Human Rights Awards Reception - Spotlight! On Ms. Ritu Sharma

Human Rights Awards Reception – Spotlight! On Ms. Ritu Sharma

Human Rights Awards Reception – Spotlight! On Ms. Ritu Sharma

Our Human Rights Awards Reception is on December 8, and we are so excited to honor individuals and organizations dedicated to furthering human rights across the world and in our own community!

Today, we want to introduce you to our Perdita Huston Human Rights honoree, Ms. Ritu Sharma. Ms. Sharma is the co-founder and former president of Women Thrive Worldwide, an advocacy organization working to strengthen the global movement for gender equality. She now serves as the Director of the Global Center for Gender and Youth at the International Youth Foundation.

Before accepting her award later this week, Ms. Sharma took a few minutes to tell us more about her background, current pursuits, gender equality, and human rights.

UNA-NCA: How did learning of your parents’ experiences living in East India shape your work here in America?

R.S.: I grew up with an understanding of what my parents had left behind; the challenges that they faced. I felt extremely lucky growing up in the U.S. and wanted to always look at things from a global perspective, working to bridge worlds. Eventually, going to an international school in Wales sparked my interest in global social justice. Things just took off from there.

UNA-NCA: When did you first draw the connection between human rights, gender, and peace/conflict issues?

R.S.: I always knew that women had it hard and it wasn’t an equal world—that inequality was a force behind a lot of the world’s problems. But I couldn’t put words to it until I took a college course on women in development. I finally was introduced to a vocabulary to use for it—patriarchy, misogyny—and realized there’s a whole movement surrounding these issues. I realized then that this is it for me, and there was no looking back.

UNA-NCA: Are there significant experiences you’ve had that helped to ignite your passion for gender and human rights?

R.S.: I met an African woman at an international conference in D.C., and asked her, “What can women in the U.S. do to help women in your country?” She blew up at me! She said, “You need to fix your own government and stop them from doing harm overseas,” and this was the lightbulb moment when I realized I had the right to speak out as a U.S. citizen and tell my government what needed to be done. That’s when I got interested in women’s rights and what the U.S. government does globally to influence gender equality.

UNA-NCA: How have you worked to frame gender equality as more than “just a women’s issue?”

R.S.: We’ve succeeded in putting women and girls on the stage, sometimes to the detriment of men and boys. Women were always saying we wanted to be included, but not to the exclusion of men. We don’t want to repeat the same mistake of excluding half the population—to do to others what’s been done to us all these years. We’re trying to promote gender equality, which means liberating all of us from the negative barriers and constraints we have surrounding us.

UNA-NCA: What was your underlying mission in writing your book, Teach a Woman to Fish? What sort of lessons do you hope your readers gained?

R.S.: I wanted to help Americans realize that women who live in poverty around the world are changing their own lives. They’re smart, capable, powerful women, not always starving and struggling. The best way we can help them is to pressure our own government. The book is about America’s global impact, and how to engage our government to make positive changes abroad. It lays out exactly what can be done—for example, not just asking people to write to Congress but showing them exactly how to do that in a way that will get their letter read. It also covers topics like how we can use our purchasing power, by purchasing fair trade products, and how to ask store managers questions like, “Do you have a sweat shop policy?” It shows how can we use our voices to change systems that seem so much bigger than us—to remind us that we have much more power than we think.

UNA-NCA: When thinking about your leadership role at the Global Center for Gender and Youth at IYF, how do you think the organization’s work is impacting gender equality and human rights?

R.S.: If we’re going to live gender equality in our lifetime, we need to start working more with younger people. We conducted a recent poll with 7,600 youth worldwide that showed upwards of 80% of young people believe women should have the same rights as men. That’s really good news, but young people need the skills to live gender equality.

How can you negotiate gender equality in a marriage? What does that actually look like? How do we redistribute the power in relationships and keep them healthy and strong? I’m working on infusing gender equality and its underlying skills into IYF’s phenomenal life skills curriculum, Passport to Success, which is used every year with tens of thousands of youth. Let’s take it to another level where young people have the skills to live out gender equality.

UNA-NCA: What do you hope for when thinking about the progression of gender equality and human rights, locally as well as globally, through the UN?

R.S.: One of the best things the UN has done is to support local indigenous grassroots organizations. That’s one of the most fundamental roles for the UN to play, because often these organizations have nowhere else to go for funding. I’d love to see the UN expand that role, especially as we potentially see U.S. cuts on a global scale. I hope that other UN member states can step up and play bigger roles too. The global women’s movement owes a lot to the UN’s support, and its investment in movement building. I hope that the UN won’t shrink away from this role, but rather lean into it.