Margaret C. "Peg" Snyder (January 30, 1929 – January 26, 2021) was an American social scientist with a special interest in women and economic development, particularly in Africa. She was the founding director of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), whose name was changed to UN Women in 2011. She was also a co-founder of Women's World Banking and of the African Training and Research Centre for Women.
Biography
Snyder was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1929. As a young woman, she attended the College of New Rochelle, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1950, and the Catholic University of America, where she received a master's degree in sociology in 1952. Her M.S. thesis at Catholic University was a study of potential effects of the proposal for an Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In 1953 she became dean of women for Le Moyne College in Syracuse, a position she held for eight years.
A sabbatical-year in Africa in 1961 changed the course of her career. Invited by the Kenya African Women's Association to work with African women in Kenya, she initially assisted the "Kennedy Airlifts" that brought students to American colleges in preparation for Kenyan independence in 1964. Kenyan women, led by Margaret Kenyatta (daughter of Jomo Kenyatta, who would be the nation's first President) then sought her assistance with planning a Kenya Women's Seminar to consult women from throughout the country about what roles women should play in an independent Kenya. After two national seminars, Tanganyika and Uganda were included in an East African Women's Seminar
When her sabbatical year was over, Snyder decided to give up her position at Le Moyne in order to stay on in Africa, where, sponsored by the Women's Africa Committee, she would serve as an adviser to Umoja wa Wanawake wa Tanganyika (UWT) and continue her work with various groups in Kenya and Tanganyika. In 1965 she became assistant director for the Programme of Eastern African Studies of Syracuse University's Maxwell School, and was assigned as field director of their Ford Foundation assisted doctoral dissertation research on village settlements in Tanzania, with an opportunity to complete her own dissertation research there. She also worked as a consultant to the State University of New York, and for the American Council on Education.
Snyder returned to Tanzania (the new name for the union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar) in 1970 to complete her research while tutoring students. In 1971 she received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. That same year she joined the United Nations (UN) staff as regional adviser for the Economic Commission for Africa in a post sponsored by the Swedish International Development Agency aimed to create an Africa- Regional Programme on Advancement of Women. In that position, she was responsible for the first data base of statistics on women to include an entire geographical region, for itinerant training courses for rural development workers from governments and NGOs, seminars on the creation of "national machineries" such as women's bureaux and national commissions on women, national bibliographies of writings about women, and other activities. She was a co-founder of ECA's African Training and Research Centre for Women, which was to become a model for similar women's programs worldwide, while she also served as first head of the commission's Voluntary Agencies Bureau.
In 1978 Snyder accepted a position with the United Nations, New York, to be the first director of the Voluntary Fund for the UN Decade for Women (VFDW), later renamed the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). In that position she expanded the scope of her activities beyond Africa to include Asia, the Pacific, Latin America, and the Caribbean. UNIFEM started innovative and experimental programs aimed at improving women's situation and status throughout the world. Its major fields of concentration were economic and political empowerment. For example, it was the first to provide a large scale grant to the Green Belt Movement of Kenya, whose leader, Professor Wangari Maathai, would receive the Nobel Peace Prize. It financed training of women as labor leaders in Latin America, and silk producers in Asia.