Development

Although the global rate of extreme poverty is at a historic low, the pace of poverty reduction is slowing and the World Bank estimates that more than 700 million people still live on less than $1.90 a day.

The Women and Foreign Policy program's Growing Economies Through Gender Parity report demonstrates that closing the gender gap in the workforce could add a staggering $28 trillion to the global GDP. Despite the potential gains from women’s economic participation, however, our Women’s Workplace Equality Index finds that not a single nation of 189 covered has a level playing field for women at work. OPIC President and CEO Ray W. Washburne and Goldman Sachs’ Stephanie Cohen explore the role of government and the private sector in promoting women’s participation in the workforce, and share insights from OPIC’s 2X Women’s Initiative, the G7 2X Challenge, and the Goldman Sachs Launch with GS women’s investment initiative.  Transcript VOGELSTEIN: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations. My name is Rachel Vogelstein. I lead the Women and Foreign Policy Program here at CFR, which analyzes how elevating the status of women advances U.S. foreign policy objectives. I want to begin by extending my gratitude to our esteemed speakers for joining us, and to all of you for participating today. Our discussion this afternoon is focused on an issue that has been part of our national and global dialogue for well over a year, how to level the economic playing field for women. In capital and boardrooms, in the workplace and on the streets, through hashtags and social media, good women and men alike have grappled with the persistent barriers that hamper women in the workplace in the 21st century, and what we should do about these barriers. To help answer this question, scholars and the Women and Foreign Policy Program here at the Council, have created several new tools to analyze the status of women in the workplace around the world and help explain why leveling the economic playing field for women is so critical to prosperity and stability. First, to illustrate the cost of gender inequality in the workplace, we’ve recently launched a new interactive report entitled Growing Economies Through Gender Parity which outlines the economic stakes by visualizing data from the McKinsey Global Institute showing that closing the gender gap in the workforce could add a staggering $28 trillion to global GDP. Both advanced and developing economies alike stand to benefit if women are able to participate in the labor force at the same extent as men. The U.S. economy could grow by 19 percent, China’s by 20 percent, Mexico’s by 43 percent, and India by up to 60 percent. You can use our new digital report to understand the effect of women’s economic participation on global, regional, and national GDP, and even to compare potential economic gains in one country versus another. Second, given the economic importance of women’s inclusion in the workforce, which barriers still stand in the way? To identify the obstacles we’ve just released the first ever Women’s Workplace Equality Index, a global ranking of countries based on gender equality at work, drawing on an important dataset from the World Bank. Under CFR’s ranking, Australia comes in first, Canada second, and Mexico is fifth. Notably, the United States is not even in the top ten, falling at twentieth. And Iran, Sudan, Qatar, Syria, and Yemen round out the bottom of our list. The index highlights the pervasive nature of legal barriers to women in the workplace, finding that over 100 countries restrict the kinds of jobs that women can hold, fifty-nine lack any legal protection against sexual harassment in the workplace whatsoever, and not a single nation of 189 covered has a level legal playing field for women at work. Third, to illustrate the effect of legal barriers highlighted in our index, we’ve also issued a new report on women and the law, which analyzes the five areas in which the greatest obstacles to women’s economic participation persist—financial inclusion, land rights, workplace discrimination, national identification laws, and family law. This report reflects field research by CFR scholars in Tanzania, Nigeria, and Pakistan. And you can find each of these reports in the materials at your seat and online at CFR.org. The bottom line from our research is this: In the 21st century, nations simply cannot get ahead by leaving half of their populations behind. Leveling the playing field for women in the workplace is not just the right thing to do, it is a strategic imperative that promotes economic prosperity and stability, both at home and abroad. Today’s discussion affords an opportunity to take stock of the barriers that persist for women at work, to explore policy approaches in both the public and the private sectors, and to ask hard questions about the way forward. And we have two terrific speakers to do just that: the honorable Ray Washburne, the president and CEO of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, who will talk about the U.S. government’s new 2X Women’s Initiative, and Stephanie Cohen, the chief strategy officer at Goldman Sachs, who will tell us about the new Launch with GS women’s investment vehicle. Before we begin, a special word of thanks goes to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has generously sponsored our work on women and economic growth, and in particular to Raseed Denashmi (ph) and her colleagues for their leadership and continued support. With that, please join me in welcoming our wonderful moderator today, CFR Senior Fellow Jamille Bigio, and of course our featured speakers. Thank you very much. BIGIO: Wonderful. (Applause.) Thank you so much, Rachel. Thank you. We’ve heard how women’s labor force participation is an economic imperative. But what you’ve both done from where you sit—at OPIC, at Goldman—is to actually try to convince your organizations and your partners to invest in women’s economic opportunities as the economic imperative that the data suggests it is. I wonder, first, what you’ve found in those conversations. What has resonated with leaders in finance, in the private sector, and the government to actually convince them that these kinds of investments advance their core mandates, and advance growth? COHEN: It’s great to be here. So maybe I’ll start where you just finished, which is—you called it a strategic imperative. I’ll just call it a business imperative. I think the conversation has migrated from being about the right thing to do—which everyone still believes it’s the right thing to do. It’s the right thing not to leave 50 percent of the population behind. But it’s also a business imperative. And it’s a business imperative at multiple different levels. So if you talk about just companies, for example, I think there’s now tons of evidence that diverse teams make better decisions. Whether that’s decisions in the boardroom, whether that’s investing decisions, whether that’s decisions in just a meeting. When you have different perspectives at the table, you get to a better answer. And that companies that have diverse population actually perform better. So I think that resonates with people. Then you get to this investing question. And in a world that is awash in capital—I think you can turn on the TV, flip to a channel, and someone’s going to talk to you about how much money there is chasing whether it’s private equity or venture capital-type investments. If you look at that, and you look at the venture capital space, something like 85 to 90 percent of all venture capital money goes to all-male founded teams. And that—just reading that statistic, I think it’s not—it’s a pretty small leap to that is a really good investment, because there must be a lot of really great women who are not getting the money that they need, deserve, and that’s going to be helpful to the world. And then the last piece of this is, that’s a little bit more of a micro around companies and investing. But then when you get to the greater population, we’ve done a lot research, there’s other people that have done a lot of research, that actually getting money in the hands of women actually helps society. So at all levels we’ve moved from saying this is the right thing to do, to saying that this is actually going to allow all of us to benefit from a societal perspective. BIGIO: What have you found, Ray? WASHBURNE: Well, when I came into OPIC—if those in the room don’t know what OPIC is, it’s the United States’ economic development institution. And my personal experience, I had never been in government. Never been in bureaucracy. I’d built a number of companies. And when I have 4,000 employees in a big restaurant business, all my senior employees are women. I’m a big real estate company, my senior employees are women. Not that I ever really thought about it that way. But when I came up here, the thought began. My wife and I have been going to Zambia for a number of years. We built an orphanage and a hospital outside of Lusaka. And when you go to the villages there, into the—well, they call them compounds. In the United States we’d call them slums. But you go in there, you saw the women were desperately looking to lift themselves up. But they were spending their days collecting water, having no access to any kind of credit whatsoever—even just pennies. And they’re all selling tomatoes by the side of the road. So when I came into OPIC, I had the opportunity now to have an institution that at the time had about $30 billion worth of money to invest. And as we looked around at our loan portfolio it was like—it just occurred to me. I said, why aren’t we making women’s loans? And no one had really kind of looked at it through that—through that lens. And with the Trump administration making OPIC part of our national security strategy for the first time, it gave us the ability to go and do things. And part of our national security of having OPIC is how do we make low-interest loans in countries to sustain them through jobs—sustainable jobs. Not just going in and doing aid, but actually build things that create it. So since that time, we’ve initially committed around $300 million. We have since, in the last year, put out almost $800 million that’s catalyzed another billion dollars-worth of investment. And a few examples are, like, in India we supported a thing called Water Health. We put not a lot of money in it, $10 million. But now it brings water—ten thousand people now get clean water every day. Well, that frees people up to go and do other activities rather than just what we take for granted here in turning the water on. Now they have time to go do things. We provided loan facilities to banks. And we require a certain percentage of them—between 20 and 25 percent—to go to women-owned businesses. As well as today with payment plans on your cellphone, someone can get—the payment system has gotten so inexpensive now in these countries, someone—primarily women—now have access where someone can’t go take the money away from them, that they can go pay their bills—five cents, or ten cents, or transfer money across. And they can create small and entrepreneurial businesses. Really what makes countries—and I started—I sold carpet door-to-door through college, OK? So I know what it takes starting and working up to a company that now has thousands of employees. What people want is just a chance. And they need access to credit. And they also need access to a rule of law. It’s another thing OPIC looks at, is in these countries you pointed out—that’s a great map. I want to get a copy of that to show our team—what countries have still issues with women. We’re going to start looking at that a little closer now that I saw your map. But it’s an exciting time to be doing what we’re doing at OPIC, to have the backing of the administration. And, you know, Ivanka’s gotten very involved in this. And we happen to be an organization that had the capital. And now with the BUILD act that’s gone through, we’ve gone from 30 billion (dollars) to 60 billion (dollars) in size. So we have a lot more room to do things. But we’re actionable. And I think doing a billion dollars in a year is pretty good. BIGIO: It is impressive too to see that based on OPIC’s work to mobilize more resources to invest in female entrepreneurs, it inspired the other G-7 development finance institutions to do something similar. WASHBURNE: That’s right. At the G-7 in Quebec this summer we went up, and the other organizations have now catalyzed behind us. I was at the G-20. And they all, you know, have taken, you know, our lead. Fortunately, we’re all getting involved. And we built a great team. A lady named Katie Kaufman, who some of you in this room might have met before. And I was fortunate to recruit her in when I first started. And, you know, I can’t keep up with them. (Laughter.) No, seriously, they’re on the road all the time. They’ve doing a great job. BIGIO: And to have it translate into actual dollars and investment, which is what you’re trying to do at Goldman now with Launch with GS, to try to actually translate that into investment of firm capital, of investment capital. COHEN: Yeah. So in June we announced Launch with GS, which is our first for-profit investing initiative with a gender lens. It’s our commitment to investing $500 million of firm inclined capital to close what we would call the gender investing gap, which is the percentages that I talked about earlier. And it really builds on the insights and thesis from our 10,000 Women program, which was—which is very similar to yours, which is that the economic empowerment of women makes good sound sense for the world. And, you know, Launch with GS, the way that we’re running it is absolutely for-profit initiative, completely embedded in our business. That initiative is not ancillary to the business. It is part of the business. When we talk about our investing, we don’t talk about Launch with GS and then everything else. We talk about all of it together. And that means that the full power and might of Goldman Sachs and all of our clients is behind it. And so with Launch with GS we’re doing three things. One, we’re investing directly firm capital in women founded owned and led businesses, with a focus on growth equity. We’ve already invested over $100 million in six months. You know, just as an aside, when we first launched we were—we got asked a lot of questions about the pipeline, about whether or not there were going to be enough women entrepreneurs for us to invest in. And I can tell you, there’s way more than enough women entrepreneurs for us to invest in. And that’s why we’re really trying to work with others and partner with other investors and institutions, because there is so much that we can do if we can get that capital pulled together. The second thing that we’re doing is we’re raising client capital to invest in women managers. And the reason for that is because we want to change not only the complexion of the founder space, but also the complexion of the investing space for the people that actually control the capital and are directing that capital. Because we all know, it’s a lot easier to really—to have a connection with someone who looks and feels more like you. So the more that that investing community is diverse, the more that we think the actual investments will be diverse. And the last thing we’re doing is building an ecosystem. And the reason for that is investing is hard work. It’s a tough business. And you say no a lot, just because there’s a finite amount of capital and you’re making investing decisions. But when we say no to an investment for any given reason, we often don’t want to say no to that founder, or to their idea, to what they’re doing. And so we want to take our community, which includes the people inside Goldman Sachs, our clients—whether they’re big corporates or small companies—the institutional investors—bring all those people together to help these women to start and run their business. So we’re creating what’s now, I call, an analog community. So we’re—you know, the people on my team are working very hard to connect people, to help them build their business. But overtime, that will become a digital community. And, you know, our initiative is a global initiative . And if you look at our investments they’re global. If you look at the events that we’ve had thus far, they’re global. Because part of the power of this is bringing our global footprint to businesses all around the world. Because a lot of these women have aspirations to build really large, big, global businesses. And allowing them to connect with people who are trying to do something maybe on the other side of the world, we think is incredibly powerful. BIGIO: So what did it take to move this investment from being ancillary to Goldman, into actually being core to its work, and having the full might of the company behind it? COHEN: I think as an organization we felt very strong about women for a long time. And 10,000 Women is a good example of that. We have a new CEO, David, who’s very passionate about this in terms of the importance of diversity in the broader community. And then the last piece of it is, honestly, we work in an organization where numbers have a lot of weight. And those numbers that show that women are—get significantly less investment, for us, was recently a good example and a lot of proof that this was going to be an area where we were going to be able to invest real amounts of capital and get a positive return. The other thing is that if you look at our investing businesses, we have 13 senior women who lead investing businesses across our firm. And those women obviously felt very strongly about the initiative. But we also felt like this was going to be a tremendous opportunity to allow them to have leadership positions around the world in driving these investments. So in some respects, you know, diversity creates more diversity, in my view. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. So the more that we have diversity in the investing community, in the founder community, you know, in our own employee base, you’re going to see that people are going to look at these opportunities and realize how exciting they are. And one of the interesting things that we hear from women founders is when they go to meetings to raise capital, and there’s all men on the other side of the table, sometimes their business—it’s very hard for them to understand the business, because it may be something that’s related to women’s health or other issues. And that by changing the complexion of that investing community, you actually get people who translate what that business might look like in a different way than if you had a different audience. So that’s why when we decided to do Launch with GS, we are doing—we’re doing three things. Not because, you know, we like to make ourselves crazy busy, but because we thought it was really important to have a full-circle of change in order to have a real impact. BIGIO: Ray, you mentioned the BUILD Act. That will shift things for OPIC and for what the U.S. does with its development finance. What are the impacts of that on the investments that you’ve been making around women’s economic opportunities? WASHBURNE: Well, for the last—OPIC was set up in 1971, and really had never adjusted its—to the modern world of finance. And so one thing the other—our brethren in other countries are doing is putting equity in the project. And we didn’t have the ability to do that. So that was the most important aspect of the BUILD Act, was having the ability to club up deals with others on an equal status, because we were getting left behind on our projects. So as far as on the women’s initiative that we have in, like, sub-Sahara Africa is, I was telling you before, that when you go over—when I travel, and I travel extensively around the world—is in the ’60s, you had the Peace Corps kids that were going on, not really sure what they were going to do and just kind of showing up. And today what you have are these social entrepreneurs that are going over. Not only do they want to do good, they also want to build real businesses. And a majority of them are women. They kind of want to bail out of society here to go over there to make a difference. And those are a lot of the companies we’re backing. We have lady who—she and her brother started a company that’s a cross-border logistics business. And that’s—so we started an initiative at OPIC called Connect Africa. And it’s how do we take the borders and make them more transparent, to where you can drive things back and forth without getting graft and corruption and waits of trying to go back and forth, and just being available. And so we give a lot of loans to banks, local banks, and let them break it down into much smaller loans so someone can go out and buy a truck or expand their business in that way. So it’s been very exciting for us. BIGIO: And good to have opportunity to be looking for investments like this, because I could imagine, you know, these entrepreneurs were out there. OPIC may not have been identifying those opportunities just by not asking are they there, and looking for who can we invest in. WASHBURNE: Sure. And, you know, the majority of growth anywhere in the world is small businesses having access to capital. The big ones, like GE, they can get money. And so for us to put $200 million in a project, I’d rather take 50 million (dollars), put it in a local bank, and let them break it down into hundreds of small loans, because each one of those people is going to hire one or two people. And that is a much greater job creation ability there. BIGIO: So I know these initiatives are both fairly young for your institutions. But I wonder as you look further down the road, what do you see as the next frontier for investments in women’s economic opportunities? And what do you see as the biggest challenges that you’re facing right now? WASHBURNE: Well, one thing we’re trying to do is our other—the DFIs around the world—is get us all to come together. Which the G-7 was the first time. And it’s amazing. We’ve never all kind of gotten together because there’s been such a competition between them all, which is really ridiculous. We’re all trying to, you know, solve poverty issues around the world, and develop. So having us all come together, have a common goal for what we’re trying to achieve, and invest, and look at through that lens. And then partnering with the people like Goldman Sachs and others. They have incredible expertise they can bring to the table. And it’s really not just having another big conference, but actually everybody sitting down and saying: What can we make happen now? And let’s put it on the table and go achieve that. COHEN: I think you’re just starting to see a lot of the impacts. And I know there’s frustration with the statistics, because if you track them on a monthly, weekly, yearly basis, they don’t feel like they’re making enough progress. And I think impatience is a good thing. But if you—if you think today, you’re a young woman who hears about all of these places where there is potentially capital available, I think everyone when they decide whether or not they should take a job or start a business, they’re doing a little bit of a probability calculation in their head. And the fact that there is more and more capital that is going after this I think will make people make different decisions. So, one, I’m more optimistic that we are going to see step function change. The second piece of this is, I think there’s a lot of people going after various segments of the market. And in this space, I think people really want to work together, because whether it’s debt, or equity, or a small business, or a large business, all of it—there’s no place in that chain where there isn’t a need for more capital. And in some cases, debt’s the right answer. In some cases, equity is the right answer. Sometimes they’re starting out as a very small company and they become a big company. Sometimes they start out as a small company and they stay as a small company. So I think working together, public and private partnerships, I think you’re going to see a lot more of that because it’s not a one-size-fits-all, in much of the same way that there’s actually a reasonable amount of press today about whether or not the—is venture capital, as it’s defined today, the right answer for every single type of start-up company? And the reality is that different securities make sense for different people. I think you’re going to find that in this space. WASHBURNE: Well, and I think also the world is working together. Getting grants to people and then just walking away doesn’t do any good. People—women, men, whoever—you need to loan them money, even if it’s a low interest rate, and it needs to be paid back. If you do that, you have a real business and you have real long-term prospects. Otherwise, they—in the past when grants were just given to people, they’d just go spend it and just think they’ll get another grant. And they never build a foundation on it. So I think working to—especially with professionals like, you know, Goldman—is able to come in here and help us understand how to do that better. BIGIO: There’s a lot of opportunity for these kinds of networks. I know we’ve got a lot of people in the room that are working in organizations that have been really invested in this area too. So I’d love to open up the floor now to questions. If you could raise your placard. We’ve got microphones coming around the room. Please introduce yourself, and your organization, and share your question. Just a reminder that this portion of the conversation is also on the record. Let’s start with Caren Grown please. Q: Hi. My name is Caren Grown. I’m the senior director for gender at the World Bank Group. And you probably all know we created something recently called the Women Entrepreneur Finance Initiative, modeled partly after the 10,000 Women initiative. I’m here. My colleague Henrietta Kolb is here with the IFC. And I know she’ll have her own question. And I have two questions. One, I really—and a comment. I really agree with the comment about the ecosystem. I think it’s really, really critical. And I agree with the idea that we need to really work together. We’re hoping that We-Fi can actually be an umbrella to bring some of the big initiatives together. But I think we really have to think about how we make that work, because there’s so many new initiatives going forward now. And I think it gets complicated when we’re in countries where we might not have the pipeline that you’ve described we have here. And we don’t want to be tripping over each other to find deals going forward. So I’d really like to push you a little bit more, particularly in the lower-income and not just the emerging market where there may be more deals, how we actually get there and start to do that. The other thing I’d like to ask about I something that we care a lot about and which we hope we’ll do through We-Fi. And that’s the use of digital technology and digital platforms, because that’s a promise for scale in a way that we haven’t really thought about that before. Platforms that might be e-commerce platforms, or platforms that bring together the finance of the marketing side and build them. And as we think—I’d like to hear your plans for encouraging that and encouraging those platforms in ways that also don’t embody unconscious bias and have the potential sometimes to hurt women. So I’m really curious about that. BIGIO: Great. WASHBURNE: I think on the digital side, I’ll start with that. But the digital side, as I said earlier, you know, we give loans to banks now that can load, you know, payment plans onto phones and things like that, mobile devices. And that’s the quickest way, we think, to get money down at the lowest, lowest level, because at a lot of villages you have to pay your electricity every single day. They’re not going to go collect it at the end of the month. They want, you know, twenty cents a day to have electricity stay on in your home. And what has happened is in a lot of these villages, and I see this in Zambia, is it’s always the woman has to walk down to the little kiosk in the middle of the compound and pay her five or ten cents, so you can leave electricity on for the day. What a waste of time. What a waste of productivity. And so by bringing that out, it’s just freeing more and more—the more time we can free up of just your basic chores enables them to go out and start businesses and be entrepreneurial. And so we’re very, very involved in that right now. I don’t— COHEN: Well, I’m going to go to the digital one, and then we go back to the other one. On your digital question, one, we’re actually quite focused on building a digital community. And we’re very open to doing that in partnership with other people, because we do believe that in order to connect women and men across the world, where people have different expertise but have the same questions, or crossover expertise, that the right way to do that is digitally. And the way we think about it is if a Goldman Sachs person has to stand in between someone every time they have a question, we’re never going to be able to scale this the way we want to scale it. So we’re quite focused on that, and very open to dialogue around that. We also have no interest in building that from scratch. There are a lot of platforms that already exist. So we’ll do that. The second question around unconscious bias, if it makes you feel any better, we actually, interestingly, had a conversation—I’ll leave their name out—with a venture capital fund in Silicon Valley that came to us and said: We use a lot of data to make decisions about investing. And we’ve realized actually half our portfolio is women. And we never really thought about it before, but now there’s all this—all this news about investing in women. And we’re a bunch of guys, but we actually have invested half in women. So to make the question better, is it actually had the exact opposite impact, which they were making—their portfolio of companies was much more diverse than the average venture capital portfolio. That’s one data point, but I thought it would be useful. On the lower end, it’s actually not the place where we’re, from a Launch with GS perspective, focused. And even 10,000 Women tends to be at kind of the higher end of that. But I will say, our philosophy overall is that we want to make sure that we are—when we’re investing, that we’re not—we’re not just talking the three winners and piling a bunch of money into that but finding people and opportunities that weren’t previously found. And that, honestly, for us is man-to-man combat, and getting out there, and meeting people. BIGIO: In the back, please. Jenna. Q: Thank you. Hi. Jenna Ben-Yehuda from the Women’s Foreign Policy Network. Appreciate the comments. I wanted to go back to something that Karen started touching upon, Stephanie, with the—this notion of what I’m kind of hearing is donor coordination in maybe World Bank parlance. (Laughs.) But, you know, BlackRock has come out and issued a commitment. Several other investment firms, increasing number of women VC efforts coming up, there’s Angel, former Twitter senior leadership. How do you kind of harness that? And, you know, I think part of the scalability of this is connecting the dots amongst all kinds of folks that are interested in doing this and creating maybe commitments across the investment community to harness this. So a question too. And I know you’re early days and this is maybe a down-the-road thing. You know, to what extent you’re thinking about that. And then, Ray, to your comment on the incredible additional amount of capital that OPIC is putting out, how are you thinking about evaluating those efforts with a gender lens? Is there somebody in the organization who is taking gender into account as part of the evaluation process and selection? And how is kind of gender being incorporated, or not, or to what extent you think that is useful in a venture organization. WASHBURNE: As I said earlier, we have a whole department that focuses on that. And every loan that comes—every single loan that comes to OPIC now is looked at through a gender lens—every single one of them. And so especially on these bank loans that we do, where we—as I said earlier, we put money into a bank and they break it up into loans, there’s a requirement that 25 percent of that has to go to women. And so every loan we have is, you know, you check on whether it’s, you know, human rights, whether there’s environmental issues, and then we have a gender lens on that as well, to be sure that’s been a consideration going into it. COHEN: And maybe to build on that, just to give you a little bit more perspective on how we’re running Launch with GS, we have multiple different investing areas across Goldman Sachs. And Launch with GS is actually embedded in all of them. And so I don’t want to make little of your first question, but nobody asks the question of: Why are there so many investment firms going after male-founded businesses? Like, in our mind the focus here was, in the same way if someone said we think XYZ trend is really good investment opportunity, let’s make sure we focus on that. In some respects, that’s what Launch with GS is, which is that we feel that there is a whole population that doesn’t seem to be getting the capital that they need, deserve, that will be good for not only those companies but the world. And we should figure out what good investing opportunities exist for them. So that’s kind of the broad thing. It’s not—really the way that it gets prosecuted is no different than the way we prosecute other investments. Practically, you know, this is one of those moments where I think a bunch of people who we may call competitors, who certainly operate in the same space, have all decided to come together and say, we—there is so much available opportunity out there that we’re going to work together. So what you’ll find, underneath the covers of what’s going on, is that we have met with all of those people and all of those firms, or all the people that are focused on this. And we all agree—we share ideas, probably in a way that maybe doesn’t happen in everyday business. But our perspective is that there are certain places where BlackRock makes sense, or Blackstone makes sense, or KKR, or Sequoia, or Goldman Sachs, or Benchmark, or whoever the right place is. And All Raise is another good example of an organization in Silicon Valley. And we’ve kind of all committed that we’re going to work together. But it’s a competitive world. And of course, there’s a lot of capital, and there’s investment ideas. And so we compete the same way we compete in all cases, for which investor is the right for any given company. You know, the other piece of this around—and this relates to the ecosystem—I think is something different given the size and scale of Goldman Sachs, versus some of the other institutions, is, you know, some people decide to start a company, and they either have a lot of friends and family, or a background where they really understand what the process is. They have a lot of people who help them with the presentation. They have twenty people who they can call for advice. You know, we have found probably that generally women have less of that network. So the other thing that we’re doing is in places where we may not want to invest, we’re trying to be helpful. And so we’re trying to really in some respects serve as a mentor to businesses where it may not make sense for us to invest, but we do help them understand what the investing community is looking for. Because there is a situation, if you have one type of person on one end of a table and another group of people on the other—whether that’s a woman on one end and an all-male team on the other side, or a black, Hispanic. They’re not always speaking the same language. And the way someone says something and the way it’s interpreted on the other side of the table is different. And so while we can’t fix all bias in the world, we have tried to help translate that so that people have a better chance of actually raising the capital. BIGIO: We’ve got a question here. Aubrey. Q: Hi. I’m Aubrey Hruby with the Atlantic Council. Question for you, Stephanie, about engaging U.S. pension funds. So I’m part of an organization called Private Equity Women’s Investment Network, PEWIN. We have 500 members, all LPs and GPs, all women. And one of the things we’ve found over the years is that there’s a high concentration of women working for U.S. pension funds. And if you look at CIO positions in particular, there are a lot of women there. And we’ve had generational challenges, even with PEWIN, where kind of the older generation, who are roughly sixty-plus, the women who are often the LPs in the pension funds are against quotas, don’t like necessarily full-women programs that highlight it, because they feel that, you know, maybe there’s undeserving folks that would get through, or the perception would be. So are you engaging with the pension funds, because they already have women LPs? And if so, are there challenges of cross-generational conversation and how you’re kind of building that out? COHEN: So we’re absolutely engaging with them. The second part of what we’re doing is raising client capital to invest in women managers. And a lot of that will be institutional capital, in addition to private wealth capital. So as part of that conversation, we engage with that community, or we’re right now in dialogue with them. The one comment I make is that the fund that we’re raising is completely—it’s not a double bottom line fund. If people want to put it in the ESG bucket, that is their choice. But it doesn’t have to go in there. It absolutely hurdles. So our view is that it should go in the alternatives bucket. If someone wants to put it in the ESG bucket, that’s their choice. And so that’s part of the way, I think, we stop that conversation. Which is, we’re not asking you to invest in our vehicle because you think investing in women is a good idea. We’re asking you to invest in our—in our vehicle because investing in women is a good investment. And for us, we think that’s completely changed the dynamic of the conversation. There will be some people who feel really passionately about investing in women. And that’s great. They’ll get a good return by doing it. But there are others where we’re just making the case on investing in this vehicle versus any other venture capital or private equity vehicle. So I think we’ve seen less of that because of that question. And, you know, I was on a call earlier today on a potential investment that we were talking about. And, you know, you could hear in the dialogue how important it is that we’ve made this very clear statement that everything hurdles, and that it—that you’re not granting people money. That you’re giving them money, and you expect a return—whether that’s to get paid back from a debt perspective or to get an equity-like return. We think that completely changes—gets rid of this question of are you just investing in them because they’re a woman, rather than because it’s a good company or a good idea. WASHBURNE: As a follow-up to that, the way the investing world’s going, a lot of these foundations have first loss money. And what that means is, in the past you might have had a foundation that would put, hypothetically, you know, $10 million into a project, and they really didn’t have the expertise to kind of follow it, and then all of a sudden the money just kind of disappeared and they’d go down there, and nothing had happened. So with us now, a project might only underwrite to being a, let’s say, $8 million investment, but it took 10 million (dollars) to build it. It didn’t make economic sense at ten (million dollars), but it did at eight (million dollars). The first loss money would be a foundation, or a pension fund, or others would put it in, kind of a hope that they’d get it back, but realizing it’s more of a kind of a grant. But it made a real business opportunity work to where we could underwrite it to get our money back. Because we’re a for-profit institution of the government. We’re not a grant thing. And same with others. So that first—so that’s an evolving thing in our—in our ecosystem that’s developing. The more that that can happen, these big, big huge foundations—like the Gates and other—they can look at us and say: We—they’re depending on our expertise to go in, realizing—and then instead of giving 10 million (dollars), they can have 2 million (dollars) they can put in, you know, five different projects, and really expand this. I’m sure you’re experiencing the same. But that’s something that’s evolving of use other people’s expertise, you get your grant money out that you want to get out, and it makes projects that otherwise would never happen be able to happen. BIGIO: Question in the back. Q: Hello. I’m Shelia Lirio Marcelo. I am founder and CEO of Care.com. So first of all, thank you both for your leadership. Stephanie, having been a founder and entrepreneur, and building the company, and taking it public, I can tell you how hard it’s been. And what you guys are doing is phenomenal. And putting the Goldman brand not only from a perspective of raising the fund, but actually saying you’re going to make a meaningful different in the marketplace, as well as what Aileen’s doing with All Raise I think has been terrific. So and then thank you. I was born and raised in the Philippines, Ray. So I know that many family members and people have benefitted with OPIC, and the contributions you guys have made in the past. So my question really is, how do you guys think—to build on Caren’s question—on investing in digital with respect to domestic founders in the United States that’s making an international impact on women? Because we’re, like, in twenty countries. We could have done this in Asia, but why Care.com in the United States? Because it’s a much more efficient marketplace to raise $350 million, right? It’s harder. And now we’re servicing the world. Or how are you thinking about it as international companies, you know, founded by women? And how do you think about those? You know, how are you making the tradeoff of investment decisions? Or is it primarily focused on the United States? WASHBURNE: Well— Q: Other than OPIC, of course. WASHBURNE: Yeah. On—we can’t—by statute, I can’t do anything domestically. So OPIC can’t do anything even in Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, any of that. So everything we have to do is internationally. The other is, we’re not a venture capital fund. So if someone came in, and came with this great digital idea, and it’s a startup, and you’re in your garage inventing this thing—we don’t do that. We have to take existing businesses, or business ideas that are more hard-asset oriented to go forward. Now, if you went ahead and had a digital, you know, software thing that, you know, could embed up into something that’s already developed out—but we’re not in the venture capital business, so. Yeah, just—I mean, just so people don’t come to us with some great ideas. I mean, you could be the next Apple Computer in your garage and I can’t even touch it. So, sorry. COHEN: So our program is international, by design, on purpose. In many respects, playing to what we think is our strength, because we have our—we have a global footprint. I think a lot of these initiatives, the organizations that they stem from tend to be either domestic in the U.S. or local in their individual country. And I think uniquely we do have a global footprint. We happen to also have a global investing footprint. So those thirteen women that I talked about, our investing businesses, they’re all around the world. So we actually see as much kind of outside the U.S. as we see inside the U.S. Like, if you looked, we’ve gone—since we’ve launched, we’ve gotten 2,000, basically, in-bound inquiries. We’ve met with over 800 founders, investors, nonprofit agencies. They are all over the world, and global. And so we have a team that’s doing that. We’re not—the team that sits in New York is not doing that. And we do believe that uniquely, I think, in terms of picking the places where we’re going to invest, we are probably likely, actually, to lean into some of these companies that are U.S. trying to go international, or international trying to come to the U.S., again, because we think we can add real value to them from both a footprint perspective, but also from, if you think about our corporate footprint and all the relationships we have with very large corporations, we think that’s very valuable to this community and probably something that we uniquely bring to it. As it relates to—I’ll do digital twice—digital on the investing side, because what we’re doing tends to lean more growth. So what we’re—if you look at the parameters of what we’re investing in, our check size tends to be $5 to $50 million with companies, with at least $5 million in revenue, growing double digits. So that’s kind of later-stage growth equity, generally. The only place we’re really doing seed or early stage investment is in fintech, where we have real expertise. And so we’re seeing a lot of digital businesses. We have a very big technology practice. And so, again, I think we can add real value to that space and have a view on where those businesses are headed. As I mentioned before, you know, the place where—I think we’re quite proud of our progress over the last six months, but it’s only been six months—the place where we need to make a lot more progress is on this—is on the digital side for us. Meaning, the—so we’ve had events in Sydney, in Hong Kong. We have things coming up in Stockholm and in Paris, in addition to New York and San Francisco. And that’s obviously a very analog way of doing this, right? There’s people flying all over, going to those places physically. And if we’re going to do this right, we’re going to make it really easy for that entrepreneur in Stockholm to reach the entrepreneur in Sydney, who both happen to be in retail businesses and can talk to each other and solve their problems. We’re not there yet. We welcome all help in trying to get there. But that’s nirvana for us, because that’s where I think you make—you make the world a much smaller place, but I think you also allow these women to really grow their business in an exponential way. BIGIO: Let’s come back to the front table here. Q: Hi. I’m Anju Malhotra. I’m principal advisor, gender, at UNICEF.  I was wondering if you could tell us a little it—I mean, this is so wonderful to hear, where both of you are moving—how you’re connecting with women’s groups and gender expertise that already exists in the field that has a lot of learning about what to do, and what not to do in the past? I mean, I remember working with a Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women program. And, you know, small and medium enterprises. Well, most of them were small enterprises. A lot of women-owned businesses are not necessarily run by women. A lot of women run businesses that are owned by families. There is a lot of complexity to how gender and entrepreneurship works that women’s experts and women’s groups have really catalogued over the year and have thoughts on. And a lot of those groups are actually not experts in investment. A lot of them are suspicious about investment. So it would be interesting to hear your thoughts and how you connect these two worlds. WASHBURNE: When I came into OPIC about two years ago, it was a very inward-facing agency overall. We had authorization to do 29 billion (dollars). We only had 22 billion (dollars) outstanding. So first question is—and, again, I come in from the outside, and I’m an entrepreneur. I’m like, you have $7 billion sitting there that’s undeployed? What’s going on here? Well, because it wasn’t a—there was no business development within the agency. And so on a grand scale, we built business development groups to go out and—like, this morning I spoke to a group of ambassadors to the United States, like forty of them, saying I want to do business in your countries. Bring us deals. Well, OPIC just traditionally hadn’t done that. So on the women’s initiative that we have, our 2X Initiative, it’s the same thing. It’s Katie and her team are out. She’s in Davos right now. She left yesterday. And she’s going to several countries and then marketing. It’s just getting out and getting the word out, and marketing it. And so to your group, you know, we hope to convene more groups. Stephanie met with—our team came up and met with you. And the other ones on the street. And we’re not sitting back waiting for the phone to ring, but we’re out marketing it. So hopefully you hear so much of us you don’t want to hear of us anymore, so. COHEN: One of the things we did, when we announced Launch with GS, we did something that is not natural for us. We announced it before we had made the investments. I think if you look at the history of how we tend to announce things, we tend to make investments and then announce it. In this case, we actually said we were going this, and then—and then made the announcement before we had actually done very much. Which, honestly, culturally is a little bit uncomfortable. But the reason was exactly for why you said, it was because we wanted feedback from the community about where we could be the most impactful. And we’ve listened to that. So in the 800-plus meetings, some of that is with people asking us for money. But a lot of that is us asking people for their—for their feedback. And so I’ll just give you an example. When we—when we announced, we talked about where we were planning to invest. But the answer was not as crisp as the answer I gave you in terms of where we’re focused. And we did get a reasonable amount of feedback that there’s a lot of capital needed at the seed stage of investing, and that it was really important to make sure women got the first check. And we completely agree with that. We just didn’t think that we were the right first check, because there is a structure and amount of capability set that you need to support seed investors, which is just not something we at Goldman Sachs have been doing. But we want to be helpful to those women. And that’s, again, how we’ve started to build the ecosystem, and try to help them find the right place to get that first check, so that we can be a later follow-on check. Because then we did hear from a lot of people that they agreed that the place where we could have the most impact was at that later stage, and that getting women from that very early check to then that later check, so that they can become much more larger businesses made sense for us. But that has been an active dialogue with the community. The other point on this is we do benefit from 10,000 Women, which has been around for a decade and I think had a lot of learnings from a lot of people in this room and in other places. And then we do, through our research arm, our research business has—spends a lot of time in this space, and actually has done a lot of research. But we don’t—there’s a lot we don’t know. And so we—hopefully we’ve been clear. If not, we’ll just say it again: We really want to hear feedback on what we’re doing, where people think we should be focused, where people think we shouldn’t be focused, on mistakes we’re making, and on learnings from other people, because this is an area where we’re not going to solve this problem on our own. We’re only going to solve it together. And we know people have been focused on it for a long time. And I think we’re starting to see change, but I think we’re just at—we’re at the beginning. WASHBURNE: Well, also, the best practices that you have, and that we have, we all just need to come together and put the best practices to use. Because anyone trying to go off on it, you know, by themselves, is just wasting time, because we all need to work together and get it done quickly. So. BIGIO: A continued call for these kinds of opportunities of exchange. We’ve got a question in the back. Q: Hi. Jeannine Scott, America to Africa Consulting. When you look at the banking institutions, particularly on the continent of Africa, it’s very difficult to get a loan. And you’re saying that you want 25 percent of the loans that you put in to be distributed amongst small women—or women entrepreneurs. And I’m just wondering, how do you ensure that there’s diversity or more equity within that? Because it’s very difficult just in general, let alone for many women, to have access to that type of loan or capital. So how do you work with those banking institutions in country to ensure that that money does get to those women, and that even that there’s a bit more equity— WASHBURNE: Well, sure. No, we monitor their portfolios. I mean, our auditing teams go in and see it. And so it’s—you know, it’s followed. Is there a penalty if they don’t do it? Well, they’ll never do business with us again, so. But—or we can cut things off. But, yeah, no, we audit it very, very closely. Just like we have to in everything else they loan on, whether it’s human rights or environmental things. I mean, it’s—you’re dealing with a government entity at the end of the day, so. BIGIO: Critical to have that accountability. Question here. Q: Hi. Doug Ollivant with Mantid International. I’m not a gender person, but I do development work in Iraq. And so I didn’t go looking for gender issues. Gender issues kind of came and found me. As you say, this really is a bottom line issue. We’ve all gotten an education in the last week or two about legal guardianship issues in Saudi Arabia. Where I work in Iraq, those issues aren’t legal, but they’re deeply cultural. If you’re a woman alone in public, you must be either a widow or a prostitute. You know, you two, you’re not do-gooders. You’re—you know, you’re in business. But is there way that large institutions like yours can kind of look long and look at these types of issues? Because this is all wonderful, but if you—you know, if you can’t move around in public, you know, all the capital development we can give you isn’t going to do you any good. WASHBURNE: Well, I can’t do business in Saudi Arabia to begin with. (Laughter.) I’ll give you a chance. That’s a good one for you. (Laughter.) COHEN: So I guess without going—I’m not going to answer the specific, like, Iraq, Middle East question as it relates to this. But I think the broader comment around the point that you raise is a global GDP growth point, right? So if at the end of the day, if you look at any business that’s a global firm, particularly a financial institution, we’re going to benefit when the global economy is functioning, and it’s growing, and it’s working well. And I think as—I won’t speak for our institution, but institutions more broadly—I think you’ll see it all over the place. People have realized that in order to build durable businesses that are going to last—we’re at our 150-year anniversary. So you’re catching me at a moment where we’re thinking about our business not over the next one year or two years, but over a very long period of time. And only by really figuring out the way for the global economy to grow and work together does that make sense. So we do believe that the business community getting together to solve these issues makes sense. And, you know, 10,000—Launch with GS is probably not the right way to talk about this. It’s really more 10,000 Women, because 10,000 Women was absolutely entirely outside the U.S., rather than an inside the U.S. program, and which really came from this idea that the more that we empowered women economically, the more that we were going to grow those economies, and then therefore the more that ultimately they would become places where we could transact and do business and prosper. So I don’t think there’s—there is in some respects, you could say, a lot of daylight between us giving a company $25 million and the problem that you’re talking about. But the only way we’re going to get to a place where it’s ever going to make sense for us to give a woman $25 million in the places that you’re talking about, is by solving the questions that you’re raising. So I think, you know, broadly, the business community is supportive of that. You know, the question is, how do we—how do we do that productively by giving people, you know, the most—this whole conversation, to me, highlights this point, which is I think everyone in the room wants to do the right thing and get money to the right place, but only by doing it in a way where people feel like they need to deliver a return, give the money back. And we actually—does it actually work productively? BIGIO: One thing that our report on women’s workplace equality shows - building on the World Bank’s Women Business and the Law research - is identifying how discriminatory laws affect opportunities for women to participate in the workplace. Family law is one example, as you talk about Saudi Arabia, that has economic effects. The extent to which women are able to open a bank account in their name without their husband’s permission, et cetera, affects how they’re able to open their own business, and grow a business, and then be able to come to either of you for loans. And so it’s something at least to be thinking about, and to recognize that that affects where your investment opportunities are. And there’s a great example with the U.S. government, where the Millennium Challenge Corporation is in fact asking explicitly about women’s legal rights as they look at whether they’re going to invest and offer a compact to a country. And so that that does have long-term implications on growth potential in a given country. We have a question here. Q: I’m Laura Liswood. I’m the secretary general of the Council of Women World Leaders. Former managing director at Goldman Sachs. Good to see you, Stephanie. COHEN: It’s good to see you. (Laughter.) Q: So, and basically to you, Stephanie, what will be—I know you’re six months into this, but I still want to know—what will be the ultimate metrics for success? You know, three years down, are you going to do a comparison of male-run businesses and female-run businesses for return? How are you thinking about that? COHEN: So we’re going to metric the business in a couple ways. One is that the way that you metric every investing business, which is on returns, multiple of money. Of course, they’ll be risk adjusted. Meaning we have—I’m not going to give you the exact percentage, because it will depend on the investment. But we will evaluate all of the investments the way we evaluate every other investment that looks like it inside the firm. So return multiple of money. The second way, we will—we will measure what type of impact we’re having. So internally, how do we think about that? We have—we have set some parameters for how much capital we want to put to work. So have we achieved that? The next will be around the ecosystem. So as you think about how many women have we touched and helped, whether that may not be giving them money, but how we’ve actually touched them, how that’s influenced and impacted our other businesses in terms of interacting with those women, but also helping them. And then the other way we are going to judge ourselves is what’s happening in the broader world outside. So, for example, if we put a bunch of money to work and it gets good returns and we feel good about that, and those women do well, but I’m here in a few years and we’re still talking about the fact that 85 percent of venture capital goes to all-male founder teams, I don’t think we’ve done what we said we were going to do. Because what we’ve said we were going to do, is we were going to invest in things that were good investments. But we also said that we were going to try to change the game. And that’s why we’re doing the three things. And if the three things don’t work, then we have the wrong three things. So we have to think about doing something differently. So I think as you think about, you know, how does this at all differ from anything else that we’re doing inside the firm, there’s that added question of what’s the broader impact that we’re having on society. BIGIO: And at OPIC, how are you measuring success for 2X and for the work you’re doing? WASHBURNE: Well, you know, we’re a lender. So we loan money out. And where she’s trying to make a return as an investor—there’s a big difference between an investor and lender, because we’re in a senior position currently. We haven’t—our equity program hasn’t kicked in yet. And so we measure success by getting paid back, first of all. Second is, you know, we’re new in the game. We’re going to see. But we’re in the job creation. So there’s a multiplier effect on investments that we hope to make. And as talked about earlier, you are able to give a loan to a woman-owned enterprise. Hopefully they hire more employees and it has a multiplier effect off of that. But at the end of the day, I’ve got U.S. taxpayer money and I’ve got the responsibility to get it paid back, so. BIGIO: Well, that brings us to a close. Please join me in thanking both Stephanie and Ray for speaking with us today. (Applause.) WASHBURNE: Thank you. COHEN: Thank you. (END)

Research indicates that gender-based violence costs the world approximately $1.5 trillion a year, but governments have struggled to address it. Though Latin America has made significant progress in empowering women, gender-based violence remains widespread throughout the region. From the classroom to the workforce, gender-based violence stymies opportunity and undermines development. Rosa Celorio and Julie T. Katzman discussed what governments in Latin America are doing to reduce gender-based violence and promote women’s economic empowerment through legal and political reforms, as well as through shifts in cultural norms.     BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Good afternoon, everybody. I think we’re going to get started. So my name is Carrie Bettinger-Lόpez. It’s wonderful to see so many folks in the room, many old friends and colleagues and new faces as well. So it’s wonderful to be hosting this today. I am an adjunct senior fellow here at the Council on Foreign Relations. I also teach at University of Miami Law School where I direct the Human Rights Clinic. And here at the Women in Foreign Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations, we’re very focused on analyzing how we can elevate the status of women and girls around the world to advance U.S. foreign policy objectives. A reminder that today’s program is on the record. So I’d like to just start giving a little bit of an overview on the theme of today, which is the economic cost of gender-based violence in Latin America. Research indicates that gender-based violence costs the world approximately $1.5 trillion a year but governments around the world have struggled to address it with thinking about strategies, and we don’t oftentimes think about that economic cost factor when we, and I count myself amongst this, when we as advocates or we as policymakers are thinking about approaches to gender-based violence. Oftentimes, the economic cost is either separated or not considered when we’re focused on policy approaches, and today’s roundtable and much of the work of the folks in this room is committed to thinking about a more integrated approach there. Throughout Latin America, we’ve made significant progress in empowering women and gender-based violence, however, remains a widespread problem and a public health concern and a criminal justice problem. The Pan-American Health Organization reports that two out of three women killed in Central America are killed for reasons related to their gender, and a 2018 survey by Oxfam reported that most fifteen- to twenty-five-year-olds in eight Latin American countries believe that women are to blame for violence, including sexual assaults, because of the way they dress. And so our roundtable today focuses on how governments in Latin America can reduce gender-based violence and promote women’s economic empowerment through legal and political reforms as well as shifts in cultural norms, and we’re going to be taking a hard look at the numbers and at some innovative strategies from a financial perspective as well. I’m thrilled to introduce our two speakers today, both friends and colleagues that I cherish and who are just doing really innovative and path-breaking work. To my immediate left is Rosa Celorio, and Rosa is the associate dean for international and comparative legal studies and the Burnett Family professorial lecturer in international law and comparative law and policy at George Washington University Law School. Previously, she served as a senior attorney at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and she has a deep professional background in human rights, discrimination, and gender. Rosa, thank you for being with us today. We are also privileged to welcome Julie Katzman, who is the executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Inter-American Development Bank. Previously, Julie served as the general manager of the Multilateral Investment Fund, which provides grants that support private sector-led development benefiting the poor. Julie is a long-time investment banker and throughout her career she has been a champion of women’s economic empowerment. So please join me in welcoming Julie and Rosa. (Applause.) So our format for today is that—and those of you who have attended CFR roundtables know this format well—I’ll pose a series of questions to Julie and Rosa and we’ll engage in a dialogue, and that’ll happen for the first half of the program and then for the second half we’ll open it up to questions and when we do so if you could just take your name placard and place it vertically and then we will get to as many questions as we can. We’re looking forward to a robust dialogue. So, first, we want to lay the groundwork for the nature of the problem, right. I always tell my students that if we don’t understand the nature and prevalence we can’t think about solutions. So according to the United Nations, Rosa, Latin America and the Caribbean is considered the most violent region in the world for women. Femicide occurs on a, quote, “devastating scale,” according to the U.N., in Central America, where two out of three women who are murdered die because of their gender—a statistic that I just mentioned. What factors contribute to such high rates of violence against women and can you talk about some of the consequences, whether they’d be about migration or access to education, employment, political participation, or likewise? CELORIO: Thank you, Carrie, and good afternoon. It’s really an honor to be here to be able to spend this time with you, to be joined by such a distinguished group of panelists and to really be discussing such a timely issue in Latin America. I really like the way Carrie started this panel talking about the nature of the issue because at the end of the day, when we’re thinking of strategies governments can employ, part of the challenge that we have in Latin America is that we’re still learning not only about the widespread nature of gender-based violence but also its features, its components—who are the women affected and how to engage the different levels of a specific state or country in addressing this issue. So in terms of the nature of the issue, I think it’s important to highlight, again, that gender-based violence in Latin America is still a very widespread issue. It’s a major human rights issue. The numbers speak for themselves. When you study the numbers of international organizations, most of them really highlight one in three women and girls that are affected by different forms of violence, and Latin America is not an exception in that trend. And I think one thing that’s really interesting about the Latin America context is that there are certain forms of gender-based violence that have had a significant amount of documentation, like, for example, gender-motivated killings, forms of sexual violence and torture, and domestic violence. But every day there are other, I would say, forms of gender-based violence that have been there historically but now they’re really coming more to the forefront or at least they’re starting to be more documented or at least more understood, even though maybe the international community hasn’t necessarily caught up entirely to where these forms should be in terms of how to address them or even governments themselves. Like, for example, sexual harassment, I would say, is one of the forms. Online violence against women is one of the forms as well. Economic violence and the way access and control of economic resources can be used not only in the home but outside of the home to actually produce violence against women. These are all concepts that we’re starting to understand better now and you see a lot of governments starting to pay attention to them but not necessarily with all the guidelines necessary. So this is why the work of so many organizations is important here. And I think if we’re talking about the factors and the consequences, I think another very important feature of gender-based violence is the amount of settings where it occurs, right. It occurs in the family. It occurs in schools and employment places, in health institutions, in entertainment and press outlets, in political venues, in prisons, and many other settings. It really occurs everywhere and we’re starting to understand or at least grasp what that means in terms of a notion and in terms of a problem to address, and we have a range of actors involved. We have government actors that can be perpetrators. We have private actors that can be perpetrators as well. So that adds to the complexity of the problem. In terms of factors, it’s very difficult to understand or deconstruct why gender-based violence is in Latin America or anywhere, really, without understanding discrimination and without understanding stereotypes and they need to really address this historical discrimination, how it’s ingrained in social norms, and also the conceptualization of stereotypes and how they affect the actions of all levels at the state level in Latin America, in the Caribbean, and I would say this is a global problem as well. I think we still have a problem of social tolerance of violence and the view that this is normal, that this is just part of our day-to-day lives. High levels of poverty are not very helpful to reducing levels of gender-based violence. In Latin America, you see something really interesting, too. You see a lot of women now assuming very important economic positions in their families and you see this evolution of the conceptualization of the family in Latin America, and it’s interesting how now we’re starting to understand how that can fuel domestic violence, how that can produce more gender-based violence, and you see also women every day occupying more public roles as human rights defenders, as women that are on the streets protesting not only gender-based violence but other gender issues and other social issues—women opposing extractive and investment projects, and all of this is producing also gender-based violence that we’re starting to understand and grasp, right, especially women that are working to defend sexual and reproductive rights for LGBTI issues or that are opposing extractive industries, right. And in terms of consequences—and there’s a lot that we can discuss here—one of them that’s very important, especially because this is a panel about economic cost, is the impact on women’s access to the labor market, and not only to access the labor market but to stay in the labor market, to be promoted in the labor market, and to really have a substantial control over economic resources, right. I think that’s a big consequence. Also, obstacles to really have that participation in public life or in political life or have decision-making positions in that regard I would say affects also under psychological and physical integrity including reproductive health consequences and forced migration, and there’s a lot of issues there. I mean, that’s a very complex issue that requires its own study in itself, and we’ll pause here because we have other—many other issues to discuss. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Well, that’s fantastic. Thank you, Rosa. Well, I’d like to pick up a little bit more on something you mentioned in terms of the actors who are responsible for the violence. And so you mentioned, you know, state actors and private actors—of course, also institutional actors. Could you talk a little bit more about the evolution in terms of international law and domestic law in terms of accountability and attribution of responsibility for the violence? Of course, kind of historically violence against women was—and gender-based violence were considered private matters, that individuals should, you know, resolve amongst themselves or that happened behind closed doors. And so could you talk about whether that—whether perceptions in Latin America are changing that kind of track these changes that we’re seeing in international law? CELORIO: I think that’s a wonderful question and I do think that you see some progress, and I think where the progress is is in discourse. I think what international law has given us and what the human rights framework in particular has given us, and this conceptualization of gender-based violence as a human rights violation, as a woman’s rights violation, is this understanding of gender-based violence as a public problem—as a problem the states need to tackle because it has social, economic, political consequences and many other consequences. And you see this in the discourse. When you talk to governments in Latin American countries, it’s very difficult right now to find a government that can deny publicly that they don’t have a major gender-based violence issue or that they don’t have major legislation on gender-based violence or a major national plan to address gender-based violence. It’s in the public discourse and it’s in the public mindset, right. But the problem is we have a huge distance between that public discourse and what happens on the ground. The problem is still endemic. Women are still victimized on a daily basis. So I think that what international law has been good about in Latin America particularly is piercing the family, right. It has entered the family. Like, at this stage, gender-based violence is not necessarily only a private issue anymore, at least in the public perception, right. But I think we still have a long way to go in terms of how do we translate that into an actual implementation of policies, of legislation, of programs, of services, that really help women and the prevention aspect. I think the prevention aspect we really have a lot to work on and there’s actually a lot of strategies there that you can think of that, in my view, are connected with international law but that really go beyond the realm of international law because, I mean, there are things like the economic empowerment of women, for example, the education of women, for example, fostering the leadership of women, for example—that that’s part international law but that’s part of a multidisciplinary strategy also at the national level. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Fantastic. You’re getting me very excited about possibilities here. Great. Well, and I’d like to return in a little while to the question of some promising practices and examples that we might look to for future directions. Before we do that, in terms of continuing to lay the groundwork and to think about the nature of the problem, I’d like to turn to Julie now to talk about data and the importance of data. Could you tell us about what data we have on this issue? What do we have on gender-based violence, what are we missing, and why is data important? KATZMAN: OK. So I’ll put that in the context of you can tell I’m Inter-American Development Bank—the bank part versus the academic part. So I’ll be a little bit more transactional, shall we say— BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Great. KATZMAN: —because, in fact, all of this we’ve known for a long time and yet did we move the needle in the region in terms of what was happening. And we go to countries and sit with women’s ministries—called lots of different things but, generally, that—and along with the environment ministries, sadly, generally the weakest ministries in government. And so getting things done, getting resources, really hard, right. So I promise I’ll get to the answer on statistics. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: That’s OK. No. KATZMAN: But so we decided to take actually a page out of the climate change folks’ book where our climate change people said, OK, where’s the power, where’s the money—finance ministries. So we developed a type of loan product that is budget support and it requires governments to take on a set of policy reforms in order to get that kind of loan, and that worked in the climate space and we got countries energized around making major changes in climate environments. So we’ve taken that and applied it to gender and, actually, to disabilities. Why were we able to do it? Why were we able to get finance ministers to decide that this was a smart way—reason to borrow money? That goes to the data. So we know, thanks to GiZ that violence against women costs small and medium-size enterprises 6½ percent of GDP per year in Paraguay—Bolivia. Sorry—Bolivia. We know that it costs 2.4 percent of GDP in Paraguay and 3.6 percent of GDP in Peru. Those numbers are stunning, and when you say to a finance minister whose economy is growing 1, 2, 3 percent a year, look, this is the cost of gender-based violence in your country and if you can get your arms around that you can actually change your growth trajectory. That’s compelling. And so when the previous finance minister in Argentina where we did the first of these policy-based loans said to me, has the violence against women thing always been this bad or is it that we just, right—or it’s only now that we understand it. I said, right, so we can’t answer that question because we don’t know. We can imagine we know but we don’t know, and that’s why this loan is so important because a component of that loan is actually creating a national registry with a national standard around reports of gender-based violence. So, you know, those kinds of statistics that make this not just the right thing to do but the smart thing to do, the necessary thing to do, are what I think open the conversation in a very different way with very different actors to create different vectors to create change. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you. Can you talk a little bit more, Julie, about the economic aspects of violence against women? You already spoke about that, of course, and specifically, how is gender-based violence connected to access and control of economic resources? KATZMAN: Yeah. So let’s take another example. We created something called the Gender Transport Lab. It’s a collection of seven cities in the region who are part of the Gender Transport Lab that are looking at the criticality of transportation and the role it plays in economic empowerment, and violence in the transport system is actually a really important thing. So and it goes beyond violence, right. It’s, like, how do you include women-owned small and medium-sized enterprises in the procurement value chain in transportation. It’s how do you think about equity in terms of pricing in transportation, because if you look at how a man uses transportation and how a woman uses transportation, when the majority of primary care givers are women you find that a woman will get onto a form of transport and drop off, say, a child at school, get back on transport, drop off another child at school, get back on transport, go to work. If that woman is charged three fares and a man just gets on transport and gets off at work, there’s an inequity problem there, right. So this covers a broad range of issues around transport. But on violence, you know, there’s a lot of experimentation going on because transport’s connection to economic empowerment is really huge. So some countries are experimenting with single-sex cars—metro subway cars or buses. You know, the vote is out because if you look at those single-sex cars in São Paulo on an average evening you will not find that there are only women in those cars. But there are other experiments going on as well. For example, in Quito they put a—let’s call it a panic button—on the bus and what that does is it notifies the driver that there’s a problem, and at the next stop the police are there and they address the person who’s the perpetrator. And about six months ago, the first case was fully adjudicated and this guy, who was groping a woman, went to jail for thirteen months. I mean, I think that that is the kind of intervention that you need to see if you’re going to interrupt those kinds of blockages in front of women in terms of economic empowerment. If the culture of impunity—if people see that someone goes to jail and they go to jail for a serious period of time, then I think we can begin to change behavior and remove some of those impediments. You know, there’s the other piece of this, which is less directly about violence. We have launched something called the Gender Parity Task Forces in Chile, Panama, soon to be in Argentina, and one or two other countries, and those task forces look at the economic gender gap—the gap in wages, labor force participation, and the seniority of women—and it’s a public-private initiative where public sector and private sector companies join the initiative and agree to move the needle on two of those three gaps over a three-year period of time. Well, if there is more equity in the workplace, this also goes to the overall view of how women are seeing what kind of gender parity exists in the dialogue of the country and we see that as playing a less direct but an important role. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Great. Thank you. So we’ve now kind of bridged into thinking about programs and solutions, and I’d like to move back to Rosa to talk a little bit about legislative and policy reforms at the governmental level. So the World Bank’s Women, Business, and the Law report has noted that all the countries in Latin America have legislation that protect women from domestic violence and most of the countries have legislation addressing sexual harassment in employment, though not all, as you noted. So could you talk about—a little bit more, as you alluded to earlier, about the next steps in legislation and policy to address violence against women in these various places and sectors? CELORIO: Thank you, Carrie. I think Latin America has been—it’s a fascinating place to study when it comes to legislation because, I mean, it has— KATZMAN: Lots of it. CELORIO: It has tons of it. (Laughter.) KATZMAN: (Inaudible.) CELORIO: Tons of it in on gender-based violence, right? I mean, it has been amazing all the legislation that we’ve had on different forms of gender-based violence, and I come from the human rights world, right. I mean, I worked thirteen years at Inter-American System of Human Rights and every time we had a hearing with a government on gender-based violence, the governments would come in and they would be, like, look at all of my legislation. Look at all of my policies. Look at all of my programs, and they were impressive. So I have to say that my read is that those are steps that we have to recognize from governments. The problem is that usually those formal steps are not consonant with what’s happening on the ground. I mean, at the end of the day, you can have the most beautiful piece of legislation but if you don’t have adequate funding or training of public officials of how to implement it or basically a set of regulations to make sure that this is properly applied by different officials in the government system, if you have different languages in a country—I’ve worked extensively with indigenous peoples, for example, and women of African descent and a lot of women that speak different languages in different countries and they weren’t familiar with the legislation on gender-based violence. They didn’t have sufficient information or they didn’t have any participation in this legislation. Because that’s part of the problem also. We have this beautiful legislation but it’s legislation that has been adopted maybe by a very small group that doesn’t really represent, you know, the diversity in women—the different ethnicities, the different races, the different economic decisions. So there are a lot of problems in the text of legislation but also in the way that the legislation is implemented as well. I think legislation is not enough and I think we’ve learned that and we’ve known this for a really long time as well. Legislation is just one step forward. I mean, there’s a lot of strategies and, I would say, a multilayer set of strategies that involve many different sectors that you really need to be able to address a problem as vast as gender-based violence, right. and I really think that we have to go beyond the legal strategies. Even though I’m a lawyer by training, at the end of the day, one thing that I’ve learned working with gender issues is that you need to go beyond the law, right. You need to work with the health sector. You need to work with the education sector. You need to work with the economic sector. You need to work with both public and private entities. You need to work with corporations, with individuals. You really have to work with a range of persons in sectors to be able to address this problem, and we really have to start studying—and I think this needs more studying—how to adequately prevent. In international human rights law we’re very good at saying prevention, prevention, prevention is so important. Prevention. You know, it’s our—it’s our main line, right. But what is prevention? How do you really prevent, right? And I think it’s something that we really have to examine and also what does it mean to have the adequate availability of legal avenues and reporting conditions. One thing that we have learned with the #MeToo movement, for example, is that we have all these women voicing their experiences and voicing things that should have been voiced for a really long time but now we have more conditions to be able to do so. But what happens next, right? Where are the reporting mechanisms? Where are the legal avenues? What kind of reform are we going to see after this? What is our response to the #MeToo movement? You know, and that’s really where we are and we have to figure out what is an adequate response there. I think also the tools to economically empower women are very important. One thing that we have learned is the more economically empowered a woman, is the least likely or at least maybe a little bit less exposure, maybe—or at least more control in how to respond to that exposure. But the exposure is still there because all women experience gender-based violence in some way or the other. But at least economic empowerment could give you more tools to respond, to report, to defend yourself, right. So we have to think about how to economically empower women, how to expose them more to education, how to expose them more to access, to quality and decent employment, opportunities to access public domains. I mean, I think the more we see women in public office, for me, it’s a fascinating process that we’re seeing in countries like the United States where you have more women entering public life. What does that mean? You know, where are the conditions, you know? How do you facilitate or motivate that women actually enter public office? I think that’s very important to address problems like gender-based violence, right. I think one big challenge that we have is intersectionality and how to address the diversity of experiences that women have. And I can tell you this. Coming from a regional human rights protection system, we talk so much about intersectionality and the need to incorporate the different experiences and races and ethnicities and economic positions and conditions that women may have and how all these factors can combine to expose a woman more to violence. But there was really little understanding of what that meant in terms of a legislation or a program or a service or how do you properly include these women in the development of laws and public policies and reforms. We talk so much about intersectionality but I think we’re still at a point where we really have to start adding more practical components to what that means in practice, right. And I think also we have these amazing international platforms like the Sustainable Development Goals, for example. International development efforts. I’m sitting next to, you know, a very important representative from the Inter-American Development Bank. I used to work at the OAS and the Human Rights Commission. How do you combine the human rights framework with international development efforts? I mean, I think there’s a lot there to be said in terms of also combining strategies because at the end of the day, I don’t think it’s only a legal problem. But one thing that we do know is that when we’re talking about one in three women around the world, this is a problem that needs more resources, needs more thinking, needs more strategizing. But I think we have to start thinking outside of a box. I think we’re at a moment where we have a lot of tools there. We have a lot of legislation. We have a lot of formal steps. But we’re not necessarily at a point where we can really say this is what we should be doing, you know, to really address this or to change women’s lives and that’s really what we need to do. I mean, that’s really the next step in many ways. KATZMAN: Can I jump in? BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Please. KATZMAN: So the tools beyond laws, right. So first I’ll tell a story of a law, which is as a result of the Gender Parity Task Force in Argentina. We found a law from the 1920s that prohibited women from operating heavy machinery. It’s still on the books. So really high-paying jobs in ports, roadworks, et cetera, against the law actually to hire women, which there were a minority of women being hired but until we went looking we didn’t know, great, yeah, lots of laws to protect women that actually are doing the reverse. So there’s that piece of laws as well. But, you know, I think there’s a broad range of tools that we think about. One is transparency and knowledge. So, you know, the launch of the Mexican National Data Bank and Information Center—I wrote it down so I actually said it right this time—I think is important because now there’s actually out there a transparent platform that the government owns that is tracking and putting out there gender-based violence statistics for everyone to see and when everyone sees them they get horrified and then, you know, the population kind of goes, oh, what are we doing. So I think that’s an important tool and creating the similarity of the way people start to look at these statistics so that they’re comparable across countries. Second, you know, the IDB has created a model that’s most robust, let’s say, in El Salvador, Ciudad Mujer, which is an integrated way to look at treating victims of those who experience gender-based violence but also a more holistic way to look at their health, their economic opportunities, and to bring the state to bear in terms of investigation and prosecution. Third is technology. So in Uruguay, we know—and Carrie, you certainly know better than I think probably most in this room—you know, the restraining order is a very flawed instrument. But using, like, ankle monitoring-type GPS-based technology for those on whom restraining orders have been placed so that if they’re violating the restraining order it’s being monitored in real time police can be dispatched so that tragedy does not happen. And then financial tools. So there’s a website that I encourage everybody to look at called asyousow.org and they launched last month a tool that lets you look at every single mutual fund and ETF in this country, and then it’s got a score based on the companies in which it invests and how well each one of those companies do on gender policies and—OK, there are two categories. They sound kind of alike. I pulled up the page so I can say it right. Gender balance and gender policies, and under gender policies, for example, are protections for employees reporting harassment and initiatives to reduce trafficking in human rights risks throughout their supply chain. So you look at your own 401(k) and you say, well, I’ve got this T. Rowe fund and I’ve got that BlackRock fund and I’ve got that PAC Zelidate (ph) fund. I care about this. So let’s see how they all do. And then you go to your employer and you say, you know what, we shouldn’t be in that fund because we need to move money toward companies that are doing the right thing and away from companies that are doing the wrong thing. And the other tool that I’ll mention on that is the Criterion Institute, which has created something called the Trillion Dollar Campaign, and it’s a really fascinating thing that they’ve done, which is they’re getting institutional investors to sign what I will call a letter of intent which says, in effect, I really wish that the money that we invest was being invested in ways that had an impact on gender-based violence. So it doesn’t require somebody to do something. It isn’t a divestment approach. It’s saying we really want our money to help move things in this direction and in parallel with that is work to say what are some of the things money could be invested in to actually move the needle on gender-based violence. And when a trillion dollars starts to speak things start to happen, and that’s the underlying thought there and they’re already at close to $100 billion. Yeah. And so we don’t necessarily think about financial tools as a big tool in the tool set. I think it’s going to become and is becoming an increasingly important tool. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Great. I have one last question and then we’d like to open it up. Rosa, you mentioned #MeToo, and, of course, #MeToo is kind of hanging over all work around the world right now in terms of thinking about kind of what it means for movement building, what it means for institutional and legal change. So can you talk a little bit more about the #MeToo movement in Latin America? Any promising developments? Any places we should be watching, where it’s reached, where it hasn’t? CELORIO: Thank you, Carrie. I think it’s a movement that has had a very interesting impact in Latin America. I think where you’ve seen it more publicly is in the streets and the movements on the streets. Women every day are marching in the streets of Latin American countries demanding accountability and more serious attention to gender-based violence, and we have well-known campaigns in that regard like #NiUnoMenos, for example, the 16 Days of Activism. Like, some of the historical campaigns have also been focusing on the #MeToo movement as well in Latin America. So it’s really interesting to see that. I think it’s very interesting also in Latin America on gender-based violence the activity of the movement itself, you know, of the woman’s rights movement itself and what they have been focusing on and what they’re focusing on right now. I mean, it’s a movement that has evolved historically in terms of what they’re focusing on and right now they have specific fears and concerns that they’re voicing and a lot of it is connected to the #MeToo movement and what has been happening globally, in my view. There’s fears for a regression of rights. It’s interesting. There’s a lot of #MeToo concerns, a lot of documentation of stories, a lot of women coming out with their stories, but also a lot of documentation of what we—fears that we have with specific legislation, with specific—that the steps that or the gains that the women have had to make sure that we don’t lose them, right, in Latin America, and this is probably the most palpable in sexual and reproductive rights. I mean, at the end of the day, even though this is a roundtable on gender-based violence, when you’re thinking of gender issues in Latin America and when you’re thinking of mobilization issues, it’s very difficult to divide gender-based violence from anything happening with sexual reproductive rights and it’s seen as something very interconnected and it is very interconnected in international law. So there’s a lot of fears of regression there. There’s also a lot of fears of this interpretation of what gender is—the contemporary interpretation of what the gender term is or what we have gained in international law when it comes to this gender perspective. There’s a lot of fears toward the gender ideology—I’m sure a lot of you work with gender ideology directly—this interpretation or misinterpretation of gender or what has been defined as international law of this gender perspective that is supposed to be empowering women, that is supposed to be addressing discrimination historically, that is supposed to be addressing gender-based violence to this term that’s supposed to be promoting patriarchalism and traditional notions of the family, right. So there’s a lot of misuse also of language that has been a game and there needs to be not only a redefinition but also highlighting what the real or at least the international law accepted definitions are of this term, so especially gender. So that’s a big fear, I think, of the movement right now. A lot of the human rights, especially the woman’s rights movement, is really fearful of its defenders right now. I mean, probably from the situations that I’ve studied in gender-based violence in Latin America one of the most concerning right now is the situation of women human rights defenders in general. We see killings on a daily basis. We see harassment on a daily basis. We see acts of sexual violence on a daily basis against women human rights defenders for the causes that they defend, for the context where they’re working, for basically defying what the social expectation is of a woman in a society because they’re holding leadership roles. I think it’s a situation of a lot of concern and I know a lot of the woman’s rights movement is very concerned about the situation and this has been the subject of a lot of documentation by not only the Americas’ human rights system but also the United Nations’ system, and I think a lot of women in Latin America are wondering what comes next. If you have #NiUnoMenos, if you have the #MeToo movement, what do we do now? How do we—what do we do with these stories? What do we do with this mobilization? You know, what do we do with all this information that is now public, right? Do we change legislation? Do we change public policies? What are our strategies, you know, to really address gender-based violence in the future? And not only against women, but there’s a lot of concern over girls, for example. You know, this is a huge concern in Latin American countries right now. We have all these girls that are ten years old, twelve years old, basically with early pregnancies because of sexual violence, very well documented. So the layers of the problem are still acute, right. There’s a lot that’s out there now, right, and women are taking a more leadership and protagonistic role in this, right. At the same time, where do we go from here? What does this mean, you know, for the future of international law, for the future of government action in this area, and for multilayer strategies to address these issues, right. I wish I had all the answers, but I don’t. At least I can (throw ?) the questions. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Julie, is there anything you’d like to add? KATZMAN: Yeah, I just had one quick thing, which is that, you know, I think some of this relates to how you redefine what it means to be a man and you can’t forget that side of the equation here, and there are—I just recently stepped down from the board of the International Center for Research on Women and ICRW did this amazingly successful program in the schools of Mumbai, which is now in Maharashtra State as a whole, hundreds of thousands of kids involved in it, using sport to in fact redefine what it means at an impressionable age—of what does it mean to be a boy—what does it mean to be a man, and it’s had a measurable impact on views about violence and later on behavior, and I think that that’s something that the region as a whole has to start to embrace more fully because that’s a big part of what’s going on here, as Rosa said. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: And I’ll just add that that theme, of course, was a huge concern of my former boss, Joe Biden, and, you know, with a campaign that he worked—It’s On Us campaign—and thinking about the role of men and boys in addressing and stopping sexual violence in schools and beyond, and so it’s incredibly important. We’re having this conversation in my own university right now about as we’re thinking about retention and promotion of women, for example—you know, taking a step back and saying, my goodness, we’re so focused on kind of women and women’s roles and women’s voices and there’s not a focus on men’s role in all of this. And so as we all kind of think of our own institutions and the ways in which we are advancing these conversations in our own institutions I think it’s a great point. Well, with that, we’re going to open it up for questions. So, yes, please place your cards in a vertical position and I’ll start with individual questions. Well, actually, for purposes of time maybe we’ll group a couple questions at a time and then have our panelists respond. So why don’t I take these first three and then we’ll go down the line. So Loribeth. Q: Great. Hi. I’m Lori Weinstein from JWI. STAFF: Could you use the microphone, please? Q: Oh, the mic. Yeah. I’m Lori Weinstein from JWI. We do a lot of work to end domestic and sexual violence here in the States and we also do work through partnerships around the world. Thank you both for your wonderful remarks. I thought I was depressed about our country. Clearly, the depression only grows. But I have a couple of questions. One is about the SDGs, because the U.N. and the Commission on Women, of which we play a role or are involved, has put such an emphasis on ending violence. I think it’s number five. And I’m wondering, kind of from your perspectives from where you both sit how you see that’s going and whether we’re really having any impact, and I appreciated your point earlier about how things stay at the top. The second question has to do with women and employment. Many years ago, we did a project in Russia, in the former Soviet Union, where we used two strategies. One was creating domestic violence programs in small cities but the other was encouraging and creating employment opportunities for women, and we found in that three-year project that was funded by the State Department a real decrease in the amount of domestic and sexual violence in those homes where women had jobs, had access to employment, and were actually more of the breadwinners oftentimes than their spouses. So I’d love your comments on those. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Monica Tejada. Q: Thank you. Thank you for your remarks. Very interesting. Monica Tejada from the Millennium Challenge Corporation. So we have—we’re funding an education project in El Salvador and the data in El Salvador is 90 percent of the victims of sexual crimes are girls and adolescents. So I have two questions. One is how does the analysis—the economic analysis of the costs of GBV take into account underage women and girls who are not officially in the labor market yet and—well, if you could elaborate a little bit of that. And then the second part is are there any interesting programs or measures that address GBV within the schools system that, from your experience, you’ve seen as successful within the Latin American context? Thank you. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: And over to Begoña Fernandez. Q: OK. Hi. (Off mic.) BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Do you want to go ahead and— KATZMAN: You go ahead. CELORIO: Thank you so much for your question on the sustainable development goals. You know, I try to be positive in nature because I’m an international human rights law lawyer by training, right. So if not, I would give it up and not do anything, right. So and I think—you know, I think it’s very difficult to measure right now what kind of impact the sustainable development goals have really had. But I do think there’s been a measure of progress. It’s not as if we’re in a moment in time that when we talk about women’s rights or we talk about, you know, the rights of girls, et cetera, that we can say that there hasn’t really been any sort of progress. I mean, every day, especially in the area that I study the most—international human rights law—you see more government action. You see more private actor action. You see more actions from individuals to address gender-based violence. You see more women vocalizing, you know, what’s happening with gender-based violence or their own stories. I mean, you do see a lot of tendencies that, in my view, at least they give me hope, right. It’s very difficult to say that this is an advance or a good practice. I’m usually very careful about using that kind of terminology. But at least I see some steps in the right direction. I think what the sustainable development goals give us is language and a platform—a consensus platform. I’m a big fan of consensus platforms because I’ve always worked historically with governments, and at the end of the day when you have governments on your side there’s a lot that you can accomplish, right. Governments have resources. They have influence. They have connections with other governments. They can use things like international law to protect and to create good interventions. So for me, there’s promise there. I think it’s very difficult to really talk about a good practice or, really, advances at this stage. But there’s been some progress. The problem is that at the end of the day, what most of us are trying to do is improve the situation of women, improve the situation of girls. Make sure we have prevention. Make sure we have adequate redress, right. and we’re not seeing that yet, right. So there’s a long way to go here. But I do think you have at least some light there. In terms of women unemployment, it’s fascinating what you said because most of what I’ve studied and what I’ve learned from my practice is that it does make a big difference, right, to have quality and decent employment, to have economic resources. But then you have documentation in areas, you know, especially in Latin America. For example, so in Juárez, Mexico, which is one of the most—best documented cases in Latin America where there were a lot of killings, you know, right after you had all these maquila corporations coming and employing all these women and suddenly women were the main income earners of their households, right. It’s not clear whether it was the maquilas employing the women. It’s not clear whether it was because they were, you know, the wage earners. But there was a specific change in that locality happening economically in terms of economic roles and it was actually happening at the same time of the killings, right. I think you would have to study more whether this was connected or not. But it was certainly presented, for example, as expert testimony—as part of expert testimony before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights when they ruled on their main case on the killings in Ciudad Juárez. So just—it’s interesting. I think employment and I think quality and decent employment and I think economic empowerment are key. But we have to also study the short term, the medium term effect—what does that mean in terms of gender-based violence. I just think it’s a very interesting issue to look at more. In terms of El Salvador and education and the situation of girls, from my experience, at least in the realm of international law and human rights where I’ve worked with the most, the situation of girls is invisible. It’s invisible, and I think that’s something that we really have to work on, especially in the area of women’s rights. A lot of the standards that we have today were conceptualized not thinking of the particular situation of girls. Even though technically and legally they’re applicable, there’s a lot of nuances and needs there that need to be better studied and there’s a lot of governments that are trying to understand that now, especially—because especially in the past five years the situation of girls in Latin America have become more of a forefront issue, especially because of the situation of the early pregnancies and the situations of sexual violence. But in my view, we’re a long way to go in terms of understanding really the situation of girls and how to best apply international law to really understand the nuances, their needs, and to really protect their human rights, and I think that that’s very connected to your question as well. I think there needs to be more standards developed when it comes to connecting the situation of women and girls and I think we have to start with an understanding of what that means—that connection. We usually lump them together, right, but we don’t necessarily understand what it is—you know, what the specific needs of protection are for girls, you know, and where the differences may lie or the nuances may lie, and I think that’s a shortcoming that we have in international law from the—in that specific field, right. And I think that was it, right. OK. For now. (Laughter.) KATZMAN: So I will start by saying I’ll probably disappoint because I think they were really good questions and I’m not sure I have anything definitive to say in the context of the answers. But, you know, the point about the decrease in violence for women who had jobs, there was a lot of talk early on that the reverse was true and I think as time has gone on it’s become more and more clear that women who have resources are in a better position across the board. You know, it’s interesting in an agricultural context that you do have to be really careful about unintended consequences. So we have an experience where, for example, you use extension services to increase production of what are the cash crops and the cash crops are generally the domain of the male in the household, and that minimizes the percentage of the income of the entire household of the woman who’s generally managing the crops that feed everybody, and it upsets that gender balance and then you see a rise in violence, right. So I think that the big picture of be careful when doing these programs that all look like they might all be good if you then don’t make sure that the women are benefitting from the extension services and et cetera. Do you know, I have a supposition that girls and adolescents aren’t taken into the account in the statistics because we’re looking—the statistics that look at the economic impact—because we’re looking at the formal and informal economies but, yeah, I’m going to guess that those girls are very underrepresented in that and I think it’s a really interesting point and it’s something that I’m going to bring back and ask somebody about. You know, we’ve done some interesting programs in the schools and I was looking to try to find the results of this impact evaluation in either Guatemala or in Mexico where—and I couldn’t find it. There happens to be something wrong with the website, which is also something I’m going to bring back. It won’t let me in to that specific impact evaluation. But where the work that was done in schools with young kids and adolescents really did have an impact on future violence. So there are some programs out there and I’m, you know, more than happy to get in touch with you with those, and how to connect those two agendas about children and girls. So I do think that there’s an underlying issue here, which is if you look at the region and you look at the age of consent, that’s a place where actually more laws are actually needed and, you know, in a lot of countries there’s an issue here around indigenous rights. But that’s a piece of this that—you’re not even there yet and you can deal with that, and I think that’s actually a place where the two agendas do come together and relates to, you know, a woman’s right to her body and what happens there and family planning and, you know, we see all sorts of statistics around this, which I think could be better leveraged and thought about if we’re thinking about the intersection of the two agendas. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: So let me ask my colleagues—my CFR colleagues—may we go over for a few minutes? OK. So we have five minutes. So I see about five or so cards up. Why don’t we—why don’t we just go through the remaining— KATZMAN: Take them all. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Let’s tick them off. We’ll be efficient. We’ll do this. Go ahead. Q: Hi. Thank you so much. My name is Aapta Garg. I work with Promundo. And I wanted to ask in terms of when the—when governments are looking at these numbers around the economic cost, to what extent are they going deeper towards more entrenched and preventative—entrenched norms and preventative measures to address these rather than just kind of accommodating measures? I mean, we talk about the single-sex trains but that doesn’t stop men from harassing women on the trains. It just removes the women from those opportunities. And thinking beyond just kind of like how do we, like, put a bubble around women. And then I guess kind of a little bit further, how do we—to what extent are they also going beyond punitive measures to address violence? Because in many countries—I’m thinking of Brazil in particular—you have communities that have high interactions with the police that don’t necessarily address the root causes of violence but actually can exacerbate it. So how do we address violence without increasing police interactions for communities that are highly surveilled anyway? And then in terms of school-based interventions on preventative violence, in El Salvador our colleagues in Brazil are working on our program (age ?) program in the school-based situations there. I don’t have data on that. But I’m happy to connect you with our colleagues in Brazil if you would like that— KATZMAN: Sure. Q: —as well as anyone else who wants to have that information. Thank you. KATZMAN: Yeah, and I should have mentioned program (age ?) program in because we’re involved in that and it’s rolling out. Q: Hi. I’m Cindy Dyer from Vital Voices, and I just have a quick question as a follow-up to the question about laws and policies. I know that many of us are familiar with the many countries that are passing femicide laws to address high rates of GBV and they’re certainly willing to use their criminal justice system to address, you know, really outrageous forms of violence against women, which is good. But I’m wanting to know if any of you are familiar with countries that are trying to address GBV by focusing on the low-level violence against women so that we can try to prevent the need for all the femicide laws. Are there any countries that are really trying to aggressively address first-time violence or low-level violence that does not result in a front-page newspaper story? Q: Hi. I’m Jenna Ben-Yehuda, recovering State Department official—(laughter) —and I teach at GW on security and the Latin—in Latin America. MS.     : How is that recovery going? (Laughter.) Q: Right. I’m sure there are others. MS.     : (Laughs.) I’m sure there are. Q: So, you know, Rosa, your excellent comment on the need for donors and multilateral actors to come together on some of these issues had me thinking back to my Haiti days—like 2004, pre-earthquake, major raise round, right? So like these—I mean, could you use the donor roundtable model; like when there is a no-kidding crisis, what would this look like for multilaterals if this were really treated as a crisis? Because I think it is a crisis, but it’s kind of like a creeping, silent crisis. So if we take Julie’s point about the data and how these countries are barely creeping up with 2 percent GDP growth, right? I mean, if they could harness even half of that, there would be like landslide electoral victories for incumbents, right? Like, it would really be huge. So I mean, kind of a big question, but like what would that look like to have a huge, multilateral kind of donor community push to come together on these issues, collapse some of these strategies, band forces, and just charge ahead? Q: Sure. Hi, Cindy Arnson with the Woodrow Wilson Center. Thanks. Just as a note of advertisement, we’ve had over the past year and a half a project with the IDB on gender-based violence, lots of resources on our website covering various Latin American countries. My question goes mostly to Julie, and it has to do with how—and I’m not disputing the data, but I’m just wondering how one measures the economic impact of gender-based violence on GDP. And I agree that it’s a very good tool for getting people’s attention, but what goes into that calculation? Q: And mine builds off of—I’m Alex Arriaga with Strategy for Humanity. Mine builds off of the previous. So just umbrella question: In terms of what is happening in the region, there are some countries where we have really seen a reversal, and true threats on what has been gained, I think, in Nicaragua, for example. And at the same time, Julie, you have spoken about some very exciting initiatives with specific countries, so just big picture, I’d like to know how you are addressing—you know, how you’re—especially with the bank, how are you addressing the countries that are truly reversing, how that’s impacting your programming with them, and also, big picture, are there countries where you see the trend and potential for championing in a positive way? BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: And Judge Brower, you had a question. Q: Thank you. Charles Brower. I’m the only one not attributed to having any institutional connection on this list, but I’m an international judge in The Hague at the World Court, and also the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal by appointment of both Republican and Democratic administrations. I just have two questions. Apart from emphasizing the importance of training boys how to be tolerant, non-violent men—that’s the major half of the—you’ve got to deal with the offense as well as the defense. My two questions are simple. Do these efforts involve also those whose gender identification has changed—so-called trans? The other is the march of thousands upon thousands of people from Central America through Mexico currently to the southern border of the United States—I understand from interviews on television and from reading the print press a lot of it deals with the gang violence. People are afraid of being murdered because their relatives have been murdered, and they live in poor sections governed by gangs, but a lot of them have said—and its mostly women and children—heavily women and children saying if I go back there my husband will kill me. Now I wonder what all that says about the degree of success of these efforts in that part of the world. Does it simply say, well, you know, we’ve just got to keep on, or does it offer any judgment—preliminary judgment as to the level of success in that area? Period. Thank you. I figured it was appropriate for a gentleman— Q: In the interest of time I’ll just pass. Q: —to ask a question. KATZMAN: OK, I’ll pick off a few hopefully accurately. So the question about entrenched norms and how you get beyond treatment, on the one hand, and punitive measures on the other—so, you know, I’m not so sure we want to get beyond punitive measures, and I hear what you are saying about policing in communities, but I think that goes to the model of policing. And we actually—you know, I think the impunity is such a big problem that punitive action is OK in my book, in many ways. And so we’re really focused on the model of policing, so in Honduras we have worked really hard to change the model of policing to integrate with the country many more women into the police force so at the community level women can—and it goes to another question that was asked, I think—women can go to the police locale and report lower levels of violence, not when it ends up being femicide, and have somebody who takes that report seriously, and a process in place to respond to that kind of report. So, you know, it is part of changing the policing to a community model and not just a come in and raid the neighborhood to get guns, for example. So I think there is a certain amount of nuance associated with how you operate along that spectrum, which I think, Cindy, goes largely to your question as well. So Jenna, I just—I think that what you said is really interesting and important, and you know, there are parts of the region where there are donors who are focused on this topic, and where we have tried to collaborate, and we do collaborate with those donors. I don’t think that anyone really has—we’ve tried to cast this as a big issue, and we have—you know, we’re a demand-driven institution, and so where we have demand, that’s how we’re approaching it, with that kind of lens. But across the region, and thinking about it the way you said it, I think there’s some really good food for thought there, and I’d like to continue that conversation. So how do you measure the impact relative to GDP? I will tell you that those numbers are not IDB numbers; those are GiZ numbers, and the methodology which—the specific of which escape me at this moment was really very detailed. So there’s a really robust methodology which we would like to now replicate. We’re looking for donors so that we can replicate this in other countries, and Andy—who you know well—can have a conversation with you about that. Judge Brower, I—yes, so the question of people with other gender identities, that—if we think that women’s gender-based violence toward women is bad, you know, multiply it, raise it to the tenth power, right? And so that is a part of the work that we do, but we—I mean, without doubt it’s an even more complicated path, but the reforms that we are working on, and where we work on this topic, we do it in an umbrella sense so that it’s not just, you know, not—not bipolar—yeah, forgot the word that— MS.     : Gender binary? KATZMAN: Thank you—gender binary. Thank you. The comment that, you know, a lot of people are fleeing gender-based violence, I think there’s no question that the scale and the scope of the things that are being done are not sufficient to be able to say it can change in any way, shape, or form—at the macro level we’ve changed culture; it just hasn’t happened. And it has been exacerbated by the fuel of gangs and guns into Central America, and so it has made a bad situation worse; not a bad situation better. And everything that is being done—back to Jenna’s point—in some ways are still gathering drops in large buckets. And that’s why there is a lot more that needs to be done. And just, Alex, I—I think for—well, for—speaking for the IDB, it’s hard to—if you have a country that is going in the wrong direction, that probably—although not necessarily—implies that their engagement on the topic with an institution like ours is not necessarily robust, which makes it hard to then kind of have a dialogue around why that is happening—not impossible, but not as the central core of the message or the work with that country because they must not be focusing. But the flip side, we are trying very hard to take all of the very positive things that are going on in the region and use those to be advocates and leading voices. So when Mexico puts up the website that creates great transparency around the scope of the problem, we’re not marketing that platform to every country in the region. When Argentina says, OK, I’m going to do all these things from changing the way we investigate femicide, to changing the way that we train our officers, to gathering all the data in certain ways, we’re marketing that across the region. And I think that’s the way we can carry the positive messages and start to show how that pays dividends to the countries. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Well, with that, I want to thank our panelists. Please join me in thanking them. (Applause.) And I want to thank all of you for your excellent questions and participation, and for joining us. So stay tuned for more CFR roundtables. You will be getting them in your inbox. Thanks. (END) This is an uncorrected transcript.  

Today, close to one billion women worldwide are unbanked, which offers a significant market opportunity for financial service providers. Salie Mlay, Dr. Tosan Oruwariye, and Dr. Dolores Torres join us to discuss innovative approaches to strengthen women’s savings and financial inclusion, and explore how financial institutions stand to gain by diversifying their customer base. Mlay, Dr. Oruwariye, and Dr. Torres are members of the She Counts initiative, a global platform that aims to harness the power of financial services to put savings and financial tools in the hands of underserved women. This meeting is part of the ExxonMobil Women and Development Roundtable Series.   Transcript VOGELSTEIN: Good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon. Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations. Thank you for prying yourselves away from CNN’s political ticker long enough to be with us today. (Laughter.) I’m Rachel Vogelstein. I lead the Women and Foreign Policy Program here at the Council, which analyzes how elevating the status of women and girls advances U.S. foreign policy objectives. Our discussion this afternoon is focused on the role of the private sector in advancing women’s financial inclusion and how financial service providers can benefit from women’s access to savings accounts. We know the research that tells us that close to one billion women worldwide are unbanked and that the gender gap in access to financial services is particularly pronounced with women at the bottom of the pyramid, 28 percent less likely than men to have a bank account. We also know that numerous studies show that women’s financial inclusion offers a host of development benefits. So, therefore, we know what women and their families stand to gain from women’s financial inclusion. But what does the private sector stand to gain by diversifying its customer base to include more women? How significant is the market opportunity posed by women who are unbanked worldwide? And how can financial service providers capitalize on this opportunity and best reach women who currently lack access to bank accounts or who don’t make use of them? Today we are privileged to host three private sector leaders from around the world whose work is helping us answer these questions. They are all members of the She Counts initiative, a global platform to put savings and financial tools in the hands of women, spearheaded by ExxonMobil in partnership with Women’s World Banking and the Center for Global Development and launched here at the Council earlier this year. Today we’ll talk with these leading financial service providers about the opportunities and the challenges in reaching low-income women with savings programs. And these insights that they’ll provide will help inform the private sector strategy and government policy related to the economic advancement of women. So I’d like to begin by introducing all three of our panelists. First, we are thrilled to be joined by Dr. Dolores Torres, the vice chair of CARD Bank, a top microfinance bank in the Philippines, which was recognized as the financial inclusion champion of the central bank in the Philippines. Second, we are very pleased to be joined by Dr. Tosan Oruwariye, the cofounder of a digital financial services platform in Senegal, focused on using digital technology and entrepreneurship to facilitate access to financial services. And third, we are privileged to be joined by Salie Mlay, the acting business head of retail banking at NMB Bank, which is one of the largest commercial banks in Tanzania. Thanks to all of our distinguished speakers for joining us. Before we get started with our discussion, I want to welcome and thank two of the visionary leaders behind the She Counts initiative, first, Jim Jones, who leads ExxonMobil Foundation, including its catalytic work on women’s economic empowerment—thanks for being her today—as well as Mary Ellen Iskenderian, the president and CEO of Women’s World Banking, which is a global NGO devoted to women’s access to financial services. Mary Ellen, I’d love to invite you up to offer some opening remarks, and then we’ll go ahead and get started. Mary Ellen, over to you. (Applause.) ISKENDARIAN: Thank you, Rachel. And thank you for this wonderful event. And I couldn’t agree more, it’s such a wonderful distraction from everything that’s going on outside today. So thank you very much to CFR more broadly for hosting this event today. As Rachel mentioned, we were here six months ago. And I think I remember seeing a few of you around the room when Women’s World Banking and the ExxonMobil Foundation and the Center for Global Development announced the launch of She Counts. And we envisioned this as a global platform for best-in-class financial service providers serving low-income women specifically with savings, and that’s a really critical difference. And we’re so grateful to Jim and the ExxonMobil Foundation for having the farsightedness really to recognize the importance of savings and how important savings are to women and bringing women into the formal financial sector, because at Women’s World Banking we’ve been focused there for a long time. Because we know that whether women are saving under the mattress or in some other informal savings group, that’s a key part of their financial interaction. But as Rachel mentioned, not enough financial service providers are recognizing the enormous market opportunity that those women savers represent. So when we announced She Counts, we had only just started a fairly rigorous process of due diligence. We, as I said, we wanted this to be best in class, so we were looking all over the world for really the best examples of sustainable and equitable solutions for low-income women to build the safety nets that allows them to build more secure and prosperous futures for themselves and their families. And so I’m particularly excited to announce the first cohort of institutions that have joined both She Counts and we were thrilled they’ve also accepted the invitation to our global network, the Women’s World Banking Global Network of Institutions. Each one of these institutions you’ll hear from today is showing that it is possible to build both a business and a social case for serving women well with savings products. Each of these institutions is working in a slightly different way with different models, in very different markets, and they’ve come up with different solutions. So, again, to repeat Rachel, she’s introduced you already to Dorie Torres, who’s worked with us for many, many years from CARD Bank in the Philippines, the national microfinance bank NMB in the largest retail bank in Tanzania, and then I think we’re all particularly excited to hear the digital story that MaTontine will bring to the picture today. So we will continue to build this—oh, and I’m sorry. We had—we had Diamond Bank with us by phone and I gather the hookup, the connectivity was perfect, so the team from Diamond was participating right along in the conversation this morning. But we’ll continue to build this group beyond this initial cohort and really look forward to continuing to share what we learn about serving women well with savings, with the broader CFR community as well. Thank you so much for joining us. (Applause.) VOGELSTEIN: Mary Ellen, thank you for those framing remarks and for reminding all of us what’s at stake here. So let’s go ahead and get started with our discussion. I’d like to start by posing a question to all of you and asking you to define the market opportunity that’s at stake here. Tell us what private sector financial institutions stand to gain by, as we mentioned earlier, diversifying their customer base and ensuring women’s financial inclusion. How significant is the economic opportunity posed by unbanked women in the country in which you work? Why don’t we start here, Dolores, and we’ll move down the line. TORRES: Yeah. In the Philippines, we do serve the poorest of the poor and primarily women. Right now, we have 6.8 million clients, but the start—but the start was very difficult, you know, to convince women to go to meetings every week, to save weekly a compulsory savings. Now it’s one U.S. dollar equivalent weekly savings. So we started training them with discipline, because before, they don’t pay government loans, so that was a—that was a huge, huge barrier that we had to overcome in terms of assisting them. So we were able to train them with very good discipline. After they are saving weekly, we provided the small loans also. We started with only less than a U.S. dollar in 1986. Now we have three banks in our organization, two rural banks and an SME bank. An SME bank is to graduate the microfinance clients to get more loans. And while they were very poor, they become good at managing their business, and now they are entrepreneurs, small and midsize entrepreneurs, and we are serving them in the bank. While it was very difficult at the start, we did not give up on women. We said women must really learn how to save, and then we provided other services. But apart from that, we would like to bring them up from poverty. And through savings and then providing them with loans, now they own most of the institutions that we have (by card ?). We have twenty-two we call (card ?) mutually enforcing institutions, who are all helping to eradicate poverty in the Philippines. And the women clients who have proven to be good at managing their business and in saving every week are now the owners of most of these institutions. The biggest of the twenty-two institutions that we have established is the insurance. So we started with savings, now it has grown to another major need of the women, which is insurance. And they own that company. We started with one company that provides life insurance, now we have three other companies that provide non-life, health, and other insurance needs of the clients. So we started with, you know, sourcing funds, like from Women’s World Banking. We had a standby letter of credit available from here in New York—or, no, with a commercial bank here with a standby letter of credit, the Women’s World Banking. But now the entire twenty-two institutions are all sustainable and are all mutually enforcing our poverty eradication mission in the Philippines. And we have, you know, partnership with companies also that do adhere to our mission. Like, we have a partnership with a commercial insurance and, you know, commercial insurance, they do pay claims in one year, three years, or five years. We made it one day, three days, and five days. (Laughter.) And that commercial company is now adhering to that. And they don’t use their adjuster, they use us to tell them it’s time to pay in one day, three days, and five days. But we continuously challenge it. Now we’re using eight/twenty-four, which means we pay in eight hours and within twenty-four hours. And ninety-nine percent of the claims are being paid. And we’re insuring forty percent of the Philippines—the insured Filipinos in the Philippines, the largest so far, according to the insurance commission of the Philippines. So forty percent of our country with a bank card, that started with just believing that women, when trained to do disciplined savings and borrowing, can become a major economic mover in the country. VOGELSTEIN: So a lot of different strategies and now you’ve expanded remarkably. I wonder if we can turn to you, Tosan, to talk about the economic opportunity posed by unbanked women where you are. ORUWARIYE: So we’re a fintech company about two years old and our mission is poverty alleviation. In Senegal, where I come from, where we have our core business, I’ll say about eighty percent of the population are unbanked or underbanked. We think it’s about a hundred-million-dollar business opportunity. And for the Francophone region, almost a one-billion-dollar opportunity. So before I talk a little bit about MaTontine, I will talk about what tontines are for people that might not be familiar with it, because this is the core foundation of our business model. So tontines are savings groups and there are different kinds. There’s VSLAs, that are very common with the NGOs. But ours is called ROSCAs that’s a term used here, and it’s when it’s a rotating savings and credit association. And it’s when, like, say ten people come together and they decide, oh, we’re going to contribute ten dollars every month into a common pot. At the end of the month, one person in that group takes a hundred dollars. And then the next month, they come again together, like in February, they do the same thing. And this continues until all ten of them have received a hundred dollars. That’s the way traditionally the poor have saved. Tontines are all over the world. In China, it’s called wi (ph), in India, chit funds, cundina in Mexico. So it’s used by the poor in many developing countries to save bulk money. The problem we’re trying to solve is, how do you lend small amounts of money, a hundred-fifty-dollars, to the poor at scale where we come from? We found that in our region, the cost structure and the legacy systems of the banks and MFIs have made it unprofitable and a struggle to do that at scale and profitability because they have to have branches, loan officers, and things like that to make this work. And they use the same effort, whether they are loaning ten thousand dollars or just a hundred dollars. Well, what we have done is that we have used technology, leveraged technology to digitize this traditional savings system and incorporate them into our business model, thereby reducing the cost of borrowing of up to seventy-five percent. So we do this through a basic mobile phone. So our members, who are in the rural areas where there are not branches, can, from their phone—if anybody has been to Africa, in every village they have people with an (umbrella ?) that gets them credit for their phones. And we use those—(inaudible)—networks. So they go there, give the money to the man, and it becomes mobile money, so they can save on the platform. So the issue of mobility, of them traveling far to save in the banks, it’s gone because they can do this right from the privacy of their phone, in the privacy of their home. And they (feel ?) security, of having this money at home to get stolen, it’s gone, because it’s now in digital money. So that’s what we’ve done, we’ve leveraged technology to reduce this cost of borrowing. But more importantly, in our region, seventy to eighty percent of the population are in one form of savings group or the other. And within this seventy to eighty percent, seventy percent are women. And that’s how we reach the underbanked, our target population, which are women that earn five dollars or less a day. VOGELSTEIN: And digital financial services are a critical part of the strategy that you’ve employed in Senegal. Salie, I wonder if you can talk to us about your work in Tanzania and what the market potential looks like there. MLAY: NMB, I’m working with NMB. They are the largest retail bank in Tanzania with branches—with 2,220 branches across the network. So by being on every corner, now we see, through our branches, we see what is happening in society. And we came to realize women, according to our culture, are the ones who are managing the family most of the time. They are taking care of kids, they are—they are working very hard in the farms and in areas, different areas as to keep up the family. Yes, we have men, but men, they are meeting the basic things, like investment in house building and other issues. But women, day to day of the family they are dealing with it. So by looking at this, we came to realize there is a very big potential in that class. And as my colleagues said, there is a way of traditional women, they come up as a—as a group themselves to save what little they have so that they can deposit and lend to one another or to help one another to solve their problems day to day. But how to save, they need some kind of guidance, knowledge, because some of them, they think that they have little money, they cannot save. So by being everywhere, we thought that it’s our time to take this financial inclusion to women and be able to come up with a product. And we worked together with our partners to development a product known as pamoja. Pamoja means “together.” It’s a Swahili name, as to make them feel this belongs to them and, you know, buy the idea, because most of the women, they are frightened to come to the bank, they think the bank is for the rich people. So you might find it in some areas, in rural areas, where we are, sometimes we find the branches is just close to the community, but women, they are frightened to get into the branch. So to build their confidence through education and be able to transform their savings into a bank account, which they can work together, we formed the product which is known as pamoja account. And we link it with a mobile phone, banking, whereby individual members, they can have the—they can have their private account where whatever they do they just put it, they just go to the small guys who have the agents, have, like, seven thousand agents of NMB, whom we have enabled them to receive and pay money into digital wallet so that they can transfer from one place to another, from one account from different banks can pay different services. So what happened is pamoja account is the account they were supposed to send cash. They select one day a week or a month they meet together, they collect from members, and go and deposit in their account. Some of them, they used to put it in a—in a box, they put the box on top of the table, and everybody sent their money there, they recorded who brought their money, and they carry it and hide it at home. So some of them, they were—thugs comes and, you know, they rob them. So we use the same concept to develop that account that they can put money together. We don’t charge them, they just put free of charge, and we encourage them to use the mobile phone to send the money to this account. And once they send money, the chairman and secretary of the group get the message that so-and-so member has contributed a certain amount of money. So far, we haven’t been able to fulfill the need across the country. And that’s why currently we are trying to develop the—we are (on the stage ?). We have prepared a proposal, specific proposal that now the bank and the management, as long as it’s so committed on this group, will be able to make sure that we dedicate—we come up with the team, the dedicated team, to deal with women, to increase their knowledge and the way to attend their meetings and make sure that we give them different options of savings and benefits and even knowledge of finance, how to manage their finances. That’s the proposition that we are—we are about to conclude. That’s what we’ve done. VOGELSTEIN: So you’ve each talked a little bit about the models you’ve employed, some similarities, some differences. I wonder if we could dig into that. And also, if you could speak to not just the opportunity you’ve described, but also some of the challenges in reaching and retaining these women as clients. Dolores, perhaps you can talk about the member-agent model that you’ve employed to support the acquisition and retention of clients. Has it worked? And what have the challenges been? TORRES: Yeah. Actually, we just started with the digital transformation. We were, from day one in 1986, we were doing manual recording. And then in 1997, when we started the CARD Bank, that’s when we started computerizing. But only the loan monitoring system had been computerized at the beginning. Now we’re embarking on the core banking system where the three—initially, CARD Bank will be online with all its branches. Right now, only about 35 percent of its branches are with the core banking system. And we started the mobile collection (shifts ?) wherein we don’t break collection (shifts ?) anymore for weekly meetings. Instead, they use mobile phone and—(inaudible)—for collecting. And in the mobile money or mobile financial system, we hired an agent. The agent that we hired are clients also, members who have a proven, good track record with us and who know all the members in the village, so they will be—they are trusted already. We trained them. And then we hired staff from operations, who have been with us for years, for some years, to work as the agent supervisors. What is very challenging is the acceptance of the women clients, especially the older ones, because they said they don’t have mobile phones, which is contrary to statistics, because the Philippines has one hundred million population, according to statistics we have one hundred twenty people with mobile phones. So some of them have two or three, so we don’t believe them. So we don’t give up on that. We don’t give up on the alibis of the women. But we try to—we try to bring them back to how CARD started. So we started with only twenty pesos in 1986. We have grown this much, so we don’t give up on the growth that we have done, we don’t give up on the 6.8 million women clients that we have. But we would like to do digital transformation in order to serve more and to serve the next generation because the next generation are the younger people who will be using digital technology in their transactions. So we would like the women to believe that if they apply the technology, then transactions will be cheaper. We will reduce the costs, we will reduce the interest rates when it becomes successful. So acceptance is a challenge. In fact, I was telling this morning that because predominantly women in the Philippines are Catholic, so they say novena in order for CARD not to be successful in the digital transformation. Because they—because they really love CARD and when we say we have to do digital transformation, you know, they are very loyal to us, so they might follow, even if they don’t want to follow. So some of them, they said novena so that Jesus will hear them and will not make our digital transformation successful. (Laughter.) But, you know, we didn’t give up on that one or those women who were there. We went there, we talked about the success that CARD has so far made and we don’t want to lose them, we don’t want to lose connection. We want to do the technology so that we’ll be able to reach more. Then they converted. They used the technology. And now in that village where they are saying the novena, all of them are using mobile technology. So the central bank went there and asked, are there women we can now recruit as members? No, everybody are members and all are using mobile phones. So we don’t give up on the women. We realized that they will, because they are very loyal to CARD, they will follow what we’re introducing, although with some resistance. So what we’re doing now is really to do a lot of motivational activities, especially inculcating or transferring the culture and values that made CARD successful in its program so that it will go through generations. So, yeah. And then especially the agents, the agents that we’re hiring, the staff who are supervising the agents must be the mirror of the culture and values that we—that we have at CARD. At CARD, the retirement is sixty, so in 2015 I retired from CARD. (Laughter.) I am just now advising CARD. But it is very important that we leave behind the culture and values that we set for CARD. We call it—(inaudible)—with competence, discipline, family spirit, simplicity, stewardship, you know, and we would like to leave that behind. And we are, so far, the only MFIs in the country that recruit the sons and daughters of our clients. Because we don’t have any secrets, you know, we’re very transparent, so ninety percent of our workforce of seven thousand today are sons and daughters of our clients. So if we retire, the sons and daughters of the clients will be managing CARD. And then ownership is shared also to the clients, so we’re leaving behind the institutions that we have established. And we are working hard right now to ensure that the culture and values will remain through generations. VOGELSTEIN: So a lot of different strategies to overcome some of the challenges you mentioned, persistence being one, meeting women where they are, and then, of course, this commitment to the values you articulated. Tosan, can you tell us more about your use of data analytics to provide financial services for women, including but not limited to savings? How has that been important in your model? ORUWARIYE: A really interesting question. For us, we do have a proprietary credit scoring model that we’ve overlaid on our basic savings platform, and so we do have a lot of data. But it’s important to note that the products we offer outside of savings are not necessarily based on the data analytics, they’re only based on what our members need. From the beginning of when we started this company, (one of our researchers ?) with NGOs had gone to talk to—(inaudible)—to understand why, despite the fact that they’ve had VSLA programs for many years, there was still a struggle with adoption. And one of the things we realized and from our innovation testbed, which is part of our business strategy, and talking to the members was that some of the product did not—did not address their needs. And so it was very critical for us to, in our—to, in our testbed, to co-create a product with our members. And when we did that, we found that the products we created were easily adopted. Also, we found a high issue of lack of trust in our region with the traditional FSPs. Many of them, they’re not very literate and so when they open checking accounts, you know how they charge them money for the checking account, they felt their monies were stolen, so they didn’t trust the banks, for those that could get to the banks. Then they were those that could never get to the bank because it was so far from them. So a lot of that initial research we did and in our innovation tests, but informed the kind of products we develop. Now, when we have an idea of the kind of product that they want, they might not say, oh, I want a credit product or I want insurance. They might say things like, oh, when my child is sick, I lose all my money, so we start thinking you need something in terms of insurance. Now, when they—when they talk about the products, we then bring them to our testbed and work with them to see if this product meets their needs. So we test the delivery, the interface, because everything is happening with the mobile phone, the interface, and then we look at the adoption and the usage. So that is how we decide what products we offer our members, not just savings. So right now, we offer three core products on our platform. We offer a credit platform, which is unique to our members and was co-created. It’s called a tontine advance. And that product was developed because our members said we don’t want a standard loan. The last time we worked with the MFI to give us credit, I had to sell my cow to pay back. I don’t want that. So this product was developed with input on the rates and things like that. We also have a micro health insurance product because many of them talked about illness. And we have a life insurance product that we offer currently on the platform. We have an opportunity for various other products, but as a startup we have limited resources and bandwidth to do this. But we feel that the way for us to work with our members is to really work on their identified needs. Because with our products, we have a ninety-eight percent adoption and almost a hundred percent usage, which is unheard of, because they feel it’s their own and that trust coefficient has been built. VOGELSTEIN: So in-depth market research, co-development to get at some of the trust challenge that you mentioned. ORUWARIYE: Yeah. And we—and we use human-centered design principles when we do this. VOGELSTEIN: Salie, much has been written about the promise of digital financial services to help reach low-income women. Can you tell us about some of the challenges that you’ve faced and how you’ve overcome them? MLAY: OK, thank you. Before I speak about the challenges, there’s something very important I forgot to speak at the beginning on the proposal of saving for women. As I said, most of the women are the ones who are taking care of kids. So in our savings proposition, we included—we have another phase connected, which is youth banking. We call it wajibu, “responsibility.” Wajibu is a Swahili name, it means “responsible,” “be responsible.” And whereby, we need to help women by teaching or training or taking through kids in financial inclusion by saving the little amount of money they have. And if they don’t have, to go through a certain education because that proposition of young banking, within there’s a training, there’s a package of training that trains youngsters to know how to save so that they can help their parents. If their parents, their mother, they are saving a little, they can save even the little they get when they are being given pocket money to do different things, they can save a little amount of money of which they can use in their future. And by building that culture of savings, we’ll have the women in the future who have grown up in a saving culture. So we have, like, we have divided that program into three levels. We have from one day kid to seventeen, which how we take them through the training and their product we have put up for savings. It’s different a little bit with the people who are—the kids who are starting from thirteen who are already on the street, they are doing their own things, but they are not in the family to seventeen again; and from seventeen to eighteen years where—in our country, where a youngster goes to university, they can stay on their own, they can decide to do anything with their—with their money. So from one year, to seventeen—to thirteen, when we open—to open this account, there’s no charges, we give interest, but they are managed by parents. If the young one is aged between one to thirteen, parents is the one who is managing their account. And if it’s about thirteen—we call it—(inaudible)—that means—(inaudible)—who are coming up—the account will be managed by—will be transacted by the particular kid, but whatever he or she does into that account, their parent will be notified through SMS so they can question the kid, where did you spend the money and why? Yeah? And then, from eighteen—these are the guys who go to college—they don’t need to be asked, but whatever they do, their account of savings is cheap, no maintenance charges. They get the interest. The good thing about this one is that the age from five to thirteen when they go to primary school, we have designed the training program where we—where we talk—where we have—we have—we are talking to the headmaster, headmistress of the schools. They provide us an opportunity to go to the—to the particular schools, training them. The first meeting, we call parents and the kids in that schools. We tell them about why savings, how is it possible together so that they can buy the idea. So the second session, we sit with kids themselves because they’ve already got their confidence from their parents, parents they provide everything, they provide the idea. Then we talk to them. Then after this is when we open the account. And in branches, we have provided a certain day we call kids’ day. That’s when the kids, they have been brought to the bank, although their parents can help them to fill the form, but, you know, they can—they can stand on the platform and give the money to the bank teller who can, you know—they start building. All this, we are focusing on women because women, they are carrying the whole burden and want to bridge. So you see the whole program, at the end of the day, they come, they become one. Now, the challenge of digital in this banking, savings banking. Because of the situation in our country, we have been fortunate to have—to have the program which is run through USSD and they’re the one in app. Because the young generation, they like smartphones and they can do a lot of things. But the old women, they need the simple one. And at the beginning, they were even afraid. So the issue of low level of literacy is our challenge, and that’s why our main focus is in education. And we need to really push training about using—how to keep—how to save and how to use even simple technology to be able to transact. And we are looking forward, as I said, we are looking forward, it’s something to come, even the simple group lending through their groups that they have formed up. So the main challenge is education. And we really need to educate people and reach more people at the village remote areas. VOGELSTEIN: So the promise of mobile technology is great, but education, norm shifting, habit formation, incentives, a lot of what you’ve all talked about, also critical in order to capitalize on the potential of digital financial services. Well, I’d love to open the discussion to questions. So please, raise your placard, state your name and affiliation, and we’ll get to as many as we can. Please. Q: Thank you. Pardon my ignorance, I’m not nearly as sophisticated in this field as all of you are. But Rachel made a very good point that there’s a massive commercial opportunity and economic opportunity in this field. And lots of Western financial institutions have made—have done vanity projects, like Goldman Sachs did 10,000 Women and they’ve paid lip service to this issue, but it seems like it lacks substance. What do you think the primary gating issue is, each of you, to having these institutions involved in a more meaningful way? VOGELSTEIN: What do you think it would take for the private sector to reach the entire population you’ve described? Earlier, Salie, you mentioned that you’ve reached part, but not all of the population. The goal is to reach all of the population as opposed to a small part. How do you get that done? What would it take? MLAY: So it took us—it’s a journey, but I see the green light at the end. Because, for example, we have three thousand members of staff permanently employed by NMB Bank. And as I said, our bank has branches in all regions and district levels. And we have come up with NMB agents whereby we have, like, seven thousand agents so far. We started two years ago, now we have seven thousand agents scattered. And this year in the budget, we plan to add another six thousand agents. That means we need to be very close to the community. And our slogan at NMB, we said, whenever you say NMB, our customer always responds “close to you.” We want to be very close to them. And we want to use the upgrade services that are being provided by agents to be able to open an account and even answer some quick questions to the people around them because, you know, they are scattered all over. So it will take us some years, but I see every year we are moving, we are—we are—we are—we are spreading and bringing more and more customers who were not banking with us. And even the confidence, the level of confidence as you go to some villages, like when you go to the northern province or when you talk about Kilimanjaro or Arusha, you see now the level, there is a very big improvement. You go to the very remote area, you find somebody with a mobile phone, you ask do you have an account; they’ll say yes, I have an account with NMB and they transact. You say, how many times do you go to the branch? They say no, I don’t need to go to the branch. I get money. I just go to the (umbrella ?) down there, to the agent, I deposit the money. And if I want to pay for, let’s say, electricity bill, water, I just—I just call my phone, all those services are there, I can—I just pay. So you see now more and more people are becoming aware of what is happening. So that’s why we are saying our focus is to spread more knowledge. And some of the parents, funny enough, we went one of the school just to inspect one of my branch, how do they do with the school training about the kids when they go to see the young banking, they go to the schools. I did some surprise visit in one of the branches. When I went to school, I just sit at the back and listen to the discussion. So one parent raised up a hand and said I didn’t know with what I have I can save two dollars a week, I didn’t know. So that gave me a notion that what was lacking is the knowledge about what is happening and how you can manage what are the priorities on day-to-day expenses out of what you are making. So I’m glad and I’m happy the top management of NMB is really willing and they are eager to see that we push on that side of educating the community. And then in addition to that in our (CC area ?), where we take one percent of our net profit every year to return to the community, we focus on only three things: health, we help the hospitals, education. So part of it will go to the school, we busy desks so children can sit and be able to listen. And once we donate, we talk to them about—again we have the session where we tell them why we are here, and then we use that opportunity also to disseminate the education about the finance and savings. VOGELSTEIN: Tosan? ORUWARIYE: That’s a really complicated question you have asked. When you look at Africa, I think that sometimes there people use broad strokes to describe different parts of Africa. For instance, in Kenya, they have a high smart-phone penetration rate of sixty percent with an internet penetration rate of almost eighty-four percent. That means you can do a lot more with technology there and be more innovative, and opportunities for fintech and other bigger companies that want to use innovation and technology to reach the underbanked. In our own region, our smart-phone penetration is five percent, so the technology is already limited. And now we have regulation in Francophone Africa, if anybody knows it—very inflexible, and it is behind the innovation curve. So you can’t use those strategies. I think if any organized unit wants to come into Africa, it depends on the region. They ought to be thinking of coming in for the long haul. I see in our region for the next five years we’ll still be using USSD technologies and SMS just because it’s going to be a slow uptake. And any organization needs to understand that as they come in. But the opportunities for them—your research, and She Counts, and Women’s World Banking, you’ve shown that women that save consistently are more profitable in their customer life cycle, so organizations that want to work with women know that. This has been studied for years. We have also found on our platform that the best savers have the lowest default rate, who are able to upsell and cross-sell products, would include insurance, micro-insurance, and they will pay for these products which are the profit pools for the organizations as they think of coming into this market. I say they need to come in with bundled services because, for us, we’ve found that savings alone wasn’t enough of a value proposition for our clients. Bundle services, but always try to get a sense for what the clients need. I always talk about members because for you to come into our business you have a part of a group. You can’t just come in because the group, which is our risk in terms of the savings. There I always talk about members but they are also our client. VOGELSTEIN: Dolores? TORRES: Yeah. I think I’ve shared an example of a private institution who becomes successful also in joining the—for example, the CARD. It’s when they are ready also to believe in what the micro-finance institutions believe, like we need to provide fast claims; no need to wait for one, three or five years if we can do it one, three, five days. Why not? So also assisting women sincerely needs time and dedication. We will not be able to create very strong values, credit discipline among women clients if we did not commit a lot of our time also. And in doing that, profitability has to be sacrificed at the beginning, you know, where we did it without, you know, even reaching break-even point, but we didn’t give up on it. Now if we do it, and if we assist more women, then profitability comes and sustainability of what we’re doing comes. So if private institutions are willing to do that – Also addressing risk like disruptive weather, climate condition, typhoons like in Philippines. We have experienced the strongest typhoon and, you know, we need to sacrifice a lot, and the private institutions that has—helping us also sacrifice their money so that we can help the poor on day one that they were affected by strong calamities. VOGELSTEIN: Salie? Q: (Off mic)—really so very impressive. I also feel such sympathy for older people on the wrong side of the technological divide—(laughter)—but a question. Has there been concerted efforts to pull in high-net-worth women in these marketplaces? I have a lot of data showing that if you look at many growth hubs, the wealth that’s vested in women is vested in hands of people who very much want gender empowerment as part of their investment portfolio. In fact, they call it out. They want performance as badly as men, but they have a bigger basket of goods, and gender empowerment is right at the top of the list. And one would think that that would be a huge opportunity because they particularly want to invest in their own communities. So I’m just wondering whether, you know, this is being tapped into in ways I don’t know about. ORUWARIYE: Yeah, I can tell you from our journey that as a start-up you are doing something very new, and the finance industry, which have own sort of regulations, and so we had to spend the first year doing an alpha and a beta pilot, and trying to get the data that could attract the partners and tell the story we want to tell. So we did that, and we—I sort of insisted that we have a research on, and when you are doing research on the work you are doing it takes some time. We’re just completing our quasi-experimental study where we worked with the World Bank to sort of gather that data, and I think for us at this time the first two years was just getting the data, telling the story, and showing that track record. And we have found it very difficult, and we’ve not actively gone out to look for financing because our strategy was to get the data because everybody asks you, what’s the traction? So our strategy was to really look for grants to get the data and tell the story. Now we just got our partnership with the World Savings Bank Institute, and MasterCard Foundation, and COFINA Senegal, one of the largest MFIs in the country to serve fifty thousand women, and it’s because we did this groundwork that we can now go back now to investors and say, look, we now have this, we are ready to expand. We’ve seen the data, we’ve done the—this is the deal, and move forward. We have found that talking—we’ve already started talking to some social impact investors, and we found that although they say they are social impact investors, they’re not quite as willing to give the rope we expected. They want the (ten Xs ?), the time to exit is shorter than we would like, so it’s just that it seemed that—so we just started that journey, and I’m sure we’ll expand our investor pool. VOGELSTEIN: Other thoughts on investments by high-net-worth individuals? TORRES: Come again? VOGELSTEIN: Any other thoughts you want to chime in on? TORRES: Oh, yeah. I remember an event that we had in Manila where Women’s World Banking helped us gather prominent women in the Philippines in order to support the early stage of microfinance, and that was very successful. A lot of women provided funding, technical support to the early stage of the microfinance operations in the Philippines, so that—yeah, that was done with the help of Women’s World Banking because we work with the poor, and it’s difficult to entice high-network women without the help of Women’s World Banking. VOGELSTEIN: Jewel (sp)? Q: (Off mic)—World Bank or with ExxonMobil to backstop some kind of a takeout so that you could attract high-net-worth women because I agree with Sylvia Ann (sp). I’m in the same—I’m in the investment business, and we see tremendous need for impact investing, especially from women. But as a financial advisor, we would not allow them to—or we would not recommend that they invest in a startup; otherwise, we would call that a contribution, not an investment. But there is a structured finance here that could happen with your backing that I think would be quite powerful—just a suggestion. VOGELSTEIN: Another good idea. I think we have time for one final question here. Q: Hi. Rachael Wagner from Atairos Management. I think for those of us sitting here in New York, it’s really interesting to hear all the work that you are doing, and it’s very admirable what your organizations are doing. Is there anything specific—you know, for those of us who are here who, you know, are sort of very far away from the on-the-ground work that you are doing—that we could do to be helpful to each of your missions? There may not be, but I’m just curious if there is. VOGELSTEIN: That’s a great suggestion. We had one contribution here that Jewel made. Let’s broaden it out. What could folks do to support the mission that you are driving towards? Please, Salie? MLAY: Yeah, for example, I can say we are successful in this young generation banking, and we work with the world women in terms of research, product designing. We work with them very well. And what is coming, because we are looking forward after looking—(inaudible)—the women at the rural area and remote areas. Yes, they are saving, but they need a small amount to bridge them into small business. They have to give small, small loan that will match with their—what they currently do as to be able to generate more money. We are—what we can get, the kind of help that we may need is to start that proposition of group lending to women, and what kind of education that will help them to be solid and understand how to go about so that it can be sustainable because what we are looking for is to have their sustainable group lending to women, and it—and it’s a lot of work on the sense that as we—the issue of lending to women is very sensitive because of culture, the way they are born to the family and day-to-day responsibilities, so we need to design a kind of training that will help them to be able to balance their daily activity, managing their family at the same time they are being able to go with what is going on. What I’m trying to say is that if you look at the African woman from morning to the evening, what she does, in every hour, she will be—she is busy. But again, she is busy in two folds: one, it’s family responsibility of making sure there is food at the home, it has been cooked, the kids have gone to school, you know, and the other side, she has to do some little economic activity to generate few dollars, something like that. Now to get education how to balance these things and be able to stay in the game properly, so it needs somebody on the ground to understand what is happening and come up with, you know. ORUWARIYE: For us, as a startup for MaTontine, I think we need to—for me, two clear areas. One is that we need—(inaudible)—some financing to (only ?) lend our members. But despite the fact we have these partnerships with the MFIs, they are still reluctant to lend so much money, and the demand outstrips the supply. And we feel that for us to really make the impact we need more players in the field that are willing to lend. And we had initially the challenges of partnerships, so strategically we did pilots; in fact, that’s how we gathered members. We said, OK, let’s do a pilot. Let’s call in, see what works—(inaudible)—scale. We can see what works to make you comfortable. But despite that, there still was division with the traditional FSPs. Nobody wants to lend to the poor. And when they do, the rates are just almost usury, and the poor can’t make any headway from those rates. So right now we feel, as a fintech company and as a small organization, that area of being able to have some kind of structured finance and to (only ?) lend to our members, to increase and impact more women, is something we are really looking at. And also another big area for us is really working in terms of designing products for the women. As a small company, it takes a lot of our efforts, trial and error, but we feel if we have some support in that area we can really impact them because when we go and do our research in the field, they tell us a lot about what they need, what will work for them, and we just don’t have the resources to do all of that at once. TORRES: In the case of CARD, we are thirty-two years old, and fortunately the savings that we have generated is more than the loans that we have been in—outstanding with our women, but because we are embarking on digital transformation, if you can help us increase or improve the connectivity and the cost of the mobile phone to poor women, it will be a big help. VOGELSTEIN: Well, it is clear that much more work remains, but also that the economic potential for women and for the private sector is significant. So thanks to all of our speakers for joining us here this afternoon, for your insights. We are grateful to all of you. Thank you very much. (Applause.) 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