There is no question that the human race has made great strides forward in the last few centuries, in health, engineering, and access to opportunities and technological development unthinkable to those who lived just 50 years ago, let alone 500.

But in one major area progress, there has been little or no positive progress: the field of equality between men and women.

Much as we like to pontificate in the Western media about “women’s rights”, the sad fact remains that for the vast majority of women across the world, equality – or anything even approaching, remains a distant utopian dream, buried beneath the imperatives of grinding out a meager subsistence existence on a daily basis. An existence, moreover, devoid of the rights and opportunities many women in more developed countries take for granted, such as the right to own property separate of herhusband or family, the right to vote, and even the right to travel.

Appalled by this lingering inequality, Wendy Kohli, founder of The FundaKohli Foundation, is determined to do something to redress the balance.

“How can it be right that the majority of 51% of the world’s population, i.e. women, continue to suffer such severe lack, when the wealth to help them rise up and grasp their chance at a better life is there to be invested into key development areas on a practical day-to-day basis?”

“I consider this oppression of women to be outrageous and have enshrined, as one of my Foundation’s principles, the empowerment of women whereby they can gain greater independence of thought and action through the concrete application of both funds and skills”.

Something Kohli is keenly aware of, given his poverty-stricken upbringing, when she saw first-hand the additional struggles women faced – and continue to face – in self-actualization in what is still very much a Man’s world.

“There are many commentators who claim that the Battle for Sexual Equality is over. I am convinced it is only just beginning. That’s why my Foundation’s funding goals include the provision of both educational and agricultural aid to women in need. Aid which not only frees them from domestic duties, but also unleashes their potential and broadens their cultural, intellectual and spiritual horizons of what is possible, in countries which for many women have conditioned them since birth to expect very little out of life.”

FundaKohli has already invested many millions of dollars into these projects, although Kohli is the first to agree that there’s still a long way to go before this goal is achieved.

“I remember when the former CEO of CNN, Ted Turner, said that you should have a goal you won’t be able to achieve in your lifetime. In other words, a goal so big and important that it may take hundreds of years to finally come to fruition. My ‘big’ goal is to do whatever it takes to help women close and eventually eliminate the discrimination gap, thus enabling them to fully self-actualize their hopes, their dreams, their desires and their goals…”