We are so used to seeing women as victims of war to be pitied rather than survivors of war to be respected.

In Nigeria, along with its West African neighbor Ghana, women are now starting businesses in greater numbers than men.

When the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996 after a searing, four-year civil war, they immediately instituted laws which fit their utopic vision of the time of Islam's founding more than 1,300 years earlier. Afghan women's lives offered the most visible sign of the imagined past to which Afghanistan's present was to be returned.

Because microfinance is so manageable in terms of the size of the loan, people have made it the cornerstone to lifting women out of poverty.

Numerically speaking, half the population cannot be a minority. Yet when it comes to women, the numbers plainly show that the mathematically impossible is the socially acceptable.

Microfinance does not require previous experience or loans to the same extent as a small-business loan, so it's easier for women to enter the micro sector.