2012 NAFE WOMEN OF EXCELLENCE – WOMAN OF ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

NAFE’s highest award for 2012 goes to Woman of Achievement Dr. Helene Gayle, president and CEO of Care USA, the Atlanta-based charity working to eliminate global poverty. She assumed the role over six years ago when about half of CARE’s programs focused on women. “Now we have a gender lens on all our work,” Helene says, “because if we don’t look at how things affect women, we won’t have the impact we’re committed to. Empowering girls and women also includes working with boys and men. For example. we’re  looking at how men have to change in order to stop things like gender-based- violence. Giving a woman a small loan to start a business allows her to generate income.  She can send her children to school and do other things for the household. Her husband appreciates her and values her and the violence stops. That one small loan starts a virtuous cycle of positive change for the woman and her family."

An M.D. with a public health degree, Helene spent 20 years focused on HIV/AIDS at the National Institutes of Health and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As huge as her leap from being a physician to taking on global poverty may seem, she recalls that “my motivation for going into health was always to bring about social change.” Once Helene pinpointed the most life-changing thing for women and girls as having financial opportunities, CARE began to partner with the private sector on such projects as the amazing women-owned cashew-processing enterprise in southern India, established with the support of the Walmart Foundation, where women are taking a managerial role and becoming players in the global supply chain.

Helene oversees an annual budget of $626M to aid 122 million people in 84 countries. As the world witnesses a convergence of global efforts empowering women, CARE remains at the forefront by concentrating on the genesis of a crisis. Helene cites the issue of sex trafficking, where a family’s limited economic prospects may lead them to sell their daughters into slavery.  “We focus on root causes,” explains Helene, “because when girls and women have greater opportunities, they don’t end up in these situations. When girls get two-four years of education, the rate of child marriage and maternal mortality drops dramatically. Some of CARE’s other projects include Opportunities for Mother and Infant Development in Afghanistan and Empowering Girls to Learn and Lead in Malawi.

Helene says she loves this work because she finds that no matter how tough the challenges, she can travel to a CARE project and visit a woman whose family dynamics have shifted because, having been given the right resources, she has raised her household from poverty and sometimes changed her whole community. “How can you leave half of human potential behind?” Helene asks. “Fifty percent of the world ought to have 50 percent of the opportunities.”