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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now widowhood has been described as one of the developing world’s key problems.  There are more than a quarter of a billion widows globally with almost half of that number living in poverty.  Well this Tuesday, you may not know, marks International Widows Day, a day of action originally launched by the Loomba Foundation.  
I spoke to Cherie Blair about it earlier last week and she told me about the impact that widowhood can have on young women and their children.  

CHERIE BLAIR: When you and I think of widows of course we tend to think of elderly widows and they have of course their own issues but across the world there are so many young widows with young children so it is not simply the issue of the widows themselves and their hardship which is important, but it is also the knock on effect for their children.

DM: So what are the main causes?  One can think of poverty and war, what are the main causes?

CHERIE BLAIR: HIV Aids.  These are the reasons why widows are made and I think another issue about young widows of course is the practice of young poor girls being married to much older men at a very young age, often as the second or third wife and then finding themselves widowed.  You can have a girl at 12, 14, 16 being married and by 20 with a couple of children her husband dies and she’s a widow.  The older children by earlier marriages probably don’t like her very much and she has in many countries no rights to her husband’s property so then you have a girl who is probably barely literate, certainly hasn’t supported herself ever, with two children to support, cast out sometimes, literally cast out of the home with nowhere to go and of course they are incredibly vulnerable.

DM: So what are some of the remedies, what are some of the projects that this Widow’s Day can focus on?   

CHERIE BLAIR: Well certainly I believe passionately in helping the widows help themselves, particularly the younger women who are physically fit, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be able to work to support their children so one of the things that the Loomba Foundation does, one of the things that my own foundation for women does is help women get financial independence by giving them training, practical skills training to run their own businesses.  So for example the Loomba Foundation has done a project in India where we made available Singer sewing machines, the ones that don’t need electricity, across India to various widows and together with training and basic dressmaking skills so that they can make a living.  

DM: This issue that you are highlighting of course dovetails with so many of the other issues surrounding particularly women and young girls in developing countries, in particular education, childcare, all these have to fit around people who find themselves in this position.  

CHERIE BLAIR: Absolutely and this is why often we focus on women’s entrepreneurship because often if it’s your own little business you can fit around these kind of pressures but it also enables women to make sure that their children get the opportunities that they don’t have so for example my own foundation had a project in Gujarat in India which we did with the Vodafone Foundation where we used a mobile phone to help women sellers of agricultural produce to do their ordering by mobile phone, by text messaging so they didn’t have to walk sometimes for up to a day to the wholesaler to buy the goods and then find out they weren’t there so they were losing a day, maybe two days, when they could be earning.  Using the mobile phone and sending the order in by one single text message and the order was then delivered, meant that these women were seeing 200 and 300% increases in their turnover.  One of the women I met was a widow from the salt flats in Gujarat and the people there who actually work the salt flats in hard, harsh conditions and she would go around selling them rice, turmeric, whatever it was and she said to me that the 200% meant whereas before she and her two children could only eat once a day and she couldn’t afford to send the children to school, now the children went to school and she had two meals a day and that’s life transforming.  

DM: When we talk about our own country, okay issues such as this specific one, over all the discussions about the glass ceiling and the progress of women, it just seems so slow.  Okay at the last election we had more women elected into parliament than ever before but we are still a long way from 50%.  How do you assess the progress?   

CHERIE BLAIR: Well I’m always an optimist, I always like to think the glass is half full rather than half empty but I look back over my career as a lawyer and particularly someone who has done a lot of work in this field and I started in the mid-70s, 1976 when we had just after a five year period implemented the Equal Pay Act, we saw the Sex Discrimination Act and I think when I started over thirty years ago, I presumed by now we would have equality but of course we don’t and the latest World Economic Forum global gender gap report shows that whereas we are doing well in narrowing the gender gap between equal access for men and women to things like health and education, I’m not saying they are necessarily good health outcomes or good education but overall the figures are now nine women to every ten men are getting equal access which is definitely progress but if you look at things like economic empowerment and economic involvement of women and political empowerment, the figures are quite different where economic empowerment is 60% which means we won’t reach parity for another 80 years.  Well I for one am not prepared to wait 80 years and you were telling me you had three daughters and so you don’t want them to have to wait until they see their own grandchildren to get parity.  And for politics, as you mentioned, I’m afraid that for every ten male politicians across the world there are about 2.4 women so we are still not seeing a breakthrough in where the real power lies because the real power does lie in the economy and the real power lies in politics.  

DM: The thought occurs, when you mentioned your career there and your path to it, did you see that poshness ceiling survey that came out last week?  It didn’t really apply to you then did it?  

CHERIE BLAIR: Well to some extent of course it did  because I didn’t know anybody.  When I look back I think how naïve I was to think that a working class girl from Liverpool could actually even go into the law.  I didn’t know anyone who was a lawyer, I was just lucky because I was at a time – for example I was supported through my education, the legal aid budget was expanding and I was able to earn my own living.  It is so much more difficult these days for young lawyers, particularly those who are doing the legal aid work, the work supporting families whose children are being taken into care, the work supporting vulnerable children who have perhaps been abused.  All of these things, the legal aid budget is now so stretched that it’s very, very difficult for young people to make a living but it is very interesting for me because I do go round and talk to people about careers in the law and what I find is that when I go to schools like mine, just ordinary state schools, the kids ask me questions like what is a barrister, what does a lawyer do?  I do also occasionally go to private schools and when I go there I am always asked completely different questions.  The girls there, because I tend to go to girls schools, already know the difference between barristers and solicitors, they are asking me how do I get a pupillage.  The kids that I go and see in the East End of London don’t even know the word pupillage exists so they don’t even have the vocabulary and so this is where we get the problem don’t we?

DM: Cherie Blair there, on the importance of supporting the world’s widows.  International Widow’s Day is on June 23rd.