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Twenty-five years ago in Kenya, I saw the male-female divide on public display. Beside a rural road, a woman struggled uphill, bent under a towering load of firewood. Just behind, her husband marched tall and proud, carrying only his walking stick.

My wife, Popie, and I saw this so often, we stopped commenting on it. Rural African women, we learned, worked incredibly hard, barely pausing from their daily labors to give birth to children. Girls and young women joined in seamlessly, caring for younger children and helping with endless chores. For rural men, the situation varied. Some left the farm for urban areas, looking for work and returning at intervals to their wives and families. Others stayed home and occupied themselves with "men's work," which included caring for animals. In many cases, however, the farms had been cut too small to give the men meaningful employment. At the nearest crossroads, you could find them sitting in a small group, talking, drinking, or just staring.

We couldn't help noticing that the women seemed generally happier than the men, even though they had the short end of the stick. Hefting their burdens or bent over in the fields, they worked in groups, chatting together, sometimes laughing. The idle men seemed bored and depressed, alienated and isolated. Alcohol plagued many. I came up with this summary: "Women are oppressed; men are depressed."

Overseas humanitarian agencies have done a marvelous job of dealing with the first issue. But they are the first to acknowledge that the second is a continuing and serious obstacle to development.

I would not make light of what women suffer. In some places girls never make it to birth—they are aborted for the crime of being female. In many places, they are deprived of an education. Since boys are valued more, girls often get less to eat and suffer disproportionately from malnutrition and disease. Men often beat their women. Girls may be sexually abused, or genitally mutilated in a misguided effort to keep them sexually pure. Double standards are common. A woman involved in an illicit relationship may be killed, shunned, or otherwise severely punished; the man may suffer no recriminations at all. In some parts of the world, girls are subjected to sexual slavery, "sold" by their parents. Women's workloads seem unending: raising children, keeping the house, and serving as a beast of burden. If they work outside the home, they are still expected to carry on with domestic burdens. Men impregnate them and then abandon them.

So it is only natural that humanitarian groups target women. Not only are women the poorest of the poor, but women are often more responsive than men. If women get a little more money, they will generally spend it productively—on food for the children, on school fees, on some way to improve family life. Poor men who get a little extra money often drink it up. Worse, if they get their hands on the women's money, they drink it up, and the children go hungry. That's what happened to a chicken co-op in Ecuador that my church gave money to start. The project thrived for a time, but then the men of the village got into the profits. Now there are only empty chicken coops.

Last summer Popie and I visited World Vision development projects in South Africa. One was led by a remarkably energetic woman named Pumla. A resident of a poor semi-rural village, a place of shacks and of families ravaged by AIDS, Pumla started a preschool in a broken-down double-decker bus. She had little education, and she was as poor as anyone else in the village. But she had gumption and initiative. She saw the children running wild and thought something should be done. The preschool sheltered the children and prepared them for school. Applying for help to various international agencies, Pumla managed to expand her efforts into a broad-based community organization now supported by World Vision donors.

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August 2005, Vol. 49, No. 8