Oprah needs to wake up and pay attention to our lovely Shakira. While Oprah is busy funding her single well-meaning, but ultimately highly problematic school for girls, Shakira is taking on poverty by empowering communities through education. And I think Shakira is doing a much better job of it:

To travel with multi-million-selling pop star Shakira is to travel behind tinted windows, on private planes and on Shakira time – always at least an hour behind schedule and always stopping for autographs and photos. It involves long waits while she has hair and make-up touch-ups before emerging from cars, planes and buildings.

But at the centre of the superstar entourage is a young Colombian who is disarmingly friendly and passionately eloquent about education.

And education was the reason we travelled with Shakira to the north-west border province of Choco, deep in the Colombian jungle. It is remote and poor.

Why is Shakira seemingly easily doing what Oprah is struggling to achieve? They both have highly ambitious noble goals–but Shakira is setting her work within communities. That is, she is empowering entire communities *including girls and women* to better fight their way out of poverty (a near impossible feat especially when a government seems absolutely adamant in doing nothing to help).

Oprah, on the other hand, removed girls from their communities–which is always going to cause problems. Girls are going to miss their families, families are going to miss their girls–and that doesn’t even get into the issue of sexism and misogyny that might influence a parent to come take his/her child back home, get angry at Oprah, or even cause moments of danger within Oprah’s school itself.

When girls (and women) have the resources, knowledge and support to stand up for themselves at home, they generally will. And if they don’t, at least they have the resources, knowledge and support to keep themselves safe in bad situations. When they are stuck in some strange building with some strange girls being led around by some strange woman with a camera–where does the empowerment come from? How brave are grown ups when it comes to standing up for themselves when they have to do it alone, by themselves, and in a strange place?

(on a side note, Shakira is so beautiful without all her makeup!!!)

Via BBC News