Widespread sexism translates into lower levels of investment in the education, health, and nutrition of girls and women. Institutionalized discrimination manifests in laws that keep land and money out of women’s hands and thwart their access to protection and redress.

GreeneWorks seeks to overcome inequity by working to end child marriage, catalyze men and boys to promote gender equity, research gender synchronization programs, and use ICTs for social inclusion.  

Ending Child Marriage

GreeneWorks is part of a global movement to end child marriage. Ending this harmful practice improves the well-being of each girl and enhances the development of families, communities, and nations everywhere.

Case study

A Large Piece Of The Puzzle: Addressing Child Marriage To End Gender Inequality

Challenge: Nelson Mandela convened The Elders in 2007 “to help tackle some of the most pressing problems facing the world today.” This group of human rights visionaries had been keen to address gender inequality as a major global problem. But they were uncertain about which aspects of this huge challenge to focus on. 

Solution: Margaret Greene was invited by Elders CEO Mabel Van Oranje to make the case to The Elders on the value of focusing on child marriage, and to support their foundation as it established Girls Not Brides.  Now a global partnership of over 700 civil society organizations, Girls Not Brides brings child marriage to global attention and serves as a source of knowledge and support for member organizations working to eradicate child marriage

Working With Men and Boys To Promote Gender Equality

Men and boys are essential allies in achieving gender equality and improving the health and development of women and girls.

Many sexual and reproductive health programs take inequality for granted, reluctant to promote women’s rights and challenge stifling gender roles.

Greene developed a widely referenced framework to evaluate programs that involve men in sexual and reproductive health from a gender perspective.

Meg Greene with Marcos Nascimento of Instituto Promundo

Meg Greene with Marcos Nascimento of Instituto Promundo

  • Engaging Men and Boys to Address the Practice of Child Marriage explores the ways men and boys uphold this practice and through program examples, identifies the ways they are helping to prevent its underlying causes and mitigate its consequences.

  • Margaret Greene and Peter Pawlak worked with the ICRW on the Men and Gender Equality Policy Project, co-authoring a report on public policies involving men to promote gender equality. What Men Have to Do With It: Public Policies to Promote Gender Equality describes diverse policy responses countries have developed to address gender equality as more than a women’s issue.

  • GreeneWorks is collaborating with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) to develop strategies for working with men and boys.

  • Who gains from involving men in promoting gender equality? Margaret Greene and Peter Pawlak worked as consultants with ICRW on WHO-funded research to more fully assess the benefits of engaging men more fully.

  • Margaret Greene, Promundo, and Andrew Levack of EngenderHealth co-authored Synchronizing Gender Strategies: A Cooperative Model for Gender Transformation for the Interagency Gender Working Group. This report also describes the need to work with both men and women to transform the gender inequalities undermining health.

More resources

Greeneworks conducted a gender assessment of women cocoa farmers in Cote d’Ivoire for Mars Chocolate. The findings report, A Sustainable, Thriving Cocoa Sector for Future Generations: The Business Case For Why Women Matter And What To Do About It is part of Mars’ corporate commitment to promote the principle of “Mutuality.”

ICT for social inclusion

Many information and communications technology for development (ICT4D) initiatives focus on supply side issues such as Internet access, ICT infrastructure, and computer skills training. The desires of poor and marginalized groups are ignored. But projects incorporating the demand perspectives of ordinary citizens offer new possibilities for social inclusion.

With this in mind, Shib Shankar Dasgupta developed the Cyber Capability Framework to address the human side of ICT4D. The Framework is the basic analytical tool in our efforts to develop ICT projects holistically. It shifts the discourse from digital growth to people; from poverty reduction to the factors creating barriers to achievement. (More about ICT for Social Inclusion: Dev. Kalpana: Center for Development Imageries.)

Agriculture, Environment and Food Security

Economic development that degrades ecosystems is also detrimental to humans. Thus, GreeneWorks believes in a unified approach to improving environment, food security, and health.

By showing that social relationships do not stop at the boundaries of society but extend to the relationships people establish with nature, we show how more ecologically inclusive analytic categories can provide insight into environmental change in the Western Himalayas.

Selected collaborations and resources

Environment: Rights and Resilience - A report, published by GreeneWorks and the Kendeda Fund and written by Brian Greenberg and Margaret Greene finds that the potential of integrated gender equality and climate response programs is muted when gender and rights get treated as an afterthought. Read Rights and Resilience: Gender Equality, Climate Response and the Potential of Integrated Programs.

Gender Equality, Climate Response and the Potential of Integrated Programs

Brian Greenberg and Margaret Greene’s “Demography’s Ecological Frontier: Rethinking the ‘Nature’ of the Household and Community” was first presented at a meeting of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population in Cairo, Egypt. It was later published in Categories and Contexts: Anthropological and Historical Studies in Critical Demography, edited by Simon Szreter for Oxford University Press.
    
Greenberg and Greene also collaborated on Beyond the Malthusian Legacy: A Demographic Approach to Social Ecology at the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population Congress in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil.