Thanks to his campaign Poverty Is Sexist, the U2 frontman is leading the battle for gender equality alongside women.
“He’s one of the most outspoken and effective advocates for women and girls I know.… As an activist, he’s using those skills to get the world talking about the fact that ending extreme poverty begins with empowering women and girls.” —Melinda Gates, philanthropist and 2013 Woman of the Year
Now Bono has created Poverty Is Sexist, a new campaign specifically aimed at helping the world’s poorest women—those who survive on less than $2 a day. “Women bear the burdens of poverty,” Bono says, meaning they are far less likely than men to have access to food, clean water, education, and health care; laws in many parts of the world don’t protect them from sexual violence or allow them to own the land they work. By establishing Poverty Is Sexist, Bono is making it clear that powerful men can, and should, take on these deep-rooted issues.
Women have always strongly influenced him in his work. Just one example: During his impassioned effort in the 1990s to get antiretroviral drugs to the rural poor in South Africa, Bono met an HIV-positive woman named Prudence who had come to share her story with him instead of attending the funeral of her sister. In her town, she explained, there weren’t enough antiretroviral drugs to go around—Prudence had gotten the pills because she could campaign for help from the outside world, while her sister, a mother who had to stay home with her children, went without and died of AIDS. “Prudence told me, ‘Letting the world know what we’re up against is more important than going to my sister’s funeral,’ ” he recalls. Though stunned by her words, Bono says, he understood, because at that time in certain parts of Africa, “HIV/AIDS was a death sentence. Imagine going to a football match and thinking, A third of these people in this stadium are going to die. This was a war, and women were at the front line of fighting that war.”
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