatives is of a different kind than the grief we show at the death of friends. One is emotional and is a shared grief.

The other is a more personal sorrow. To A. B. S’s family I can only offer my heartfelt sympathies. To his many friends the consolation that, at least, he lived is life on his own honourable terms. No more making hard choices between what is convenient and what is principled.

And now from the sublime to the go-blimey, the visit of President Bush to Britain. In hard monetary terms a cool five million pounds was spent on security. London was turned into a fortress. Is the war on terror being won when the world’s most powerful man and the commander-in-chief of the world’s invincible military machine has to ride in an armour-plated, bullet-proof Cadillac to get from the backdoor of Buckingham Palace to its front? And this, not in some Third World country but in Great Britain. So tight was the security that George Bush seemed to have been made a prisoner in some gilded cage.

I do not for a moment suggest that the precautions were not necessary but this was a state visit and the head of state should, at least, have been given an opportunity to wave at some crowd to establish some kind of rapport even if the crowd had been rented. In our neck of the woods, we ‘Shanghai’ school children to line the streets and break into cheering on cue. We call this a spontaneous reception. But George Bush can truthfully claim that he went to London to meet the Queen like the pussy-cat in the nursery rhyme.

Will this state visit play well in the United States? It will. JFK’s Camelot was the nearest thing the Americans had to royalty and his swearing-in as president was like a coronation. But some business was transacted between him and Tony Blair, the contents being drowned out in a flood of earnest platitudes and mutual admiration.

George Bush gave a speech at the Banqueting House to a selected audience. He spoke of shared values and he soared into the clouds with his “ the United States and Great Britain share a mission in the world beyond the balance of power or the simple pursuit of interest. We seek the advance of freedom and peace that freedom brings,” he said to applause from the hand-picked audience.

At just about the time that he was extolling the “alliance of values,” Major General Charles Swannack was telling a press conference in Iraq: “Now it’s no holds barred. We use whatever weapons that are necessary to take the fight to the enemy,” He said something about using a sledge-hammer to crush a walnut.

He sounded very belligerent and very John Wayne as air support was called in against targets, as empty warehouses were hit and howitzers, helicopter-borne Hellfire missiles, mortar and tank fire were used to flush out the ‘thugs’ a word used to describe those who were putting up resistance against the occupation of Iraq.

This would suggest that we are a long way off from making Iraq a Garden of Eden of democracy in the Middle East. Crushing walnuts with a sledgehammer is hardly a recipe for bringing liberty to a people. Nor is Guantanamo a reassuring example of a rule of law and justice.

The 9/11, Bali, Riyadh and now Istanbul. These were barbaric acts and deserved to be condemned outright. The answer, however, is not more military force. The answer is in getting at the roots of terrorism. George Bush said in London that terrorists hate freedom. Not all of them.

It depends on one’s definition of terrorism. The British considered George Washington a terrorist, a fact that was not mentioned in the speeches during George Bush’s visit. Nelson Mandela too stayed at Buckingham Palace after he left his earlier residence at Roben’s Island.

The war on terror will not be won if we insist on comparing apples with oranges and find no difference.

There is no honour in killing

“The government of Pakistan vigorously condemns the practice of so-called honour killings. Such acts do not find a place in our religion or law. Killing in the name of honour is murder and will be treated as such.” — General Pervez Musharraf, April 2000

IT IS still early and dawn has not yet broken over the horizon in this part of California where I come to seek solace and comfort after restless days in my beloved country. The shrill ringing of the phone wakes me up, and I, dreading such midnight calls, hesitate to answer. Who is it this time who has bowed out of this race called life? Whose passing must I mourn now?

The voice at the other end of static tells me that the young girl who was being sheltered in a friend’s home was found dead, apparently murdered by her paternal grandfather and maternal uncle. Taken away by the men folk in her family who were enraged at her act of refusing a cousin’s hand in marriage, this young woman was first rendered unconscious through the administration of a drug, then electrocuted. When her dead body was examined, it was discovered that her legs had been broken, possibly to ensure that even in death she could not have gotten away with the crime of defiance.

What was this young woman’s crime other than defying the very system which incarcerated her, keeping her poor and ignorant family insisting that she must never consider herself to be an equal, a fully developed human being with dreams and aspirations and the potential to achieve a productive life? What dynamics coerced her to seek refuge in the home of a person she had never met, but who extended his help as a benefactor, an enlightened man who now regrets having letting her go?

What forces compelled the men in her family to seek her out, exacting vengeance for her defiance with such brutality, such unrelenting wrath? What causes women to pay for freedom from oppression with their lives, and what causes men to take those lives away? What is this system which allows such killings to go unpunished and who are those people who justify such murders in the name of honour?

Several years ago another young girl was murdered in the office of her lawyer while seeking a divorce from her abusive husband. Her killer was accompanied by her mother, who stood by calmly as the bullet was fired at point blank range at her. Her father, a significant member of his social class and his business community, received assurance that the girl was, indeed, dead, and proceeded to return to his hometown, confident that he will never be punished for the deed of murdering his own daughter.

His confidence, like that of thousands of other killing men who go unpunished and free, was predicated on the convolutions of the law of Compensation under Qisas and Diyat which allow men who murder the women of their families to walk free in lieu of a compromise effected between the two parties concerned.

In the case of murders committed in the name of honour, the concerned parties are usually the family of the murderer and of the murdered person, so a compromise is effected between the killer, the colluders, and those convinced of the rightness of the act. No one speaks for the dead women, their voices have been silenced forever, and their bodies buried in unmarked graves. No one questions the validity of the act of murder in a land where honour is vested in the body of a woman, not in the minds of honourable men.

In the year 2002, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) found that a woman was raped every two hours, and that thousands of women were victims of “honour” killings, domestic violence, burnings and murder. In most cases, murders of this nature are not reported, nor investigated. The murder of a woman is considered to be as insignificant as the death of a cow or any other animal. Women are dispensable commodities, to be bought and sold, used and abused, done away with when they transgress the parameters of morality which are usually much more flexible for the men who created that paradigm in the first place.

Four years ago General Pervez Musharraf committed himself and the state to the abolition of crimes against women, particularly murders committed in the name of honour. But that commitment still remains unfulfilled. Even one year after its induction, the parliament has not discussed the issue or passed a law making honour killing a capital offence.

Perhaps what will make the general sit up and reconsider his scheme of things is the glaring defiance of his wishes in the form of the resistance being put up by the Men in Boski to the resolution on honour killings which has time and again been shot down by today’s so-called democrats, yesterday’s demigods — denizens of fiefdoms where patriarchy rules supreme.

I reproduce in part an e-mail sent by MNA Ms. Fauzia Wahab who describes the infamous proceedings of the day when the speaker of the National Assembly made us proud of being patriarchs in an era of democracy:

A member of the treasury benches moved a resolution in the National Assembly against “Karo-Kari” (honour killing) on November 10, 2003, which incidentally happened to be the penultimate day of the parliamentary year. It was placed on number twelve in the list of agenda of the day’s business. Gauging the sensitivity of the issue, the member had personally ensured that his resolution was placed before the house for discussion.

On the given date, items of the house business were called out one after another, but before resolution No 12 was about to be called, the speaker bypassed No 12 and took up some irrelevant call-attention notice. At first the member thought that this must be an inadvertent mistake and duly reminded the speaker of the schedule. The speaker ignored him. He protested, but his pleading fell on deaf ears and his voice was quashed...

After the session, the member was called in the chamber of the speaker, where he found to his surprise other members of the treasury benches... Without mincing words, they bluntly told him to take back the resolution and asked him not to take up this issue again. They told him that they were first and foremost Pathans ... that they were here to safeguard their traditions and customs and would not allow anybody to disturb “their centuries-old customs.”

Patriarchy persists where there is limited industrialization and may be legislated by the state. It persists in a family and social systems in which male rule have power over women and children derived from the social role of fatherhood, and is supported by a political economy in which the family unit retains a significant productive role, and where women future, play basically a reproductive role.

Whereas most of Asia has experienced considerable fertility decline in recent decades — an outcome of increased female education and employment — a handful of countries, including Pakistan, stand out for their lack of significant fertility change. Demographic facts about such societies suggest “a culture against women,” in which women are conditioned to sacrificing their health, survival chances and life options.

Pakistan belongs to a part of the world where woman’s status is disadvantaged by systemic injustice. Human development indicators such as sex ratio, literacy levels, educational attainment and labour force participation are abysmally low while the statistics for maternal mortality and morbidity, fertility and crimes against women are extremely high.

In Pakistan, patriarchal forms of control over women include the institutionalization of extremely restrictive codes of behaviour for women, a practice of rigid gender segregation, specific forms of family and kinship, and a powerful ideology linking family honour to female virtue. Men are entrusted with safeguarding family honour through their control over female members, controlling specifically the female body, both in terms of its sexuality and its reproductive ability.

Thus, when a woman’s behaviour is seen to threaten the patriarchal order, it is her body that is punished, with beatings, burnings, sexual abuse, and the all pervasive murder in the name of honour.

The passage to modernization can be ambiguous and fragile, and marked by contradictory patterns. In a country where financial wizards claim to be at the “take-off” stage of a burgeoning economy, more women and families live below the poverty line than they ever did in the history of our existence. More women die in childbirth, more children die before they turn five. Ninety per cent of married women report being kicked, slapped, beaten or sexually abused when husbands were dissatisfied by their cooking or cleaning, or when the women had ‘failed’ to bear a child or had given birth to a girl instead of a boy.

That is the order of patriarchy. That is the system which the Men in Boski wish to perpetuate. And that shall be the primary reason why our nation might just win the dishonourable title of being amongst the most bigoted nations of the world, ruled by despots, ruling the hounded and the desperate. For the thousands of women who are abused and murdered every year, there is only the anguish of injustice, only the echoing wisdom that there is certainly no honour in killing.

November 25 is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

The writer is United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the Population Fund.