Kristof: Women’s rights effort has work to do in Africa, elsewhere

By Nicholas Kristof / The New York Times

Every year I choose a university student to accompany me on my win-a-trip journey, which is meant to highlight issues that deserve more attention. My 2025 winner is Sofia Barnett, a recent Brown University graduate and a budding journalist. Her first essay was about girls in West Africa challenging the tradition of female genital mutilation. Here’s her second, arguing that Western feminism should show more concern for global women’s issues.

By Sofia Barnett

MAKENI, Sierra Leone — In Makeni, Sierra Leone, girls walk home from school with notebooks tucked under their arms and dust clinging to their socks. Their uniforms are clean but faded. Their routes are long. I met girls who walk 5 miles through washed-out roads to reach a classroom. Their futures depend on a fragile calculation; not just of effort, but of what they’re willing to trade to keep learning.

Here, there are girls who drop out because they can’t afford a sanitary pad. Girls who sell their bodies for the cost of a notebook. Some are proud of what they earn at night — $7, maybe — because it helps them stay enrolled. But that’s not opportunity. That’s extortion under the veil of agency.

Another young woman, Tity Sannoh, said menstruation is often where the trade begins. In the coastal town of Tombo, girls rely on boyfriends just to manage their period, she said. “If you give them something, they will give you something in return.”

Safieyatu Kiadii, a 16-year-old girl from the village of Vonzua in Liberia, said she dropped out of school after her father died. She now takes care of her mentally ill mother alone and lives with her in a one-room house. She isn’t ready to bear a child, she said, lifting her sleeve to show the birth control implant in her arm. She wants to become a nurse.

When I asked how girls learn about their bodies, most said they don’t. Mabinty Thoronka, a 19-year-old from Freetown, said her mother explained menstruation by saying only, “If you allow a boy to touch you, you are going to get pregnant.”

This is what systemic neglect looks like. Not just from governments, but from donors and the global feminist movement.

I came to West Africa to report on girls education. I left convinced that the Western feminist movement has grown far too comfortable fighting for itself. In America, we talk about Title IX, boardroom parity, the price of tampons; real fights, yes. But we rarely ask what rights look like in a place where school itself is conditional; on sex, on silence, on survival.

American feminism excels at diagnosing inequality where it lives: in wage gaps, courtroom bias, the absence of paid leave. But the need for gender equity is global, and it’s meaningless in practice if it excludes the millions of girls for whom empowerment is not a buzzword but a daily act of survival.

With the U.S. Agency for International Development gutted, crucial support has already pulled back from countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia. The girls I met know exactly what that means: fewer clinics, fewer supplies, fewer safe spaces to understand how their own bodies work.

They aren’t asking for pity. They’re asking for a chance.

Western feminism has matured legally, rhetorically and electorally. But it has failed to mature politically; in the sense Hannah Arendt described when she wrote of acting “in concert” across boundaries. A feminism content with national progress but indifferent to global inequality can’t consider itself a politics of freedom.

There is no liberation in a movement that refuses to ask whom it leaves behind. If some girls must bleed, beg or barter for the chance to learn, then feminism remains unfinished.

Dabah M. Varpilah, chair of the Health Committee in Liberia’s Senate, said that when you give a girl access to education, “allowing her to grow, make her own decisions, participate in leadership, then mindsets start changing.”

That belief runs deep in the communities I visited. Families pool coins to help teachers buy chalk. Some classrooms serve lunch twice a week — if a vendor shows up. Girls want better. Parents want more. But belief cannot patch the crumbling scaffolding of international commitment.

Contact Nicholas Kristof at Facebook.com/Kristof, X.com/NickKristof or by mail at The New York Times, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10018. This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2025.