Development

Despite the relationship between women’s labor force participation and growth, legal barriers continue to inhibit women’s economic potential around the world. According to the World Bank’s 2018 Women, Business, and the Law report, 2.7 billion women globally are legally restricted from having the same choice of jobs as men. World Bank legal expert and 2018 report author Sarah Iqbal explores the most comprehensive data set on legal barriers women face worldwide and discusses how to level the legal playing field for women. This meeting is generously supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.    Transcript BIGIO: Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. My name is Jamille Bigio. I’m a senior fellow with the Council’s Women and Foreign Policy Program. Our program has worked with leading scholars for 15 years to analyze how elevating the status of women and girls advances U.S. foreign policy and national security interests. I want to take a moment before we begin to thank our advisory council members who are here with us today as well as the Gates Foundation for its generous support of today’s discussion. I also want to remind everyone that the presentation discussion and question-and-answer period will be on the record. So right now you have, hopefully, heard the estimate that $28 trillion could be added to global annual GDP simply by leveling the playing field between women and men at work. But despite these financial stakes, most countries still have laws and policies on the books that make it harder for women to work. The World Bank is helping countries understand the effect of these discriminatory laws. The Women, Business, and the Law report, now in its fifth iteration, examines how the legal and regulatory environment affects women’s ability to get jobs and to start businesses. They’ve just launched their latest research with some sobering findings. Here are just a few—that 2.7 billion women globally are legally restricted from having the same choice of jobs as men; 104 economies still have laws preventing women from working in specific jobs; and, in the context of the #MeToo movement, as we look at workplace discrimination, 59 economies have no laws on sexual harassment in the workplace. But the Bank also found that there’s reason for hope. Governments are starting to take notice and are undertaking legal reforms that are helping to make the environment more equal for women to work and to pursue economic opportunities. I’m thrilled that we are joined today by World Bank legal expert and the 2018 report author, Sarah Iqbal. She comes to this role with a rich background in the law, on issues of financial inclusion, and on women’s rights. We’re so lucky to be able to hear from her about the World Bank’s latest research. Sarah, before we dive into what the research has actually found, can you talk to us a little bit about how this report came about? Why has the World Bank undertaken this massive research effort to document the legal rights of women around the world? IQBAL: Thank you so much, Jamille. And I’d like to thank all of you for coming here this morning. It’s really an honor and a privilege for me to be here, and I wanted to explain a little bit how we came about doing this research. It’s the tenth year now and the fifth edition of the report, and I have to say the reason we started doing this was almost accidental. Some of you who work on women’s rights might realize this and we started this because about 10—actually, 11 years ago, the World Bank’s board, which is composed of all of the member states of the World Bank, asked another project that we work on—the Doing Business project—to look at how the legal and regulatory environment for entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized enterprises actually affects women. So the idea is there’s a legal and regulatory environment. It should function the same for women and for men just because it’s general neutral. But so we started asking survey respondents, mainly lawyers, judges, people who work in setting up sort of enterprises, how is this different for men and women and what we got was a series of answers that, basically, told us we didn’t know what we didn’t know and we were asking the wrong questions. So, basically, what these people from 190 countries around the world told us is, you’re asking about up here, but the barriers—the legal barriers—for women are actually down here. So you’re missing all these barriers to entry—things like sort of do you need your husband’s permission to, you know, leave your home—do you need your husband’s permission to actually sign a contract or register a business. If you’re already looking at sort of operating in the business environment, you’re not focusing on unequal property rights, unequal inheritance, job restrictions on women—all of these things that we now understand you need a gender lens to look at sort of things that prevent women from doing the same thing as everybody else. We just assumed that women could do the same things as men and we didn’t realize we weren’t actually looking in the right way. So, basically, after that first year of realizing the mistake that we made, we took a step back and we started to do more research to understand better what are the particular obstacles to women because they are women, and we came up with this set of seven indicators: accessing institutions, using property, getting a job, providing incentives to work, building credit, going to court, and protecting women from violence. And I think it’s really important to understand that when you’re looking at women’s issues you need to look with a gender lens, because I see it a lot with my colleagues who work on these issues. I see it with other organizations as well. We just don’t know what we don’t know and we assume a lot things, and the problem is if you don’t look with a gender lens you miss things. And I tell this story a lot just because people feel like, oh, the World Bank should know what it’s doing on gender and I can tell you it really didn’t 10 years ago. We’ve come a long way since then and I would say the international community has as well. So that gives us reason to hope. But the results of the 2018 report are also sort of a good cautionary tale about the long way we still need to go. BIGIO: Well, on that note, what did you all find in this latest report? What have been some of the most striking findings for you, in terms of the extent of the discriminatory laws? And have we seen the legal environment get better for women since the 10 years that you started doing this research? IQBAL: So starting with the first part, I do think there’s quite pervasive legal restrictions that prevent women from reaching their economic potential. So, for example, a third of the economies in the data set—68 economies—actually still have at least one form of legal restriction that prevents women’s freedom of movement or voice or agency, and this is really basic things like, you know, needing your husband’s permission to leave your house or leave the country or needing an extra signature or your husband’s name or his permission to get a passport or a national ID card or signing a contract—some of these really basic things that we assume that everyone has the ability to do. So, for example, I’m based in D.C., right. So yesterday I came to New York. I actually, you knew, flew because that was easier after work. I needed to show my driver’s license to get on that plane. Well, if I needed my husband’s permission to get that national ID card, that driver’s license, maybe I wouldn’t be here speaking with you—all of these really basic things, right, and these are mostly economies in sub-Saharan Africa or the Middle East and North Africa that have these type of restrictions. However, as Jamille mentioned, there’s 104 economies that still have at least one form of job restriction on women. I mean, that, to me, was stunning because I knew there was a lot of job restrictions—I didn’t assume that it was, you know, over half of all economies, and this is something like in the Russian Federation there’s a regulation whereby women can’t do 456 specific jobs because they are women. You know, these are things like being a captain on a ship, being a train driver, driving a certain type of tractor, being a plumber, electrician. All of these are actually sort of low-skill high-wage jobs, right, and that makes a difference because, you know, women want to be able to earn more and they can’t because they’re women, and this is for nonpregnant women, non-nursing mothers, so just sort of a woman who shouldn’t have any sort of constraints in terms of what she can and cannot do. And a lot of these are well intentioned, and by that I mean they’re meant to protect women. A lot of them are tied to demographic concerns. Most of them are, basically, leftover legacy legislation. So in the Russian Federation it’s a holdover law from the Soviet Union. You see similar types of restrictions throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It’s actually very pervasive in that region. Some economies don’t permit women to work in jobs that are immoral. What does that mean? I don't know. I think sort of it’s very discretionary and that can prevent women from working in certain industries. In Argentina, women can’t work in distilleries. You know, in France there’s a weightlifting requirement whereby women can’t actually work in jobs that require them to lift weights above a certain threshold. In Madagascar, they can’t work with certain types of sort of printed material. In Guinea, they can’t use certain types of hammers. They’re all very strange pieces of legislation. You see in a lot of commonwealth countries holdovers of things like the Factories Act. So women can’t work on certain type of machinery, and you see the same laws in South Asia and exactly the same laws in the Caribbean and that’s because they’re holdovers from old British law. And so one of the things that we work on with our colleagues is trying to remove these restrictions because it’s about the choice of jobs, right. So women should be able to determine what they want to do and don’t want to do by themselves. It shouldn’t be legislation that prevents them from doing this type of thing. And one other thing I wanted to point out is the importance of the #MeToo and the Time’s Up movement, which really started, you know, based on sexual harassment, based on sexual assault, but has also shifted into other workplace issues like the gender pay gap. Well, one of the things that we find is a lot of the gender pay gap comes from things like occupational segregation, and occupational segregation is exacerbated when you have these type of job restrictions. So we did some research and we find there’s a larger gender pay gap in countries that have at least one job restriction because women get sorted into jobs that pay less. And in terms of sexual harassment itself, you know, 59 economies have no laws on sexual harassment in employment, but we find where countries do such—have such laws actually more women owned firms. And that’s the other thing—we did a lot of analysis looking at what is the effect—what is the economic effect of these type of legal restrictions and we found, you know, on things like women’s ownership and leadership of firms, women’s leadership in the political environment, both in parliamentary positions but also in ministerial positions, the more legal restrictions you have, the less women in leadership. And it’s because, you know, if you don’t have women entering the labor market—if you don’t have women working in firms, they don’t rise up. If you don’t have women entering the government, you know, you’re never going to have them at those leadership positions because they’re stopped at the door. They’re stopped from leaving their home. They’re stopped from getting on that plane and coming and making a presentation. BIGIO: So you talked a little bit about what the implications are for women’s economic participation, for their leadership, when countries have these kinds of discriminatory laws. How does that then connect to economic growth for countries? IQBAL: I mean, basically, if you’re locking out a certain proportion of your labor force—of your work force—your economy is not growing as much as it could have. So there’s a lot of research from McKinsey and others showing the cost of sort of legal exclusion. The IMF has done a lot of research on this as well, and the idea is, you know, sort of what are the economic gains that could be had if you let women into the labor market—if you let them into the jobs of their choices—if you let them have the entrepreneurial sort of ability. And, actually, there are some impact evaluations that are also showing the specific consequences of reforming certain laws, right, because a lot of the analysis that we do is global and aggregate, and you mentioned the McKinsey—the McKinsey report and what are the economic gains globally. But, for example—you see in India, for example, they reformed the Hindu Succession Act and they reformed it to allow women to inherit joint family property in the same way as men, and they did it at the state level first. Now it’s throughout India, but because they did it at the state level were able to sort of estimate, basically, the gains from this reform And there are papers that look at this showing that, you know, the outcomes for women after this reform, and you see more women having bank accounts. You see more sort of women having sanitary latrines in the home, the gains for girls’ education, especially the second-generation gains are much higher, and it’s a reflection of preferences, right. So if I, as a woman, have greater access to financial resources because I’m able to inherit in the same way as men, maybe my preferences are taken into greater account in the home, right. So my bargaining power is greater and then I can say to my husband, OK, I want to send my daughter to school as well as my son—OK, it’s important for me to have my own bank account—yes, I want a sanitary latrine in my home instead of going out into the field. There was another impact evaluation done in Ethiopia. So they reformed the family law in Ethiopia also at the state level first and then they did it nationally and, basically, that showed it removed things like sort of—it used to be the case that you needed your husband’s permission to work. Now that’s no longer the case. They introduced joint titling as well and there you see more women also working outside the home, more women working in higher value-added sectors. And one of the things that you asked earlier, which I forgot to answer, is sort of gains over time, right, and sort of we’ve been looking at this data over the past 10 years, but a few years ago we did a 50-year data set. So we looked in both property rights and sort of legal capacity issues over 50 years for a hundred countries and we found actually tremendous gains, right. So half of the restrictions in sub-Saharan Africa were removed in this period, basically, from decolonization to 2010, and sort of this was interesting for a variety of sort of analysis, both in showing what are the drivers of reform but also showing the pace of reform. In this round of the report, we found that 65 economies had made 87 positive changes, and actually taking it back even further, if we look in countries like the U.K., if we look in the United States at the state level, it wasn’t that long ago—it was in the last hundred years that women started getting property rights. You know, there was—it used to be the case in all common law countries married women didn’t have the same property rights as single women. When you got married, you gave up your property rights to your husband, and there was a series of acts introduced in the U.K. and also in U.S. states in the last hundred to a hundred and fifty years called the Married Women’s Property Act, and the basis for these was actually giving married women the same property rights of single women, and you see some sort of analysis—economic analysis—of the consequences of giving these property rights to married women. You know, more women started taking out patents in U.S. states where they equalized the law. More women started opening businesses. You started seeing greater investment in things like children’s health. So, you know, there are sort of trends in terms of going forward. I do think, even now, the trend is a positive one over time. But the problem is the pace, right. So things are getting better but not fast enough, and I think sort of this year, last year, the #MeToo movement, the Time’s Up movement, all of these sort of awareness-raising campaigns, the fact that we’re concentrating on these issues, actually presents an opportune time to actually improve the pace, to get the reform moving faster. BIGIO: As you pointed to with the research, there’s certainly evidence that would, hopefully, drive countries to undertake these legal reforms, whether to help them realize the economic gains of having more women in the workforce or the benefits to families. How are countries undertaking these reforms? And we also know, of course, that just changing the law on the books doesn’t always translate into changes in practice or in the everyday lives of women. So how do you look at the implementation mechanisms as well? IQBAL: So in terms of how countries are undertaking these changes, I think part of it is just highlighting the laws that exist, right, and a lot of the countries that we work in, which are developing countries, often policymakers aren’t aware that these restrictions are there, right, and it’s because it doesn’t affect them directly. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat across the table from policymakers and said, OK, you know, in your family law there’s XYZ restriction—you know, husbands need to give their wives permission to work, and it’s generally men in the delegation—you know, a large group of men—and they’ll say that’s not the case—I don’t have to give my wife permission. You know, that’s kind of the standard response, and you show them the law, right, and they say, OK, you know, that’s not the case—it’s not implemented—maybe it’s there. And then, you know, you’ll see kind of one woman in the back and she’s kind of nodding her head because she knows this is an issue and sort of it’s not her voice that comes to the front of the table. We do a lot of work with civil society organizations in these countries, you know, and we always ask, you know, are these issues that are on the books and are not implemented. I mean, the question is really who are the policymakers. Yes, they don’t need to give their wives permission—yes, they don’t need to give their daughters permission because their wives and daughters are relatively wealthy—they’re relatively well educated. But if you go and you talk to civil society organizations that work in the rural areas, you know, that work outside of the main business city, these are restrictions that are enforced. And it’s not like the husband takes his wife to court, but it informs the social norms. There’s a whole system in place that, you know, puts it into effect, and the question is who are we trying to help. It’s not necessarily the empowered, educated, relatively well-off women. It’s one’s who maybe don’t know their rights, who don’t know the avenues, and are encumbered both by the legal restrictions and the social and cultural norms, which reinforce each other. And that actually brings me to the next part of your question, which is, you know, sort of, OK, the law is one thing—what about the implementation and effectiveness of that law. And I think there’s a push-pull, right. In some countries, society, the social norms, things change and then the law is a holdover and it gets changed later, right, and then it’s actually relatively easier to change because it’s not so much engrained in the identity of a—of a people of a culture. In other areas—and we’ve seen this in countries, too—the law changes first and it kind of pulls society after it, and the question is how much you want to push with that and also then how do you work on the implementation side, and I’ll give you an example. So in the Democratic Republic of Congo, it used to have one of the most restrictive family codes that I have personally seen. It was, literally, verbatim based on the French Code Napoleon, which was introduced by the Belgians, basically, and you had similar legislation throughout West Africa. And it used to be the case in France, you know, in a lot of continental Europe and also in West Africa, based on the Code Napoleon, that married women had the legal capacity of, essentially, minors, right. They couldn’t sign, you know, a contract, open a bank account, register property, initiate court proceedings without their husband’s written permission—you know, I, the husband of Sarah Iqbal, allow her to have this bank account—it goes in your file. This was removed in continental Europe sort of—you know, I would say, in France in the ’60s and the ’70s they removed the last vestiges of this. In parts of West Africa, sort of there’s been reform over time, but in DRC it was, basically, verbatim, and we did a mapping of this. You could look at the old Code Napoleon and the DRC civil code article by article, word by word. It was the same. And so the World Bank actually worked with the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo for a number of years to show them both the economic consequences of this to build up a constituency around this to show reforms that happened in the region in countries like Burkina Faso and Cote d’Ivoire and others on, you know, why they should be reformed and also explaining, you know, where it was coming from, how it was introduced—how it wasn’t, you know, sort of intrinsic to the culture of DRC but, rather, was something that was introduced. And so this has been reformed. But in terms of the implementation, you know, a lot of the implementing authorities—and by this I mean, like, you know, land registrars, you know, business registrars, banks, others—don’t really know, right. They’re not aware. Women themselves might not be fully aware. So there’s another project looking at the enforcement and implementation, and a large part of it is training—training for people on the front lines like the registrars, you know, sort of like judges, people working at the municipal and administrative levels and also just an awareness-raising campaign with civil society organizations about, you know, what women’s new legal rights are, and this takes time. You know, implementing any law takes time. It takes an effective administrative framework and it takes financial resources. BIGIO: It’s powerful to hear that the benefit of creating this comprehensive data set isn’t just for the ability to compare between countries and to look at what’s the status of women globally but also to have the country-level data—to be able to do the advocacy with a specific country that these are the barriers here and make sure that people are aware and that policymakers are, hopefully, undertaking the reform that you’ve talked about. Looking at how countries do compare to one another, one of the things that you all have done for the first time in this report is to actually score specific indicators, and I know that there’s some thinking around whether you transition this into actually ranking countries and having the ability to compare in that way between how countries are faring in terms of the legal environments for women. Can you talk a little bit about what that process has been to score these for the first time and what the benefits and challenges are of doing a gender ranking? IQBAL: Sure. So previous to this edition of the report, we presented what we call raw data, right. So, essentially, you know, we had a series of questions and answers, laying out the legal environment for women in 189 economies. But it was a little bit hard to understand at the country level what to focus on. Our own colleagues told us this. Our stakeholders, counterparts, civil society organizations, and governments also said, you know, what do I do with this, right. So there are all these yeses and noes—what is the thing that I should be focusing on. So one of the things that we did in this edition is introduce scoring. So we took the set of information that we were looking at and we refined it into scored indicators for the sort of seven areas. So you can see now for a country, say, Pakistan, you know, what is the score on accessing institutions, what is the score on protecting women from violence, and it’s a number from zero to a hundred—zero being the worst, a hundred being the best—and it’s easy to see at a glance, OK, how is Pakistan doing, you know, relative to Bangladesh, relative to Sri Lanka. You know, so that actually really helps policymakers hone in. And we’ve started to get a lot of feedback from a variety of people, including governments, saying, OK, why is my score on this indicator not as good as my neighbor—basically, what can I do to improve, or saying no, you’re wrong—I should have a higher score, and it engage—it’s allowed a lot of country dialogue—a lot of engagement. In the past two months since the launch of the report, we’ve gotten a lot of requests, a lot of what we call data challenges where governments are saying, you know, you’re wrong, and it generates a lot of dialogue. One of the things that we were thinking about and we haven’t done and we’re still sort of trying to figure out if it’s something that we should be doing, going forward, is whether or not we want to introduce an economy ranking. The project that we spun out of—the one that I was talking about earlier, Doing Business—has a country ranking. So it ranks countries on the business and regulatory environment in its indicators and this has generated a lot of engagement for the Bank, a lot of reform in countries, to improve the legal environment for entrepreneurship, and it’s a controversial thing to have a ranking. So the pros are really the amount of reform, the amount of dialogue, the amount of engagement that it takes, and I would say the cons are, basically, the controversy for the—for an organization like the World Bank. We need to sort of make sure that we are doing all of our homework in terms of is this the right set of things to be looking at—you know, what does the econometric analysis tell us, and then there’s also a very strong consultative process and, you know, discussions with our shareholders that we need to go into and do. So whether or not we do a ranking I would say is a question for my management and the management of the World Bank. But I do know, you know, sitting next to the Doing Business project, that having a ranking actually generates a lot of high-level attention and reform. I know when the last Doing Business report launched, India, I believe, went up in the ranking. And then, on Prime Minister Modi’s Facebook page, they were talking about, you know, how great it was that India went up in the Doing Business ranking. It’s a priority for many of the BRICS economies. I mean, it gets a lot of high-level engagement. BIGIO: And you’ve highlighted, as you’ve looked at this latest research, that the problem has been the pace, so to look at whether it’s this avenue or what are other avenues there are to help speed up the pace of legal reform to make sure that women and men actually have an equal playing field when it comes to engaging in the workforce. With that we’re going to open to the question-answer period. Please raise your placard if you would like to speak. When I call on you, please introduce yourself. Please. Q: Thank you for making the trip from Washington. This is wonderfully interesting. I wondered if you could expand on a couple of things; first, your discussion about the work that the Bank is doing with civil society. I mean, it’s long argued that the most effective route to reform in country is with the engagement of women’s movements on the ground. And you mentioned that. And I know that that’s a big change for the Bank. So I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more. And secondly—and I’m not sure how directly this relates, but I’ve been intrigued to hear more about what the impact has been of the fund that was announced with much fanfare last year by Ivanka Trump and the Saudi Arabian prince of $100 million to advance women’s entrepreneurship. You mentioned that the Bank is working on that. And I gather that’s being managed by the Bank. So if you could tell us more specifically about that. So I have something I can say positive, if there is something to say positive, or negative if not. IQBAL: Great. So in terms of the question on civil society, I agree with you. I think working with civil-society organizations is crucially important when you work on women’s legal rights. I will say the Bank does more work on civil society than it used to. It certainly doesn’t have a reputation for working with civil-society organizations. I will say, from the inside, there’s a lot more work going on. We actually have a team that focuses on civil-society organizations and trying to build up those linkages. In terms of what the work the Women, Business, and the Law project does in particular is we work with civil-society organizations, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, to help them understand and use the data, the idea being that we are data producers. So we produce primary data and then we sort of do a lot of outreach with different audiences to help them use, understand that data, and also to hear from them, you know, what we should be collecting. Is the data accessible? Are we presenting it in the right way? I will say the World Bank is made up of economists, and economists look at data maybe in a slightly different way than sort of non-economists do. And I say this as a non-economist, right. So my background is as a lawyer. I’ve been working with economists quite heavily for the past 10 years, and a lot of the World Bank data is not so accessible for civil-society organizations. So we work to try and make it more accessible, usable, because ultimately they’re the ones on the ground. They’re the advocates. They’re—especially in this space, they’re the ones who are working with government to try and get them to change these things. And we try and make our information more usable. So we’ve had a series of workshops, I think, in about 10 or 11 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. We have a two-year program at work that’s about to initiate to do more. And we work a lot with organizations like the Femmes Juristes, organizations of women judges in Africa; sort of WiLDAF, which is an organization of women that works on law and development in West Africa. And what we try and do is build linkages between these civil-society organizations on the ground and the World Bank country office on the ground, because, you know, we sit in D.C., but the World Bank country office, you know, sitting, say, in Burkina Faso or in Ghana or what have you, manages the relationship with the government, right. So if we build that linkage, then a lot of the gender work actually gets included into the portfolio of that country office. And so we’re trying to build these linkages better. Your next question was on We-Fi, the women’s financing fund. I don’t work on that specifically, but I can certainly give you sort of some of the things that I’ve seen. So in terms of the impact of the fund, I’m actually more familiar with—there’s a portion of it that looks at the regulatory environment, right. So there’s a portion of it that’s sort of actually financing women entrepreneurs. That part of it I don’t know that much about. I do know more about the part of it that is focusing on sort of the regulatory environment. And, at least from my perspective where I sit, I think it’s really a good thing that it’s looked holistically, right, because there’s a lot of research that shows you can’t just give financing to women entrepreneurs but not look at other issues, you know, whether they be sort of legal barriers like the ones I was describing earlier, mentoring, other things. You actually need to look at it holistically, right. So I actually think the way that they’ve set up the fund, they’re looking at financing, which is a big issue for women entrepreneurs, but other constraints; you know, binding constraints as well. I think that’s actually really important and a big step forward. I’ve seen other funds that just focus on the financing part. And I think that’s important, but it’s not looking at the whole. And these are issues that are inextricably intertwined, right. So you can’t just look at one piece of it. BIGIO: Yeah. Q: OK, thank you. I’m Angelika Mendes-Lowney from Women’s World Banking. Thank you very much for the overview; very interesting. I have two questions. One is more general; if you could speak about which countries have made the most progress and if you can see a direct link to how that improves women’s economic participation. I don’t know if you’ve tracked that or how you track it. And the other question is a little more specific. We’ve been looking into—it’s about the building-credit aspect. We’ve been looking into how movable collateral registries can be used to—really how their potential can be unlocked to benefit women entrepreneurs. And we’ve seen—you know, you talked a little bit about the missing link between what happens at the legal level and then to the actual key actors. So we’ve seen the same, that in some countries the movable collateral registries are in place, but then the financial-service providers are not necessarily aware of them. So I’m curious whether you have been looking into that in the building-credit component and what you found. Thank you. IQBAL: Great. Thank you. In terms of which countries have made progress and how that improves economic outcomes, I mean, I think there’s—you know, I talked about the two impact evaluations earlier. And there’s a time lag, right. And then how do you measure at the country level sort of the outcomes. What are the outcomes that you’re looking at? And then you need to give it enough time to actually filter through the economy. So, you know, those are actually the two best sort of tested examples that we’ve seen, although a lot of what we do is look at aggregate, right. So what we’re looking at is certain laws and policies, and then we’re looking at how it influences aggregate outcomes, the idea being that, you know, it sort of belies something that’s easy and in the control of policymakers, whereas outcomes like growth or labor-force participation—I mean, it’s very hard for policymakers to actually influence that directly unless it’s through an avenue like the law. So, you know, I can tell you, for example, in this round of the report which are the countries that made the most progress sort of quantitatively. DRC is one of them. I was talking about that earlier. You know, a country like Kenya, which introduced its first domestic-violence law, has also made a tremendous amount of progress. Zambia introduced a gender-equality act that includes actually some of the things in building credit, including, I believe, nondiscrimination in sort of financial transactions on the basis of gender. Iraq, actually, and Afghanistan both are fragile countries that have made a lot of steps forward. In Afghanistan, for example, they introduced a lot of steps on sort of legal provisions on violence against women. The question is, you know, what was their base, right. So perhaps they were coming from a lower base than certain other economies. But relative to themselves, they’ve improved a lot. What are the precise economic consequences of that? You know, it’s too early to say. We need to kind of give it time to both be effectively implemented and understood. But at the aggregate, I can tell you sort of legal reforms lead to better outcomes in a variety of areas, including sort of one of the things that you’re probably more familiar with, which is sort of women’s financial inclusion. One of the main outcome data sets that we look at is the Findex, the Global Financial Inclusion Index. They recently launched their third round last month, and what they found is the gender gap in financial inclusion is exactly the same as it was four years ago, as it was eight years ago. So there are a lot of things that basically are not being done. And the question is, you know, how do we improve sort of financial inclusion for women? How do we close that gap? Because the levels of financial inclusion are rising, meaning more people are being included in the financial system, but the gaps are the same, meaning that it’s not necessarily helping women as much as it should. And, you know, personally, I think that one of the things that we should be looking at is the legal and regulatory environment. That takes me to actually the second part of your question, which is movable collateral frameworks. And the argument there is, you know, women have less access to real property, right. They have less access to land. Sort of part of that is due to legal restrictions on things like inheritance. Part of it is just women have less titled land in their name, maybe due to social and cultural norms. It may be due to a lack of joint titling. You know, there’s different reasons in different countries. And so the question is how do you help women get access to credit where they lack access to real property, especially in developing economies, where banks basically require real property as collateral. You need land. You need housing under your name, and you just don’t have that. And so there are different ways of doing that. One way is to incorporate reputation collateral, right; so successful repayment histories to, you know, things like retailers, utilities, microfinance institutions, looking at the forms of collateral that women have and figuring out systems to incorporate that, right. So in the building-credit indicator, we do have sort of whether aspects of reputational collateral are considered. What we don’t have is movable collateral registries. And the idea there—and the Bank does a lot on collateral frameworks—is, you know, if there is not—you know, women have access to movables, right. It may be accounts receivable. It may be other things, you know, sort of warehouse receipts and others. But if there’s no framework to register and consider movable collateral, then you’re losing an opportunity to include elements that women and others also have. And there are—there is some research that I’m familiar with—I think you probably are much more familiar with this—I think movable collateral registry in Ghana. And I believe that the Bank worked on one in China as well that showed an increase in sort of women’s registration of movable collateral. It’s not something we include, although it is something that we have been discussing with our colleagues for a while. And I do think it is actually critically important for women’s access to credit. Another thing that’s interesting and we do look at is nondiscrimination, right; nondiscrimination on the basis of gender and also marital status and financial transactions. It used to be the case not that long ago in this country that you couldn’t, as a married woman, have a credit history of your own. It was kind of wrapped up with your husband. Also you couldn’t get a credit card and other things. Now we have nondiscrimination both on the basis of gender and marital status, but also on other elements. And the question is, you know, do other countries have this? Sort of are there nondiscrimination provisions sort of that help women gain access? BIGIO: Thank you. Right here. Yeah. Q: Agnes (sp)—(off mic). IQBAL: Thanks. I mean, as far as I’m aware, all of the research that I’ve seen is there isn’t really an effect on men’s employment. And I think the IMF has actually done more research. And I can point you to some papers. The idea is not so much if you’re giving women jobs, you’re taking away jobs from men. And I think that’s really basically what people are afraid of, right. So policymakers feel like, OK, if you open up these sectors to women, you’re going to be taking away jobs from men, right. And that’s the argument. But sort of based on the research that I’ve seen, that doesn’t seem to be the case that, you know, the pie is this big, and if you give a slice to women, you’re taking away slices from men. It’s generally sort of seen as if you’re opening these jobs up for women, if you have more women entrepreneurs, you’re actually creating more jobs, so the pie gets bigger and there’s more space. But I actually think the fund has done that much more work on this. BIGIO: That’s great. Thank you. Q: Jamille and Sarah, thank you very much for an excellent and very powerful presentation. I’m Natalie Hahn. I worked at the U.N. for many years, mostly in Africa. Does the World Bank make a conditionality for their loans that the laws have to change, they have to be implemented? Number one. Number two, when I look at this powerful report, it would be extraordinarily important for law faculties and law students to know about this. And you mentioned that you had the workshops in West Africa, for instance. But I could envision women lawyers in many of those countries taking the lead on this, and particularly students, and also hopefully this report to be introduced to American faculties of law. I found one of the best groups to work with is IDLO in Rome, which was founded by Ibrahim Shihata, former legal counsel to the International Development Law Organization, because they’re so well placed within these countries. And I’m wondering if you had an opportunity to work with them. IQBAL: In terms of your first question on conditionality, the answer to that is no. I don’t think the World Bank believes in conditionality. You know, really, in general, we try and encourage and influence governments to reform their laws, but not as a part of conditionality for loans. However, I do know, you know, we’ve seen, for example, the MCC, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, picked up part of this data as their Gender and the Economy scorecard. They’ve actually expanded it to include other things this year. And we see a lot of requests coming in from low-income countries on how can they improve in this element, because basically they want to get access to MCC grants. And the reason the MCC did this is, I believe, because of Lesotho. So many years ago they had an MCC grant in Lesotho before they had this Gender in the Economy as part of their scorecard. And they went in and they realized in Lesotho legally women had basically the same status as legal minors. There were all these things that women couldn’t do. So I think they worked with the government of Lesotho to reform this, but they didn’t want to be caught in that situation again. So they realized they needed to include sort of more gender-relevant data. As I understand it, the inclusion of that scorecard was relatively good, and they decided to expand it this year. So they’ve included more questions, including on things like child marriage. In terms of working with law schools, law faculties, law students, we try to do this. You know, we work, for example, with the International Association of Women Judges. I have a colleague who was just at their annual conference in Argentina; the idea being that we’re trying to disseminate to as many people as possible, including law schools and law faculties. But it’s a little bit difficult. We do work with the IDLO, and they actually have very strong gender programming and this is a priority for them. We also work a lot with U.N. Women, both on the SDG framework, so we’re working with U.N. Women and the OECD’s Social Institutions and Gender Index, along with strong consultations with the CEDAW committee, to build an SDG monitoring indicator on whether or not legal frameworks discriminate against women in law and practice. That’s the—I think basically the paraphrase of the indicator that was selected. And the idea is to work on as many levels as possible. But we’re a relatively small team and we can’t be everywhere. So I would encourage all of you to go out and talk about this data set. BIGIO: Right here. Q: Hi, Sarah. Sarah O’Hagan from the Fuller Project for International Reporting. I wanted to build on that. You talk about the ministers of certain countries really contesting their rankings or that the existence of a number was suddenly a very focusing device. So is there kind of an unspoken conditionality, or will there be follow-on effects that will be beneficial or not? And a separate question, but related, that I wanted to ask you—it’s very early to talk about the prognosis or the impact of either Me Too or Time’s Up. Even though Me Too seems to be the umbrella phrase, they’re really very separate movements. And what you’re really working on is sort of the Time’s Up piece of this. And I just wondered if you might return to your earlier comments about whether legal frameworks change or social norms drive change faster, because the Time’s Up movement is clearly—in this country, we’re in a social-norms moment. And I just wondered if we might just get a little bit more from you on that kind of dialectic. IQBAL: Of course. In terms of the unspoken-conditionality part of your question, I don’t think so. I actually think it’s more of a question of competition, right. I think countries like to either be on par or better than their peers. So it wouldn’t be—for example, you know, in general, say, countries from the Middle East and North Africa wouldn’t necessarily be comparing themselves to, say, Nordic countries, but they would want to know, you know, why their score indicator maybe looks, you know, less good than Morocco or Algeria or what have you, because there’s—in any kind of scoring system, there’s implicit competitiveness; like, you know, why is my number less than the number of my neighbor? You know, I beat them in soccer or something like that, right. You see a lot of competition coming out of that. And it’s actually that peer competition that encourages countries to move. You see this in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap report. You see this in the World Bank’s Doing Business rankings. I don’t think it’s a conditionality issue. In terms of social norms versus legal frameworks, I think the answer is it really depends. It depends in terms of where a particular country is. Like you said, in this one, you know, it’s a social-norm change that we’re talking about, because the legal frameworks—there are gaps, such as, you know, the gap of paid maternity and parental leave, which is, you know, quite a big gap. But in other areas, it does relatively well relative to its peers. And by this I mean high-income OECD countries. But a lot of the implementation, the discussion around things like sexual harassment, sexual assault, hasn’t been there. Now it is. In other countries, you know, that’s not the case. You know, it may be that legal frameworks really aren’t at the place that they need to be. And oftentimes it’s civil-society organizations, advocates on the ground, who’ve been advocating for this reform, for these reforms, for a long time. I know, in the case of DRC, there was a lot of reform advocacy going on by civil-society organizations for decades. But, you know, oftentimes this doesn’t rise to the level of interest of policymakers. And I think you have to—you know, there’s a lot going on. And maybe gender issues aren’t the most important issue in the portfolio of the minister of finance or the minister of justice. You know, they’re going to deal with whatever’s in front of them. And maybe women’s issues are kind of not seen as important. And I think the awareness, the spotlight, really kind of changes the dynamic. And, you know, we see these movements, these hashtags, going on in Latin America, in the Middle East, in North Africa, in West Africa. You can see it in every region of the world. It’s kind of spread like wildfire. And I think that’s great, because these are issues that need to be discussed. And, you know, whatever the issue is going on on that ground, in that region, in that country, maybe it’s the social-norm issue. Maybe it’s a legal issue. But ultimately this is an umbrella, and it sort of talks to, you know, whatever is going on on the ground. And for this data set, I do think the data is an inch deep and a mile wide, right. So it compares countries to each other, but it should never be the substitute—and perhaps I should have started with this—it should never be the substitute for country-level data, for an understanding of what is going on on the ground in each country, because that is the most important determining factor of, you know, where the discussion needs to go. Q: Leah Pedersen Thomas. Thank you to both of you for your very important work; appreciate your time here, Sarah. I actually serve on the board of a maternal fetal not-for-profit in Ethiopia, where we see women who are victims of underage marriage and certainly having children at a very young age and kind of surviving through the consequences of that. My question is around enforcement by advocacy, a little bit about what you just spoke on, kind of the positive—the knock-on effects of positive peer pressure. Are you finding that local advocacy groups are erupting to really hold the government to the stated laws or the change in laws? So, for example, we see a number of women who were betrothed in marriage under the age of 18 in Ethiopia. And although Ethiopian law would suggest that getting married, believe it or not, under the age of 18 is against the law, a number of orthodox clerics continue to perform services. So we’re seeing a number of victims actually approach those clerics and say I wouldn’t be in the position I am today if you hadn’t broken the law. So I’m just curious if you’re seeing that level of advocacy, kind of that positive peer pressure, and how we can successfully harness it to really create enforcement. IQBAL: Thank you. I mean, the answer is it depends, right. So we see it in some places. And it really depends on the strength of civil society at the country level, right. And I’m actually a little bit surprised sort of by your example, just because I know in Ethiopia generally, you know, I mean, there’s a lot of issues with civil society and, you know, how that gets funded and how the government feels about it. But in terms of the specific question that you’re asking about, it’s actually really interesting. We look at, you know, age-of-marriage laws, legal age of marriage. What is the minimum age of marriage, and what are the exceptions? So often there are, you know, parental consent or judicial consent. So the age is maybe 18, but girls can get married, you know, as young as 14 if they get permission from some kind of authority. And then we also look at basically what are sanctions, right. So is there a sanction for a cleric or a judge who performs this in contravention of the law? The idea being, you know, how do you—who do you hold to account and how do you hold them to account? And if there is a sanction, you know, and it is enforced maybe through this positive peer pressure, maybe through young girls actually trying to hold, you know, people who officiated their marriage to account, maybe that would stop the cleric from doing it the next time, right. There’s sort of a detrimental effect. But again, that takes a certain level of empowerment for the girls and for their advocates to even do that. I mean, it takes a lot of, I would say, strength and bravery to be able to hold an orthodox cleric to account. BIGIO: Back to—(off mic). Q: Congratulations. I mean, that sounds like an amazing program. BIGIO: Last question. Q: (Off mic.) Thank you—(off mic). IQBAL: Thank you. I think, if I’m not mistaken, that those are two different numbers, right. So the 155, that’s looking at a different measure. That’s at least one legal restriction. And the 104 is just on job restrictions. So one is the sample size, but it’s also just looking at kind of an overarching measure, including job restrictions, but including other restrictions as well. So it’s a little bit like comparing apples and oranges. And I would say there has been improvement, but not quite that much. BIGIO: Well, thank you. Please join me in thanking Sarah. (Applause.) And thank you all. (END)

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf discusses the importance of women's involvement in development and democracy in Africa.

As women’s economic empowerment rises on the global agenda, the architecture to support this development imperative is shifting. Several leaders have recently launched innovative initiatives that afford new opportunities to unlock barriers to women’s economic potential—including the World Bank’s We-Fi partnership, aimed at increasing women’s access to capital, as well as the Global Business Coalition for Women’s Economic Empowerment, a group of nine leading multinational corporations focused on growing women’s role in the global economy. What are the implications of these ambitious new approaches? And how can governments, multilateral organizations, foundations, and civil society organizations most effectively engage with the private sector to advance women’s economic participation around the world? Priya Basu and Linda Scott join us to discuss the changing landscape and new research on the role of the private sector in accelerating the economic advancement of women. This meeting is part of the ExxonMobil Women and Development Roundtable Series at the Council on Foreign Relations.   VOGELSTEIN: OK. Good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, everyone. We’re going to go ahead and get started. Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations. My name is Rachel Vogelstein. I am the director of the Women in Foreign Policy Program here at CFR, which analyzes how elevating the status of women advances U.S. foreign policy objectives, including prosperity and stability. I want to begin by expressing my gratitude to Jim Jones of ExxonMobil for his leadership on women’s economic empowerment. (Applause.) Yes, indeed. As well as his continued support for our work here at the Council, including our Women in Development Roundtable Series. Our discussion this afternoon is focused on The Changing Landscape in Women’s Economic Empowerment. Today we know that the evidence of the relationship between economic participation of women and growth is stronger than ever. And leaders around the world are really taking note. From Christine Lagarde’s reforms at the IMF, to Prime Minister Trudeau’s elevation of this issue under the upcoming G-7 presidency that the Canadians hold, to Prime Minister Abe’s economic reform agenda in Japan, even to the recent rescission of the driving ban in Saudi Arabia, which was largely driven by economic considerations, we are seeing policymakers make significant changes to increase the role of women in economic participation and growth. And as women’s economic empowerment rises on the global agenda, the architecture to support this development imperative is shifting. There are several new and innovative initiatives that offer the potential to grow economies by unlocking barriers to women’s economic potential. And we can find one very prominent example of this evolution at the World Bank, which has partnered with 14 governments to generate over a billion dollars in financing for women-owned businesses in developing countries through the women entrepreneurs financing initiative. Another important example is the Global Business Coalition for Women’s Economic Empowerment, which a group of nine leading multinational corporations working together to explore how the private sector can grow women’s role in the global economy. So what are the implications of these new ambitious approaches? And how can governments and multilateral organizations, foundations, and civil society best work with the private sector to advance women’s economic participation around the world? Well, today we are very pleased and fortunate to be joined by two experts who are really helpful to shape the answer to these questions. First, we are delighted to welcome to the Council Priya Basu, the head of the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative Secretariat at the World Bank. She has served in several capacities at the Bank since 1998, most recently as manager for the multilateral trusteeship and innovative financing, where she designed and managed a $21 billion portfolio to address global priorities, including food security, climate change, refugees, and pandemic threats. Prior to that she was the lead economist in the Bank’s South Asia region, where she led the bank’s finance and private-sector engagement strategy in India, with a particular focus on financial inclusion. She has also held positions at the IMF, the Asian Development Bank, and the ILO. Priya, welcome to the Council. BASU: Thank you. VOGELSTEIN: We are also very pleased to host Linda Scott, the emeritus professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at the University of Oxford, and a senior fellow at Chatham House. She founded and is now senior advisor to the Global Business Coalition for women’s economic empowerment, which we’ll talk about today. She’s also the founded of Double X Economy, which is a consulting firm that specializes in women’s economic participation. She works with multinational corporations, international agencies, governments, and NGOS, designing and testing programs to advance women’s economic participation. And she is working on a book, The Double X Economy, which we can all look for some time next year. Linda, welcome and thank you for joining us. SCOTT: Thank you. VOGELSTEIN: So I’ll begin with a few questions for each of our panelists, and then open the discussion to all of you. Linda, I’d like to start by setting the context for our conversation about this changing landscape for women’s economic empowerment, with a particular focus on the role of the private sector. So in 2014, you convened a group of leading multinational corporations to focus on this issue, many of which are represented in the room today, to discuss how to better include women in the economy. This is a coalition that shared research findings and approaches and you’ve recently released a report that summarizes what you’ve learned. So tell us, what works best to advance women’s economic participation through private sector engagement? And why do you believe this should be such a priority for the private sector? SCOTT: Well, I think it’s—I should probably tell a little bit about the group and kind of what their background is, because it’s not a simple answer what works best. And the people who would tell you that with the most passion would be this group of people. I would like to just go ahead and acknowledge that it’s Qualcomm, Coca-Cola, PWC, ExxonMobil, Mondelez. I’m looking at them now. Have I got them all? Walmart just left. And then Goldman Sachs, and MasterCard, and Marks and Spencer. And so that’s who’s on now. And we’re still adding members. And I originally chose these companies on the basis that they already had in 2014, in my estimation, serious programs going. I did not want dilettantes. I wanted people who were serious. And I picked people from different industries, because I wanted a nice distribution in terms of the types of things. And I think a lot of people don’t realize that there has actually been quite a lot of activity in the private sector over all this time. I think the one who has been engaged the longest is ExxonMobil. And they’ve been working since 2004. But everybody is really pretty active. And they—I think a lot of people look to the corporate sector mostly for funding. So they think that it’s just one-off stuff that they do. But it’s actually been very programmatic. This group is collectively in 132 countries. And that’s not 132 offices of theirs. That’s 132 women’s economic empowerment programs. They’ve already reached 18 million women. So it’s a very, very serious thing. And I think that what needs to happen now—and that’s part of what that changing landscape is about, and I think Priya can speak to this as well—is that we’ve learned a lot about kind of what the challenges are for practical economic empowerment, because that really is the kinds of things. They’re trying to work out, you know, the nuts and bolts of how you do this. That we’re getting to the point where we need to start thinking about scale. We need to start thinking about—you know, we’ve got a situation where we’ve got half the world’s species—half the species is seriously economically disadvantaged. It’s going to be a long game. And we cannot do this through one-off charity donations. And so that means there’s going to have to be a systemic alliance of some sort. So that’s kind of where we are. VOGELSTEIN: Linda, perhaps as important as what does work to advance women’s economic empowerment through private sector engagement is what doesn’t work. And, you know, we’ve talked earlier about some of the challenges that you’ve seen, in particular the challenge of integrating women-owned businesses into supply chains. So can you illuminate for us what some of those challenges are? And if you can, some of the solutions? What we can do to address those challenges? SCOTT: Mmm hmm. Well, I think that there are a variety of barriers, depending on which supply chain you’re in. But I was really fortunate to have done some research on Walmart’s Empowering Women Together, which—of course, Walmart is in a very large range of supply chains. And, you know, I think—you know, I’ve done a lot of field work for many, many years. And people would always say to me: If we could just get these women connected up with Walmart so they could sell their—fill in the blank—their scarves, their rugs, whatever it was, right? And everybody thinks, wow, that’s it. And this is one of the things that Priya and I have also been talking a lot about is that people think that, well, you know, the thing to do is to get them into these supply chains. And they come up with programs or proposals that say that but don’t really realize what really is involved. And this is one of the reasons why the private sector is wanting to engage at this point. So for example, you know, once a small women-owned business wants to trade with a multinational corporation, they really do kind of need to be of a certain size. They need to have a certain amount of capital. Otherwise, it’s going to actually hurt them to try to do it. They’re going to have to be much more formalized. And sometimes women don’t particularly want to formalize. And there are certain requirements in terms of ethical sourcing, even animal cruelty came up at one point because we had some horn bracelets. And we had to be sure that nothing, you know, untoward had been done. There’s all kinds of certifications and things that happen that if you don’t know that in advance really frustrate your effort to integrate them into the supply chain. I think that how to—how to solve that problem should be something that collectively this—the world system should be looking at. One of the things that I found the most troublesome was that women would have an order, they would have a design they were supposed to execute. And they would be supposed to, for example, match a certain color. OK, so you’re used to going into the department stores, right, in a certain season, and you see the purse that matches the shoes that matches the scarf, right? And it’s an exact match. OK, if those objects are being made around the world, everybody has to have the chip that’s going to match, right? And then you have to make that happen. Well, in some cases, the women did not have access to the right pigments. And the only way they had of dying things was a big pot of water on a bunch of stones, right, and drying things out on bushes, right? It’s really hard to control a dye under those circumstances. So there’s some really, really basic things, material things, that have to be thought about. And it’s—you know, it’s not enough just to have a networking event, OK? So that’s what I’m saying. (Laughs.) You can’t stop there. VOGELSTEIN: That’s it, we’re seeing really, serious practical challenges that— SCOTT: Yeah, I mean, it really—it gets down to the nubs. You just can’t be holding a party. You just can’t. (Laughs.) VOGELSTEIN: Right. Right, right. Fair enough. Fair enough. Priya, I’d love to bring you into the conversation to talk about the Women Entrepreneur’s Financing Initiative, which is known here in Washington by its seemingly requisite acronym, which in this case is We-Fi. So we’ll go with that. Just a few weeks ago at the Bank, at the spring meetings, Jim Kim announced the first round of grants under We-Fi. So tell us a little bit about where the money that’s been generated so far is going, what you hope to achieve, and how you’re specific collaborating with the private sector to achieve your goals. BASU: Thank you. So, yes, the first round of funding for the We-Fi was just announced on April the 18th. So maybe I’ll just kind of tell you a little bit about the We-Fi and then, you know, what—where we are and what we hope to achieve to this first round. You know, as Linda’s mentioned, really scale and impact are sort of the two ambitions of the We-Fi. I think, you know, we know there’s been lots of little successes around the world, lots of isolated projects. We really want to use the We-Fi as a platform to make a difference. We-Fi was announced, as you know, at the G-20 in Hamburg last July. And then we moved very quickly to have it launched at the World Bank/IMF annual meetings last October. And then in less than six months, we did the first round of funding allocation. It is different, I think, from other initiatives because it really tries to address the challenge facing women entrepreneurs in a more comprehensive way. We acknowledge that access to finance is, you know, one of the problems, access to markets is another problem, access to technology and information. And then on top of that, problems that women face because of the legal and regulatory environments in which they operate. So we’re trying to take this kind of ecosystem approach that tackles all of these barriers and then, you know, shows that impact and scale. We have an operating model where right now we’re operating through multilateral development banks. So it’s a collaborative partnership amongst the 14 governments. And I have to say that that itself is—you know, is quite an interesting process, because we’re able to get 14 governments around the table to contribute to We-Fi that have never really come together around the issue of women’s economic empowerment. So that kind of happened. We were able to value that support. And then we had these multilateral development banks, including the World Bank and IFC, that will serve as implementing partners of the We-Fi. So that was the first round where, you know, we issued a call for proposals and MDBs were eligible to submit proposals. Then we went through sort of reviewing their proposals and then, you know, the winning proposals were awarded grants a couple of weeks ago. But we’re also looking into now, in the next phase of the We-Fi, to engage directly with the private sector. So, now, the private sector is really the heart of the overall initiative. For every dollar of We-Fi funding that we’ve mobilized from governments, our ambition was initiative to leverage least $5 from the private sector through kind of additional financing. I should say that I’m kind of happy to share that the first round of We-Fi has actually overshot that target. The 120 million (dollars) that we’ve allocated is mobilizing 1.6 billion (dollars) from the private sector. So that just goes to show there’s a lot of interest amongst private corporations and private financiers to sort of get engaged in this. And it’s really very heartening. And I think this event is kind of a great example of that. So private sector engagement, one dimension of that is leveraging money from the private sector. But delivery—I mean, the entire delivery model of We-Fi is also sort of predicated on active partnerships with the private sector because the way these projects are constructed—I’m kind of—I’d be happy to share a little bit more about the particular projects that the We-Fi is financing—but every project that we’ve received, every proposal that we’ve received for financing has kind of the private sector as an integral element. Even though MDBs are sort of the developers of this projects and sort of the overseers of them. So for example, there’s kind of one set of projects that deal with partnering with the private sector to set up dedicated financial institutions that will support women entrepreneurs, venture capital funds, banks that are able to focus more on women-owned, women-led businesses in developing countries, ways to address credit risk, ways to deal with bankers to sort of help them address their unconscious bias when it comes to dealing with women entrepreneurs, and so on. Then there’s another set of projects that helped to bring in more women into the supply chains of large corporations by precisely kind of tackling the sort of barriers that Linda was mentioning. Then there are projects that are looking at women as participants in the shared economy, how they can sort of, you know, play a more active role—what kind of capacity support, what kind of networking support, mentoring and so on they need in order to not just enter but also sustain themselves. There are very exciting projects around women and technology. And that kind of ties back to the question of, you know, certain environments where women face cultural biases, for example. They kind of—other kinds of problems that prevent them from, say, you know, going out of the house to work. So, you know, technology really brings opportunities to women at their doorsteps, to sort of get engaged both through providing them with access to finance, but also, you know, access to all kinds of ways in which they can market their products and so on. So, you know, maybe I’ll stop here and happy to kind of elaborate. VOGELSTEIN: A really helpful overview about where the money’s going. And I think, not without note, that in an era where multilateral pledging campaigns all too often fall short, that you’ve actually managed to overshoot the goal that you set with respect to financing. That’s quite significant. Some have questioned whether We-Fi will actually reach women at the bottom of the economic ladder who, you know, arguably need the most help, some of whom, let’s say, live in fragile states. You have talked about We-Fi as an initiative that will specifically target the so-called missing middle. Not just women at the top, but how will We-Fi reach women at the bottom? BASU: So maybe now it’s time to kind of go into a little bit of the specifics around the proposals that the We-Fi is supporting under the first round. So we have projects from the Asian Development bank that focus on Sri Lanka. And not just—in fact, not really Columbo, outside of Columbo. And the bulk of the money that’s going to go through this project is going to go to what they call lagging regions and lagging parts of Sri Lanka. The proposal from the Islamic Development Bank that’s been approved focuses on Yemen, Mali, and northern Nigeria. Again, the target audience for this, the target beneficiaries are women entrepreneurs working outside of sort of major cities and really in kind of fragile and conflict sort of regions. And then there’s the proposal from the World Bank and the IFC, which has been supported, over 50 percent of which is going to go to the poorest, most fragile, conflict-affected countries. So kind of in terms of the overall focus of We-Fi, we had put poverty and fragility as, you know, kind of important goals to tackle. And more than—so our overall goal for We-Fi over the life of it is that more than 50 percent of money should go to poorest and fragile countries. And in this first round, 58 percent is going to those countries. Now, you can argue within those countries, well, there are, you know, women who are at the bottom of the pyramid. And then there are women who don’t really need support. And on that, again—and maybe I can just share some data—but the majority of the proposals are really for women entrepreneurs who are just starting off. You know, they’re not women entrepreneurs who’ve already succeeded and just need a little bit of extra money to kind of grow. They’re about really helping to address the barriers that these entrepreneurs face. So just to give you an example of the—kind of the scale here, so the Islamic Bank proposal, the loan size that will go to these women through the We-Fi grant is between $10(,000) and $30,000. So we’re not talking of, like, huge amounts here. And then, you know, the grant ceilings for another part of that project that focuses on Yemen and northern Nigeria is $15,000 per grant. So these are not, you know, women who are the elite in these countries. These are women who really need help. Similarly, maybe on the—on the ADB proposal in Sri Lanka, the support will go to women entrepreneurs who have a borrowing capacity of no more than $333,000. And the average loan size is estimated at about $92,000. So again, you know, these are kind of, you know, not massive amounts of support. But, you know, the overall—the aggregate impact of all of this is sort of likely to be very strong, so. VOGELSTEIN: Quite targeted. BASU: Quite targeted, yeah. VOGELSTEIN: Would like to ask both of you about legal and cultural barriers, which our research here at the Council suggests is a significant impediment to women’s economic participation, including in the areas that we’re talking about. So first, Priya, how is We-Fi addressing these barriers? You touched on it a little bit with respect to one of the grants you mentioned. And given the regressive policies of at least some of the partners that helped to found We-Fi—I’m thinking of Saudi Arabia, for example—should we expect to see this be a priority for We-Fi going forward? And then, Linda, I’d love for you to chime in and tell us, you know, what is the role of the private sector in addressing some of those legal and cultural barriers that impede women’s ability to move forward in the areas we talked about? Priya, why don’t you begin? BASU: No, that’s an excellent question. And it’s a question that we thought hard about and really it was central of the desire of the We-Fi as we were working on it over the summer. I mean, cultural barriers are not here to go away, but in terms of legal and regulatory barriers that is an important focus of We-Fi. And every proposal that—you know, when we set up the criteria for evaluating the proposals, we really put a very strong emphasis on proposals that were—that had an ambition to address legal and regulatory barriers. And in fact, if you look at the results indicator of the We-Fi—it’s all there up on our website—but we have a specific result that we’re targeting, which is how many regulatory and legal barriers are going to be addressed in how many countries through We-Fi. And so a number of the proposals we have are aiming to do that. And I have to say that, you know, the governing committee, yes, comprises of countries with diverse views on these topics. But everyone around the table—and it’s represented by people from, you know, each of these 14 countries. Everyone’s being very supportive of this particular target. And, you know, we’re going to measure it. We’ve set it up. It’s out there in the public. We have to demonstrate that, you know, we achieve that. And then, you know, but there are some innovative ideas in the proposals on how to deal with cultural barriers. So like I was saying, you know, the use of technology to—as an enabler for women entrepreneurs in these developing countries is something that has come out in many of the proposals. And I am very optimistic that, you know, we’re going to be able to achieve some breakthrough in this, through these kinds of projects—what’s called disruptive technology. And I think that’s kind of one of the most exciting part of the proposals that have come in through We-Fi. But, you know, hold us to it. And, you know, keep asking us this question. VOGELSTEIN: Right. You can count on us. We’ll hold you to it. (Laughter.) And look forward to seeing the data, and really glad to hear you’re keeping metrics on this critical element. Linda, what about the role of the private sector? And through the work of the coalition, how have you contended with some of these legal, social, cultural barriers? SCOTT: Yeah. First, I want to parse a little bit because what I might say here is that I brought this group together, but I am not the leader of this group. They lead themselves now. And I am also not—well, they sort of do. (Laughter.) And I’m not a spokesperson that represents them, right? I represent myself. And it’s very important for me to do that, because I have strong opinions and they may not want to be, you know, behind that. So—(laughs)—I think that in terms of legal stuff—so, major corporations have to be very careful about following the laws in any particular place, right? So they’re going to be doing that. At the same time, they have relationships with local governments because they need to have relationships with local governments in order to be able to do business. And sometimes what happens is that their expertise in this particular area, actually, the women’s empowerment, is helpful to that government. And that’s part of what they’re, you know, kind of trying to do as partners with the governments. It’s quite a different mode than it might have been in the past, where they try to work together on things that are going to benefit everybody, and that this is something that they can offer. And I think also it is the case that in the—in this space, that a private sector player, particularly a multinational company—and this is one of the reasons why I think it’s very important to be using them wisely to bring about systemic change, as we’re trying to do here, is that they occupy a little bit different space, such that they’re maybe not as implicated in some political issues that might be going on, because they’re a cross-national kind of an entity. They’re a secular entity. They do work across borders all the time. And it’s just a little bit—they’re a bit more agile than the public sector, I would say a great deal more agile than the public sector. But they’re—but sometimes they have strengths, OK, that can be drawn on in that kind of a situation. So I think, you know, with an important emphasis that they have to be mindful of the law, all right. And sometimes people do kind of want them to, you know, deal with informal workers or something, that they just can’t do, right? But, yeah, they’re going to do that. Now, as far as the social and cultural—and this is the Linda Scott part here, OK, has a very strong opinion of this—is that they’re all very careful about culture. You know, they’re all very careful. Most of them, though, have worked around the world for really as long as any of us have been on it, OK? I mean, they’ve had Coca-Cola way out there for a long time. So it’s not like they just, you know, fell off the turnip truck. But at the same time, going into Linda Scott here, I think it’s really important to be recognizing that this phenomenon of gender inequality is a global phenomenon. It actually doesn’t vary that much around the world. It has a very strong pattern, one you can see from space it’s so patterned, OK? (Laughter.) And so to keep acting like this is a local, cultural idiosyncrasy is not realistic, OK? And the other thing is I think it’s important, even if you don’t say it, to remember that if you’re in there engaging with changing gender norms, you are by definition kind of going against the local culture, right? You’re trying to change. And let’s face it, people push after—even in this country—trying to change gender norms, right? Everywhere you go, people push back. So I think it’s important when we consider questions like how are you going to honor the culture or something, to remember and be realistic about what you’re trying to accomplish for all of us. VOGELSTEIN: Fair enough. And truly global, as you noted. SCOTT: Yes. VOGELSTEIN: Right here as well. SCOTT: Yes, terrible. Yes. VOGELSTEIN: I wonder if I could ask each of you to reflect on how the different sectors, governments, certainly the multilateral space, NGOs, foundations—how can we expect better engagement with the private sector on a shared agenda to advance women’s economic participation? Linda, I’d love it if you could answer that. And then, Priya, perhaps you could reflect on what you would like to see from the private sector to achieve some of the goals that you’ve outlined through We-Fi. So, Linda, why don’t you begin? SCOTT: Yeah. I think that they—I think they have—they’ve learned a lot, the private sector has. They’ve been quite active. We were—and we actually were meeting with some people from the World Bank yesterday and talking about some of the touchpoints that there might be, some of the expertise that might be shared. We had one conversation about how they—not with World Bank but later—about how there’s enough knowledge about financial inclusion in this group that they really feel like they have a lot to offer in terms of expertise about how such things have to be executed. I think, if I may—I hope this analogy will work—but I read something a couple of days ago, an article that said 80 percent of world trade goes through multinational corporations. OK, that’s a lot. OK? And you’re not going to do a women’s economic empowerment program unless you’re engaged with the private sector, which doesn’t necessarily mean the multinationals because obviously on the ground you’re local businesses. But it’s important to realize that you have your policy part of this and you have your practical part of this. And it’s one thing to talk about trade regulations and agreements and whatever, but when you’re starting to talk about goods and services moving around the world, when you’re talking about where the rubber meets the road, you’re talking about that part of the economy. And I think a lot of what they’ve been doing is figuring out in real time how do you accomplish some of these things. So that’s, I think, a lot of what they have to offer. VOGELSTEIN: Priya, what do you want to see from the private sector? BASU: So there’s a 1.5 trillion (dollar) estimated credit deficit facing women entrepreneurs around the developing world. So one kind of big part of all of this is working with the private sector to—and I’ve said this before, to mobilize and leverage more money for women entrepreneurs. So here, I’m talking about the private financial sector. And, you know, around the world there are sort of biases against lending to women entrepreneurs. And I’ve seen it in my own country where, you know, if you give—way back in 2005, I did a project in India on SNE financing where this SNE development bank was sort of given applications. And when you took the name out from the top of the application, you know, many more women would have gotten credit. But as soon as they saw the name of a woman, you know. So working with the private sector, with private financial institutions to address this kind of financing gap, and it’s not just, you know, access to loans. It’s really access to equity and access to insurance and, you know, just to kind of come back to Linda’s point, that problem is not just a developing country problem. I understand even here, you know, what 3 percent—less than 3 percent of venture capital goes to women. So, you know, so one kind of aspiration we have is to be able to partner, you know, with the private sector to sort of get more financing to these women entrepreneurs. You know, multilateral aid is going to sort of—you know, can help, you know, steer this in the right direction, and then sort of provide some amount of financing to address risk and so on. But the solution is going to have to come from private financing. And then, I’m very hopeful. You know, when I hear and I see all this interest amongst, you know, private corporations to partner with us, to address exactly the kind of things we’re talking about. You know, we can’t do it alone at the World Bank or the eight MDBs that are working around the We-Fi or on other women’s issues. If we really are to make an impact in terms of, you know, creating more jobs for women through entrepreneurship around the developing world, and that has to come from the private sector. So not to put pressure on the private sector’s that’s siting here, but really, you know, you’re the solution to all of this. You know, we can work with you and we can—you know, we can certainly kind of come and help on the policy framework and the legal/regulatory framework and so on. But the jobs are going to be—going to have to be created, you know, by the private sector for the private sector, so. VOGELSTEIN: Fair enough. Fair enough. SCOTT: Can I jump in on that? VOGELSTEIN: Please. SCOTT: Because I think it’s important to make, you know, discernment among sectors, right? So there is—the people who are in this room right now, of our coalition, there’s no financial sector people here today. Now, we do have some financial sector members. And one of them, for example, is Goldman Sachs, who has actually worked very closely with the IFC on, for example, training bankers around the world to deal with women better, which is just, like, a really nice way to say it, OK? (Laughter.) Because there’s a lot of bias in the banks. I mean, you know, there is. And that’s a job that will—you know, the World Bank can help on too. I mean, there’s—you know. And I think that some of our members that have gotten out in the field and tried to help women build businesses and stuff have discovered this problem for themselves. And they have tried to work around, you know, some of the issues. Like, for example, MasterCard is one of our members. And they’ve worked a lot with the whole problem of identification, which we were talking about just earlier today, is that in a lot of cases you can’t even get a woman a bank account, never mind a loan, because they don’t have an ID. So that is the first step. And so they’ve worked a lot on that. Goldman Sachs and Coca-Cola both, I believe, have had big credit facilities that were available through the IFC on a global level. There’s a lot of actually activity that is not financial sector, but it’s aimed at the financial sector. And so that’s what I’m saying, is just that you need to be, you know, looking at who needs to be moved. VOGELSTEIN: Expand this coalition, yes indeed. Well, there are many experts in the room, so I’d love to open the discussion now to your questions. Please raise your placards, state your name and affiliation, and we’ll get to as many as we can. Why don’t we start here in the back? Q: Hi. I’m Macani Toungara, TechnoServe. VOGELSTEIN: I think we actually have some microphones. So wait till it comes around, we can all hear what you have to say. Q: Macani Toungara. I’m with TechnoServe. My question is around the citizenship of these global partners. So I see a lot of these are American companies. How are you seeing the trends with European companies, Indian, Chinese, from other sectors? How does—how do corporations that are incorporated in those regions, how do they measure up? Are they keeping up with where the American corporate sector is? What are the differences? VOGELSTEIN: Linda? SCOTT: Yeah, that’s a good question. As I said earlier in the beginning, I’m someone who chose them. And I—for this particular group. And I, at the time, looked at other—we have a mix, actually, of American and British, because some of these that are—although they’re familiar names to us, actually the Women’s Empowerment Program is in England. So I did not feel at the time that there was anybody really that stood out that I could be confident was of the same stature myself, with the knowledge I had, OK? So what I decided to do at the time was to keep it to the U.K. and the U.S. members because I felt like I had a solid idea of what they were doing, and I could make an informed judgement. All along, we’ve realized that at some point we were going to need to reach out and do that. And really, the main thing is being able to make sure you have a solid partner and you’re not asking somebody who isn’t what you want, right? So I would say, yes, we want to do it. And we’re just not quite there yet. We’re still kind of getting ourselves situated. VOGELSTEIN: Thanks for that, Linda. Other questions? Lyric, here in the front. Q: Thank you so much for this rich discussion. I’m Lyric Thompson. I direct the policy advocacy program at the International Center for Research on Women. And I also co-chair an advocacy coalition on women’s economic empowerment. So I’m very interested in both of your remarks. My question is for Priya, which is sort of a one part process question and one part substance question on the We-Fi. On process, we were one of a number of groups who had called for a formal civil society role in the governance structure of the We-Fi, particularly given some of the dynamics that Rachel alluded to in terms of the rich diversity of countries who are contributing to the fund. So any comment you could make on where that stands. And then, the substance question, we were delighted to see the focus on dismantling barriers. Has there been any focus or discussion on the barrier of unpaid care work which, of course, is one of the major things that is keeping women out of economic participation or underemployed? Thanks. BASU: Great. So on the governance, the We-Fi governing committee does include representation from civil society. And thanks, I mean, you and others raised that, and that gave us the—sort of the wherewithal to make that happen. The way it’s structured is on top of the 14 decision-making members that are the founding donors of the We-Fi, there are I believe 3 CSO representatives on a rotating basis. I think they’re—if I recall correctly, it changes every two years. And then we also have on top of that—and amongst those CSO representatives, were saying that at least one of them at any point in time has to be from a recipient country of the We-Fi. And then on top of that, we have representation from U.N. Women and the W-20, and One Campaign. So that’s kind of the structure. And then we have all of these MDB implementing partners as observers as well. So that’s—I hope that answers your question on the CSO representation. And we see—you know, we see these representatives, they have been playing a very effective role because they really do bring different insights to the table, and the—you know, they complement the sort of knowledge and kind of experience that the government representatives have on We-Fi’s governing committee. On your other question, that’s kind of—that is covered in the World Bank Group’s proposal. There’s kind of a strong sort of acknowledgment of the fact that, you know, better care for—you know, kind of child care and so on for women is something that really does act as a barrier for women to go out and work. And I don’t want to keep coming back to this again, but the proposal that deals—or the couple of proposals that deal with using technology, giving women better access to sort of online platforms, ways in which they could sort of work from home also take into account this barrier. That’s not a solution to the barrier, but it’s kind of, you know, a way to tackle it. But, Linda, I don’t know if you wanted to add something about care? SCOTT: I’m sitting here trying to think if anybody who’s on the—if I know about any of the programs that they have that are dealing directly with the care question. I’m thinking not right now. There are programs that deal with violence and some other things, but not particularly that. I think everybody is very much aware of it, however, and are very concerned with doing things like measuring time use and that kind of stuff. So it’s not like they don’t know. I do feel like—and I did want to kind of plug my report here— VOGELSTEIN: Go ahead. (Laughter.) SCOTT: OK. So I’ve got this report. And I’ve got some copies sitting out there. It would be great if everybody took one. If, among other reasons, I don’t have to put them in my suitcase. But they’re really nice, and full color. But it talks a lot in here—this is kind of my distillation of the conversations we’ve had over the last three or four years—talks a lot about this whole question of an ecosystem, that there’s no one thing you can go in and do in a community without taking into account all of these kinds of issues. But it’s often not necessarily the private sector to be the one to, you know, deal with it, right? And I know some of them, for example, have even had some, like, gender—family gender training stuff, and whatever, because you just—there’s a lot of stuff that goes on. I know a lot of them have gotten involved in things like water access and girls education and things like that, because when they got into a community that was a problem that they couldn’t execute. A lot of them are testing technologies that try to get around some of these issues. And so I think—but I think what happens is, at least my observation is, that we’re doing something here where the governments are going a little bit of some of the things they didn’t always do, and the private sector is doing some things they didn’t always do. You know, you didn’t used to have governments teaching entrepreneurship, you know what I’m saying? So everybody is, I think, still trying to feel their way towards what is their role. So. VOGELSTEIN: Fair enough. We have another question here. Q: Thank you. Erika Veberyte, international development consultant. Many of us probably have at least participated in one discussion focusing on economic versus political empowerment. And at the end we usually come together, saying the mutual support of these two spheres is the most important for the sort of progress of the country, and the development. What is the private sector? What is the role of the private sector in that? Has the private sector been engaged in that? And by political empowerment, I obviously don’t necessarily mean running for office. I mean leadership, the community leadership, the leadership in their, you know, business associations, et cetera. Thank you. VOGELSTEIN: So what about this question of leadership? SCOTT: There’s actually a good bit that goes on about leadership. For example, I think some—for example, Mondelez and Marks and Spencer both, you know, out in areas where they’re getting cocoa and this kind of stuff, start—in fact, and I know this also has been happening in some of the factory programs—they actually start with trying to cultivate self-esteem, encourage leadership, encourage engagement. It doesn’t—it’s no enough just to do—you know, they have to—they have to be able to engage, just as you’re saying. And so, for example, one of the issues that you run into in access to markets, all right, is that you’ve got to be able to get them in there on a cooperative board. And they’ve got to hold their own, OK? So that there are those kinds of leadership issues, even within a private sector environment. And, yeah. I mean, it’s, for sure, have to do it. VOGELSTEIN: Why don’t we come to the other side of the room. Myra, you have a question, and then we’ll come over here. Thank you. Q: Hi. Mayra Buvinic from CDD and Data2x. A comment for Linda and a question for Priya. (Laughs.) If you don’t mind. The comment is, you know, responding to TechnoServe’s question, I would venture that there are very few other countries in the world where multinationals are doing this. And that this is, you know, very much sort of the first, or whatever. And I would suggest that at some point you really need to give this much more visibility and PR-ing, just to act as a demonstration effect, because I really think it’s incredibly valuable what you’re doing. But nobody knows about it, or very few people know about it. And probably you have—you haven’t wanted to make it more public. (Laughter.) But I think that it’s a great idea and it should be fostered. SCOTT: Thank you. Yeah, I’d like that actually. If I could just answer, and you’re absolutely right that in other areas of the world this is—the whole economic empowerment thing is kind of not known about among the corporations. In some countries, in fact, some of these multinationals have had trouble selling in some of the programs because the local office is like, what? You know, I mean, in England, for example, they can kind of take offense at the idea that you’re going to intervene for women, so. VOGELSTEIN: Just saying. Mayra you had another question for Priya. Q: For Priya, yeah. Two questions, very short, brief. But, you know, on measuring results, I mean, if the financial sector is going to be a big sort of target for you, are you going to be asking the banks to sex-disaggregate their supply-side data? That’s, you know, sort of—you know, three-fourths of the banks in the world don’t do that. And if they don’t do it, they’re never going to realize the biases they have. The second question is just have you been able to sidestep some of the regular procedures of the World Bank to give away the money? Because otherwise, it’s going to take a very long time. (Laughter.) And we need results quickly. VOGELSTEIN: There’s the wisdom of inside experience there with that question. (Laughter.) Priya, please. BASU: I’m so glad you raised both of those points. So on the first one, I should have mentioned that, so sex-disaggregation of data, we have two results—we have 12 results indicators in our results framework. My team’s sitting there. They can correct me if I’m wrong. I think I have—yeah. So two out of 12. And two of them are about sex-disaggregation of data. And just yesterday we were talking to the ADB team that’s going to do this big project in Sri Lanka on banking for women. And the eight banks that they’re going to work through, each of them has been—set a target of doing this. And in previous projects—and this is not the first time, you know, those eight commercial banks have received multilateral support, but this is the first time under We-Fi that they’ve been asked to do that. And any bank that doesn’t—the way we’re tracking it is that if they don’t show their ability to sex-disaggregate data within the first two years, then they’re going to be disqualified for future support. So we’re really kind of putting a lot of emphasis, because, frankly speaking, you know, there’s been so many projects that have kind of dealt with—well, that have set out to help women get better access to finance. But at the end of the day, nobody knows whether men receive money or women receive money. So, Mayra, thank you for pointing it out. And we also have seven impact evaluations as part of the We-Fi proposals, which we’re going to—kind of which also are going to focus on this. On top of that, there’s also a focus on sex-disaggregated data for nonfinancial institutions under We-Fi as well, the ones that are providing sort of capacity building and business advisory support, and so on. So we want to be able to track how many women, you know, were supported through We-Fi. Two headline indicators for the We-Fi at the top are how many women-owned SME got financed through We-Fi, how many of them got other kinds of support through We-Fi. And then on your other question, so, yes. You know, I think we’ve already shown that we can move very fast. You know, I have, over the past 20 years at the World Bank—in my—in my most recent job I set up about 20 or more partnerships. And none of them were set up with the kind of record-speed that We-Fi was set up. But that’s not—I mean, I setting up is not just—I mean, that’s a good start, but then the approval procedures and so on. So we are—we have our own kind of governance structure. We’re called a financial intermediary fund, and we’re governed by this external governing body. We’re housed at the World Bank. But our procedures are very nimble and agile. And the whole bank is moving that way. You know, we have this big, agile bank project right now. So, yes, we were able to get the funding approvals very quickly. And we hope to be able to sustain that. And, again, another thing to watch out for—and shout-out if you see that, you know, we’re not moving fast enough, so. VOGELSTEIN: Well, that’s refreshing to hear. And it sounds like we’ll have a treasure trove of data to dig through. So grateful for that. SCOTT: I just want to, you know, underscore what Mayra was saying about this business about sex-disaggregated data is a really big deal. It’s a big deal in everything, but particularly with the banks. And it actually is a problem in this country that needs to be turned around, because the banks are restricted by some old regulations of the 1970s that probably need to be looked again. But just from some of my personal experience, working on some of these banking programs, it is amazing to me how you’ll go into a bank and they’ll tell you, well, you know, women won’t be good, you know, for the bank, because, you know, they—you know, they’re not profitable, and they’re going to do this, and their businesses don’t grow. And they’re—and they’ll just go on and on and on. And you’re just like, OK. So how many women have you got as customers? Oh, we don’t have any, right? Or, well, you know, we had to turn them all down. Well, so how many apply? Oh, they never apply, right? And they have all these very fully formed ideas about what a typical women customer is. And they either have never had one, or their sex—their data is not sex-disaggregated, so they actually don’t know. They are talking about of a complete absence of information. And so that is just pure stereotyping. Decision-making on nothing. And so I think that’s something that really needs to be held to the fire. VOGELSTEIN: It is amazing how illuminating facts and numbers can be, fair enough. SCOTT: Yeah, can be. Yeah. VOGELSTEIN: We have a question over here and here. Q: (Off mic)—CNN International. My question is actually very much about data and, Rachel, your point about having a treasure trove of data. But I’m curious for our speakers, you know, for, say, you know, governments, heads of state, and also for CEOs, what—if there was one data, one metric, one indicator that you would really encourage them to look at, what would it be? VOGELSTEIN: I don’t want to limit it to one, but is there something that rises to the top? SCOTT: Governments or businesses? OK. OK, I think it needs to be equal pay. I think that’s the number-one thing. And it needs to be measured consistently. And it needs to be published. And it needs to be comparable across national borders. And it needs to be tracked over time. And that is the one thing. Everybody needs that one. That’s what I would say. VOGELSTEIN: Priya, any thoughts? BASU: Well, I think—I mean, I would—I would agree with that. I would also look at, you know, how many women are in leadership roles in kind of the private sector. And I think that’s a really important one, on the boards of these— SCOTT: Yeah, and those two, of course, are connected, right? BASU: Yeah, they’re connected. (Laughter.) And I should say that, you know, we are walking our talk within the World Bank Group as well. We are just one short of having 50 percent of our senior leadership at the bank female. You know, we’re looking at how many, you know, women we have at all different levels, and trying to sort of, you know, make sure that there’s a, you know, an equal balance. We have also actually recently—it might be interesting, not quite connected with you—but we’re sort of saying how we’ve looked at our own procurement, our own corporate procurement, and looking at what proportion of our procurement is from women-owned businesses. And we’ve held ourselves to a new target. So, yeah, we’re— VOGELSTEIN: The lens is internal not just external. That’s great to hear. We had a question over here, and then we’ll come over to this side. Q: Hi. Thank you. I’m Arbor Johnson (sp). I work for Itochu. So the whole Japan-based multinational corporations is a whole separate issue. But separate from my day job, I’m involved in some impact-investing that’s focused on women, venture capitalists investing in women at the angel, and a little bit later stage. So that’s what I wanted to ask you about. How do we get—how do we leverage women in finance, women in leadership, but mostly women’s—women investing in women? SCOTT: Is that for me? VOGELSTEIN: Either one of you. I mean, this is an issue Priya mentioned before. SCOTT: OK. I mean, I think it’s really important. I think over the last 10 years or so, there’s been just really a lot of focus on credit. And credit is very—I mean, that’s still—in fact, we were talking about problems with credit here a few minutes ago. And I just wanted to share a fun fact that I had in a recent report where in the United States, women own 33 percent of the businesses and they get less than 5 percent of the small—conventional small-business loans. And I was doing a report on Lebanon, and exactly the same. Thirty-three percent of the businesses, 5 percent of the conventional business—exactly the same numbers. And, you know, the legal and regulatory environments are quite different. So there’s other stuff that drives all of this, you know? But the problem is that when you rely on credit so much, I mean, from a—just a purely business perspective, right, that’s not—you can’t be doing that. So it puts people at risk, especially start-ups, right? So definitely equity is where we need to be going in my opinion. But then, I mean, that’s where, you know, you go up the financial food chain, it gets worse, not better. And so I don’t see any other solution for it but angel—for the time being—women-led venture capital and women-led investment funds, yeah. Personally, yes. BASU: I would—I would just add to that that, yes, I mean, you know, we need to set targets for these, you know, venture capital firms, and so on, you know, in terms of number of women partners they have, for example. And you know, you will get more women investing in women when you have more women in powerful positions, in decision-making positions. If you talk to venture capitalists, you know, in this country and elsewhere, and I’ve done a little bit of that, you know, you say—they’ll tell you there just aren’t enough women applying for venture capital. So they say it’s kind of a demand issue. And there might be some truth to that. I mean, in this country, for example, venture capital is in tech, right? And how many women tech firms do you have? And then you go back and there’s, like, the answer to that question—or, the solution to that problem requires going many steps back, right, getting more women to study computers, getting more women to sort of, you know, set up technology firms. And then go to tech companies seeking venture capital. But in other countries, you know, venture capital is not necessarily tech-based. And even there, you find that, you know, there’s not that many women applicants. Maybe they’re not going because they don’t think they have a chance, right? So building confidence and getting them to sort of go apply for that money could be one part of it. Another part is they have gone and they’ve been turned down so many times that, you know, they just don’t want to go again. And that part of the equation, I think, is solved by getting more women into decision-making roles in these companies. So— SCOTT: Yeah. Two things, if I may. One is on, yeah, getting into decision-making roles in leadership. OK, this is one of the reasons why women’s economic empowerment is important. And I know that it starts to get a little bit uncomfortable for some people about women need many, or should get many, even at big amounts, OK? But money is power, all right, we have said, for men. And why should it be any different for women, OK? And so we need for women to have some money so that women have some power. That’s my feeling. OK. So that’s one. The other thing, though, is this business about confidence. I’ve gotten to the point where I just automatically in my head I go, OK, is it because she’s not confident or is because she has a really pretty rational expectation of what’s going to happen when she walks in there and just says: I don’t need it. I just don’t want to deal with those guys. I think that is a lot of what happens, is that—well, you say, oh, well they don’t apply. And, oh, they must not be confident. Is what they are is realistic. I also think that it’s important to start looking at why they feel that way. I think that, for example, I’ve just done some reports on women in tech and I think there’s a lot of just bad statistics being put out there about this. But if it doesn’t take any time at all on Google for a young girl who’s trying to choose her major in college to find out that the average tenure of a woman in tech is 12 years or 7 years. It’s really short. OK, so you’re going to put all your eggs into that basket, knowing that you’re not going to make it the rest of your career because they’re going to push you out? And then it doesn’t take any more—you know, maybe another 10 minutes googling around. And what you find are lots of surveys that say: And the reason they’re leaving is because it’s a hostile environment, there’s sexual harassment, and they’re really awful to mothers. So my feeling is, let’s not—let’s not just beat up on these girls too much and, again, assume it’s because they don’t have confidence. Let’s deal with the source of the problem. Source of the problem is a toxic work environment. Sorry. This is why they don’t want me to be their spokesperson. (Laughter, applause.) VOGELSTEIN: We’re grateful for your candor. MS.     : (Off mic.) (Laughter.) VOGELSTEIN: There we are. Well, I regret that we are out of time. But I will venture to say that while there’s clearly still a lot of work to be done, that the conversation today really illuminates the path forward. So please join me in thanking our speakers for being with us today. (Applause.) Thank you all. This was so great. (END) This is an uncorrected transcript.  

  Women’s financial inclusion is positively correlated with economic growth at both the household and global levels. Yet women at the bottom of the pyramid are 28 percent less likely than men to have a bank account – a product of mobility restrictions, cultural norms, and low levels of financial literacy. Mayra Buvinic, Uzoma Dozie, and Mary Ellen Iskenderian discuss how the rise of digital financial services offers new opportunities for women and economic development.  This meeting is part of a high-level series in collaboration with ExxonMobil. Transcript VOGELSTEIN: Good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon. Welcome. Thank you for braving the elements and for being here at 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 and girls advances U.S. foreign policy objectives, including prosperity and stability. I want to begin by expressing my gratitude to Kevin Murphy and Jim Jones of the ExxonMobil Foundation for their leadership on women’s economic empowerment and their continued support for the Council’s working, including our Women and Development Roundtable Series. Our discussion this afternoon is focused on access to financial services and women’s economic empowerment, and this gathering marks the official launch of She Counts, an ambitious new 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. This new initiative comes at a time when evidence of the relationship between women’s financial inclusion and economic development is stronger than ever. And yet, despite this evidence, significant barriers to women’s financial inclusion remain. We know, for example, that women at the bottom of the pyramid are 28 percent less likely than men to have a bank account. We also know that the rise of mobile phone ownership affords new opportunities to advance women’s economic participation and thereby economic growth, and we know this in part because of the research, advocacy and financial insights provided by the esteemed panelists we have with us this afternoon. And we are delighted to welcome them to the Council to talk about how the She Counts initiative will help close the financial inclusion gender gap. First, we are very pleased to be joined by Mayra Buvinic, an internationally-recognized expert on gender and international development, who currently serves as senior fellow at both the United Nations Foundation and the Center for Global Development. Previously, she was the director for gender and development at the World Bank and was a founding member and president of the International Center for Research on Women. Second, we are very fortunate to be joined by Uzoma Dozie, who has served as the CEO of Diamond Bank since 2014. He first joined the bank in 1998 and has served in several capacities, including as the executive director of personal banking, retail banking and corporate banking. And we are delighted to welcome back to the Council Mary Ellen Iskenderian, the president and CEO of Women’s World Banking, a global nonprofit dedicated to giving low-income women access to financial tools and financial security. Prior to her role at Women’s World Banking, she worked for 17 years at the International Finance Corporation and before that, at Lehman Brothers. Before we get started, I want to welcome Jim Jones, the executive director of the ExxonMobil Foundation, to give opening remarks and tell us more about the She Counts initiative. Jim, we’re grateful you could be with us today. The floor is yours. (Applause.) JONES: Welcome to spring in New York City. For those of you who are in here, this is the way it looks. Thank you, Rachel, thanks to the Council, for that really kind introduction. I thought it might be helpful for about 90 seconds to just give you some context of what we’re doing today and how we’ve come here because it really, truly was a journey. In 2005, ExxonMobil launched a new initiative through our foundation called the Women’s Economic Opportunity Initiative, and in that, we knew, in all of the places where we have investments, that women drive economic change almost unilaterally across the globe. We knew that when women are more fully participatory in their economies that prosperity is bolstered, and that, of course, is good for business, but we didn’t know how best to target our investments. So we asked the question that we do in our business all the time—in order to return the maximum impact of our investments—if you had a dollar to invest in women’s economic empowerment, where is that dollar best spent? And we started on a process in which we spoke to just about every academic, thinktank, government donor in this space and asked that question, and clearly what we got back was a panoply of answers. Clearly, there was no silver bullet in this, and there was no one-size-fits-all mechanism and intervention that would fit all women in all contexts around the world. So we called a woman who has become now my friend—Mayra Buvinic—because we worked together for so long on this issue, and she commissioned probably two dozen research teams that went around the world asking that question, combed all of the academic literature, and the findings of that study were meant selfishly for our purposes to direct our philanthropic giving in this space. But it became so clear—and Mayra convinced us—that we should actually publish these findings for the betterment of every donor, every analyst, every implementer to really understand these interventions that are proven to work and move the needle on women’s economic empowerment, those that are promising and those, frankly, that need more research. So that publication called, “A Roadmap for Promoting Women’s Economic Empowerment” was published in 2013, was updated last year again; it’s online. If you just google those words—roadmap for promoting women’s economic empowerment—you can find it. One of the issues that the roadmap turned up, as we were trying to think about how to direct our funding, was that when women are encouraged to save, when women have control of capital, when financial institutions design specific products for women, that the impact on women’s economic empowerment on the micro stage is profound and that leads to great macroeconomic development as well. So that’s why we’re here today, frankly, to talk about this very issue of savings and the impact that savings has on women’s economic empowerment. How do you engage with women-owned businesses to deliver another benefit, too? It’s one of the best avenues that we’ve found that drive macroeconomic development in terms of countries and the impact on business is profound. So that brings us, as I said, to where we are. Mayra’s going to discuss, I think—we didn’t talk about this before so if I say this wrong, you can talk about whatever you want. But Mayra, I think, is going to discuss the results of a very large-scale pilot program that we supported in Tanzania and Indonesia on this issue—designing savings programs for women entrepreneurs. And as I said, it’s really great to see my friend Mary Ellen Iskenderian here, and I think that Mary Ellen is going to touch upon this new She Counts platform that we’ve helped develop, that Women’s World Banking has taken over and going to run with in future years. And, of course, it’s great to see the distinguished CEO of Access Bank here as well. So let me conclude again by thanking you, Rachel, for hosting us today at the Council, and before we go onto the panel, I think we’re going to show a video of what She Counts is. So thank you all very much. (Applause.) (A video presentation begins.) ANNOUNCER: She is strength. She is a daughter, a partner, a citizen, a friend. She is an entrepreneur. Although entrepreneurship may look different around the world, the hope and aspirations are the same. Nearly 1 billion women worldwide lack access to formal financial services. This limits her potential to save money, to grow her business, to create a better life for herself and her family. She Counts is a global platform that harnesses the power of financial services to help her plan and save for a prosperous future. Launched by ExxonMobil in partnership with Women’s World Banking and the Center for Global Development, She Counts works with financial service providers to put savings and financial tools in the hands of women enabling her to save securely, invest in her business, and transform her life. Together, we are creating a world where every woman counts. She believes in her potential. She is driven to succeed. She will build her financial future. She Counts. (Video presentation ends.) (Applause.) VOGELSTEIN: OK, let’s get started now with our panel discussion and dive into exactly how this new She Counts platform will work. Mayra, I’d like to start with you and ask you to give us some context. You’ve led, as Jim said, important field research on women savings—most recently in Tanzania and Indonesia. What does your research tell us about why savings accounts are so important for women and mobile savings accounts, in particular? BUVINIC: Sure. And there’s—you know, at some point we have highlights and a fact sheet with the results of the first report that we have published. Let me just say, first, that it’s a pleasure to be here. It’s wonderful. And in psychology, there’s, you know, a finding that is very reliable—it says suffering leads to liking. (Laughs, Laughter.) I like being here a lot because it took us quite a lot to get here today. (Laughs.) VOGELSTEIN: Fair enough. BUVINIC: So anyway. VOGELSTEIN: You’ll tell us the fruits of your labor. BUVINIC: (Laughs.) But let me just say we went—you know, this project in Tanzania, which the project focuses on giving mobile savings plus business training to women, and it’s a rigorous control trial. It has a control group, a group that gets mobile savings, and a group that also gets top business management training, and we wanted to see the effects. And we went to see—to visit the project, and we met this woman, Rose. And Rose tells you all of why we need better access for women for savings. I mean—and Rose and most of the women that were part of the project—and the project, it was 4,000 women so—which 3,000 were either, you know, receiving mobile savings or business management training. And we went to visit Rose, and Rose has a microenterprise in a big market in Mbeya, in one of the cities in Tanzania, and she now was using the mobile savings platform and she was saving for her business. But she told us, you know, oh—well, you know, well, but I’ve saved all the time—and in fact, 90 percent of the women in the study already saved, used to save, but all informally—and so we asked her, how do you save, and she says, oh, come, I’ll show you. And she took us—her house was very near the marketplace where she worked—she took us to her house. She had keys—you know, she sort of had hanging keys, so she opened the door. Her house was very well locked. She opened the door, she took us inside the house, and then she went to her bedroom. And then, she came back, and she came back with a jar full of coins, a big huge bag full of coins and a lockbox—a wooden lockbox that she had had made. This is how she had been saving. What she would do is with the profits of her enterprise, the coins, she would put them in the jar. Once the jar was full, they went into the big bag. And then the lockbox was different. So she said: With the savings from the big bag, I want to buy a car. But then, I also need saving for emergency, so I use the lockbox. And then now she had savings for the business. So—and that’s what we called mindful saving, because clearly she had—she had these different—mentally, she was saving in different instruments. And, you know, hopefully she was going to be able, with these savings, to fulfill her dreams. But imagine—I mean, she—somebody could come and steal her savings, you know? I mean, she was in really risky situation. So the ability—I mean, and that’s another thing that I’ve—now we’ve found with the research. Women prefer to save. And there’s a significant difference between women and men. Men, if you have—if you give access to women to a very basic saving tool, for every 100 women 63 women will access the tool and save. Only 26 men will do so. So there’s clearly a preference for saving. Women use savings to invest in their businesses also, you know, for emergency reasons. But if they don’t have access to the financial system, it just—it’s robbing women of their future and it’s robbing banks from a huge potential cliental. VOGELSTEIN: So my one follow up. In the research that you did, what did you learn about what works best to promote women’s access to savings, particularly for women at the bottom of the pyramid. What do women look for in providers? BUVINIC: Right. I think—I think that what is happening—I mean, what we have been trying to figure out now is mobile savings—you know, the mobile technology—how the mobile technology can overcome huge constraints that women have. Why don’t—women don’t go to the banks. And oftentimes, you know, they don’t go to the banks because the banks were away—were far away. The transaction cost of women to go to the bank. So there is the physical issue of going to the bank, their transportation cost. And then, you know, banks—I mean, most people think, well, you know, banks are gender neutral service providers. They’re not. So that’s the beauty of the mobile technology. The mobile technology’s close to the women. They—you know, it reduces their transaction cost. And then the other thing that we have found out—I mean, and the Tanzania research shows it and then other—complementing other research. The mobile technology allows women to save privately. So they—that increases their economic independence and economic self-reliance. They don’t have to share the savings. They don’t have to tell the rest of the family the money they have, because if they have cash what happens is that some of that cash does not get invested in the business, it goes to family relatives. Female—women feel the pressures of family and to give away some of the cash. So the mobile technology—and this is—you know, the Tanzania study shows in fact that the mobile technology empowers the women subjectively. It increases their decision-making abilities in the household, at least what they tell us. So I think that that—there’s a huge potential on—of the mobile technology to give multiple benefits for women. To reduce their transaction costs, but also to empower them. VOGELSTEIN: So we know why it matters. We know now from the research what works best. Mary Ellen, I’d love it if you could talk a little more about She Counts, this new platform to promote savings for women. What do you hope that the platform will achieve? How will it work? And what is the specific gap that you’re hoping to fill? ISKENDERIAN: Well, also thank you very much, Rachel, for having us here and for shining a light on this exciting new project that we’re just thrilled to be entering into with Exxon and CGD. I think everything that Mayra just said is so consistent with Women’s World Banking’s work over the last 40 years. We know that given a choice, the—and I would actually argue with you, Jim. I think there actually is a silver bullet and it is savings for women. The product that women most want, the product that will drive the women out of the informal sector into the formal financial sector first, isn’t credit. It’s savings. In the network of financial institutions that we work with around the world, 49 institutions and 32 countries serving a total of 44 million clients, we see that women save on average—(background noise)—whoops—10 to 15 percent of monthly income, with is an extraordinary number. And so the light that this platform, we hope, will shine on the importance of savings—if we do nothing else with that, I think that will be such a great outcome, because far too often the economic—still, the economic development conversation, the conversation about microfinance and small and medium-sized enterprises is around credit. And we know—you know, one of the things that always kind of gets on my nerves is we keep hearing, you know, women are more risk averse than them. But—and I’d actually love to know whether this was supported by your research—we see very often it’s not so much that they’re risk averse. If anything, I think they’re sort of risk appropriate. That when women have a place to save and they know they have that cushion of savings, they have that cushion of risk prevention, of risk protection, then they’re very willing to borrow at the same levels, often unfortunately on worse terms than men, but with repayment rates as good or better than men, even in the small and medium enterprise space. But it’s that need for that safety net, that security, that’s the role they play in the household. And savings can provide that. So on She Counts, we’re really hoping to bring together more researchers and more great research by Mayra and her team, and financial service providers that are interested in exploring this base. And I’m really so pleased that Uzoma’s here today to tell you about the journey that Diamond Bank made into the low-income space. And it was a journey that started with a savings product, not a credit product. And we’re hoping to bring more Diamond Banks onto that platform. Other stakeholders, there are policy issues that are related to savings, to digital, to making sure that women have the identification and the other parts of the puzzle that you need in order to join the formal financial sector. So it’s a place to share best practice. That network that I told you about, the organizations in it, you know, love us at Women’s World Banking. But what they really love is being able to learn from each other. And so by bringing the She Counts members into that network, that ability to expand the learning, and particularly around savings and what works and even more especially around digital savings, is what we’re hoping to do through She Counts. VOGELSTEIN: So, Mary Ellen, you mentioned the private sector opportunity. And, Uzoma, I’d like to ask you to talk about the market interests that are at play here. Why did you decide that this was a good market opportunity? Tell us more about your experience promoting women’s access to savings in Nigeria. Why does this approach make a difference, not only for women but for your bottom line? DOZIE: Thank you. Thank you and thank you for inviting me. It’s good to be here. You know, I’m very pleased with the research findings, because it just validates what we’ve been doing. And I don’t think it would have been successful without the—if we had deployed our solution by ourselves, you know, got it wrong, because we would have used the bank as a product, program to actually drive it. So, you know, working with Women’s World Banking, one of the things that we learned is that you have to actually put yourself in the customer’s position and see the business through her—through her own lenses. And the reason why we did that, because we took—like, we took a long-term view of the market. And I said, where is the market going to expand? The corporate space is saturated. And there’s a lot of opportunity in the—at the bottom of the pyramid, and also for the excluded. But how do we actually—what mechanism can we actually use to actually drive that? And it has to be a completely different project, because the lifestyles of people that work at the bottom of the pyramid is completely different. I mean, they work harder than bankers. They work—you know, they start at 6:00 in the evening and they probably finish at 9:00 in the evening. So there’s no way they’re going to go to a bank. They don’t understand—and banks—banking language is not simple. So they don’t understand it. They really don’t understand. Nobody does. You know, very simple, logical reasoning. And so we had to—so nobody was doing it because everybody—they all had mobile phones. But you had to—and then we also had to—so there were two things that were important. How do we use technology is key, and how do we gain trust? You can have the technology, but if you don’t have the trust they’re not going to do any business with you. So I think what we did is first of all we changed the model. We had to take banking to them. So we built a banking solution on the mobile phone. Secondly, we also had to find—get a new set of bankers. So it wasn’t the typical bank stuff. We had to get people who were familiar with the marketplace, that people trusted as well. And then we had to teach them the basics of what they have to do. So one week, it was getting—I think it was getting—so, I think, it emphasizes the popular line: There’s no economic prosperity without social inclusion. And so you have to actually include these people. So no one will be creating jobs. We are actually providing a solution for these people. And great name—great name, because we did some market study to find out what was an appropriate name they will understand. And we went really—I mean, working with Women’s Banking, we weren’t actually bringing something new into the market. We were actually displacing a traditional way in which they were banking, which was a—(inaudible)—system where really what they did was take the money and give somebody, a man in the market, who would keep it for them and who also would give it to them when they wanted it. And there was uncertainty that they would see him tomorrow as well. And so when we came up with this proposition, and I think the right market and communication, so we got someone in the market that was very familiar with the people, someone to actually advocate for us and explain the solution. And we saw it was a—the adoption was amazing. You know, and to just to validate that women wanted—it’s not about a product. It’s about what it does. I mean, like, it’s—so when they tell you the story, they tell you how their children can go to school now. They tell you how they’ve increased their business. And they tell you how much they are saving as well. So they’re saving for a life that they never thought that their children would have, or they would actually be able to give to the whole—give to the family. And so that is—and when we came—and so—and they wanted to separate their transactions from their savings. So they wanted—so and that’s when we came out with the better savings. The savings—the product of just saving. They wanted to save for tomorrow, and they wanted an account to do that. They wanted—they wanted to do their transactions so that they could separate savings from transactions. And on the back-end perspective, what that has done—two things. It increased our liquidity—low-cost liquidity. It has made us—I mean, it has increased our brand equity. So before—(inaudible)—was spending—and what women are great at doing is telling good news. And so, you know, we spend—we could spend money on advertising, it wouldn’t get anywhere. But we have people in the marketplace who are actually saying fantastic things about Diamond Bank as well, and that has also increased our brand equity. And so I think women are the—I think women are very critical, especially in a marketplace like Nigeria, where 50 percent of the population are women. So you just can’t ignore that market, right? I mean, you know that market. And then they are—you know, they are the center of the value chain of any family. At once they have the say on education, they have a say on what happens in the home. And so the man gets paid, the money goes—a significant amount goes to the wife under her control. So if you’re a banker and you just—you’re not following the money trail, then you’re missing—you’re missing the plot. So not only—it’s also giving us extending revenue streams as well. And it has to be a deliberate exercise. If not, it’s very hard work. So we now have—I think with all the work that we have done, I think this year we moved the total, I think, the percentage of women in our business—in our customer base has moved from 32 to 37 percent or so. And so every year—and that’s with dedicated drive, dedicated communication. But that’s—I mean, it’s worth it, because it is not—we don’t see it as a charity. Actually, it’s a sustainable business model for us. VOGELSTEIN: There’s a clear value proposition that you’ve experienced. DOZIE: Yeah. VOGELSTEIN: So I want to ask each of you about policy reform, and how we can scale some of the approaches that you’re talking about and researching and testing. What reforms would you like to see at either the national or the international level to encourage savings for women? And what would you like to see the U.S. government in particular do, particularly in light of their stated interest of the current administration in promoting women’s entrepreneurship and economic empowerment? Please, Mayra. (Laughter.) What’s the answer? BUVINIC: I will start with what I want private sector banks to do. VOGELSTEIN: Start there. BUVINIC: And the private sector, and then we can—but—(laughter). And I think, you know, the private sector more generally that have been investing in women for a long time—you know, the ExxonMobil Foundation I think is a—is an example of, you know. Like, most private sector companies—and I think most public sector, also, development efforts focusing on women entrepreneurs—the focus has been on increasing the capacities of women. I mean, you know, women entrepreneurs need more business management training, they need more financial literacy training. All that works. But it’s really very cost—I mean it’s intensive. It’s cost intensive. You know, it’s difficult to do. There is another side that sort of I think particularly, you know, private sector banks have forgotten about. And it’s service provision. And modifying things on the side of service provision and understanding that your service provision is never gender neutral. That, you know, they are unconscious biases—conscious or unconscious biases that are really preventing women from accessing those services. And modifying that might be much more cost efficient because you don’t have—you know, you have to deal with a much smaller population of bank agents and, you know, tweaking the way that financial service providers design products. And I think that that is something that the private sector should do a lot more of, as well as development agencies. VOGELSTEIN: Both. BUVINIC: Both. VOGELSTEIN: And the structural changes, as opposed to individual training approaches. BUVINIC: Right. VOGELSTEIN: Other thoughts on policy changes or private sector opportunities that you see? ISKENDERIAN: Well, I guess a couple of things that have come up in this conversation I think have sort of obvious policy implications for them. You know, digital financial services are the way we are going to reach the un- and under-banked. I mean, that is a statement that pretty much everyone can agree on. But there are models around which that access that are being built, that regulatory agencies have a lot of say. And agents—building banking agents and some of the thinks that Mayra’s referred to. You know, regulators can really get in the way of determining how well those agent models are set up. You know, I think some of the experiences that Diamond Bank has had in Nigeria, there’s, you know, a requirement that banks and mobile network operators pair, making sure that the regulator kind of stays out of the way of what those commercial arrangements between those two private sector players are is absolutely critical. We’ve seen enormous moves forward in terms of financial inclusion in India as a result of electronic identification. Stupendous change there, really. What we’re still concerned with and really need to stay on top of is just because you have an account and an identification doesn’t mean you’re actually using it. And I think that’s where Mayra’s admonitions around service provision are hugely important. But Women’s World Banking is doing a great deal of work with the Indonesian government right now in setting its national financial inclusion strategy to have as their—quite remarkably, actually, for a Muslim majority country—they are at gender parity in financial inclusion. And they’re hoping as they increase that to more and more parts of the economy, that they maintain as close to parity as possible. We took them to India. They were amazed at what that electronic verification and identification process could bring about. And it’s now a number one priority there in their financial inclusion strategy. So we wanted to make sure that the services that are then provided with that identification are kept. And I guess what I would say about the U.S. government—again, Women’s World Banking’s been very fortunate over the years to be included as a representative—or, I think associate member is our name at the G-20, conversations around financial inclusion. And I have to say that as strongly as many people will have, you know, dinner table conversations with you about the power of tiered know your customer requirements and a broader access to identification, in the formal G-20 conversations, the United States is all about terrorism financing and money laundering and really not thinking in a particularly nuanced way about the need for easing identification restrictions for certain purposes and certain places. So I’d say maybe taking some of that nuance that we know the policymakers have and bringing it into the conversation. DOZIE: Well, I’m not U.S., but I think our government’s almost the same. (Laughter.) So I think there’s a lot of policy, but I think it’s a question of strategy. How do you execute on some of these things? And we find that in Nigeria you can—I think we underestimate the amount of training that is required, right, to actually—so it’s not about—and more people see financial inclusion or, you know, using digital—trying to go to digital as a nice to have and not as an imperative. And it has to be an imperative, because there’s a cost of being financially exclusive to a government. There’s also a cost when, you know, a lot of cash is being used—corruption, especially in a developing economy, corruption and leakages. So from the policy perspective, I would say you’re trying to promote incentives for gender diversity—the diversity. And not subsidies, but incentives as to knowing that—knowing that especially in an economy like Nigeria, where 50 percent of the population is women. And so if you’re going to increase consumption and GDP, you have to have a more inclusive population. And then you have to move—if you want to really track and understand what’s happening in the economy, you have to move from less cash to more electronic payment so that you can now better allocate resources and really because people only—people are financially excluded as well because they might—I mean, there’s a tax issue. What am I paying taxes for? So if I do not feel I’m going to get any benefit from government, I will stay out. But it is still expensive, both for the individual and also for the government as well. So that would kind of be my input on that. VOGELSTEIN: So quite a menu of proposals that have cast here. (Laughter.) Well, I’d like to open the conversation. So if you have a question, please state your name and affiliation. We have microphones coming around and we’ll get to as many as we can. Judith. Q: First of all, thrilling to have you all here. (Laughs.) I know two of you—three of you quite well. Two observations, with related questions. This issue of mobile money and this, you know, uneven penetration of access to mobile. Nonetheless, I think it’s extremely important. And with, for instance, our work on adolescent girls, we have tried to get mentors—this is through—paid by mobile money. I see a huge opportunity for some experiments to be done in both, you know, nongovernmental civil society efforts—because NGOS—one thing we saw was that if the mentors were paid through the NGO they would stop being paid, because of course they’re female and they don’t need the money. So mobile money provides a channel and entitlement and so forth for them. So we insisted, rather than giving grants, to do—for some of the organizations just to pay their mentors directly using mobile money. Teething problems, but still. There are places, like Ethiopia, where 33,000, you know, community health workers, all female. How are they paid? What if we switched it to mobile money, or did a controlled case? I bet it would make an enormous difference. It would also be much less easy to sideline them or swap out their jobs. So that’s one thing. A lot of entitlements that are having trouble getting there anyway operate through females who are doing work being deprived access to their wages. The second is that a lot of other innovations—green and renewable energies—have with them financing packages and assumptions which are if not enabling, are really hostile, but could be adapted. I mean, packages that would allow, for instance, women living with school-age children to have a package for, you know, solar panels and so forth—looked into this a little bit—but that were much better adapted and could use, in some ways, some savings—some savings instruments. I think new savings instruments, including energy-saving instruments. Again, those are, to my experience, completely un-adapted. So what do you know about it? What can be done about it? VOGELSTEIN: Thoughts, Mayra? BUVINIC: Well, I mean, very much agree with Judith. I mean, the potential for mobile payments for women—for young women, I mean, is huge. I think it’s starting to be done. I mean, some of these cash transfer programs are staring to put monies in mobile. But, you know, the potential is huge. And I think that that’s where there should be a lot more investment and experimentation. I just want to add also, on sort of the policy side, I mean, one of the great things—and I have to really salute the ExxonMobil Foundation in terms of really sort of trying to look for the rigorous evidence and investing in financing, you know, research that is very rigorous. You don’t have to do rigorous evidence all the time. But in these kinds of things, to just get the basic knowledge, I think that rigorous evidence is very important. And it will be—you know, it’s wonderful that She Counts also will bring that, sort of the rigor of the evidence to evaluate and see which programs work and which programs do not work, so that we can—you know, we can—we can—instead of sort of trying out things that, you know, people keep trying without knowing if they work or not, we’d be investing wisely and smartly in things that worked. ISKENDERIAN: You know, I guess just the only thing I would—you know, I—pretty much everything I know about youth savings I know from Judith. So I’m not going to in any way—(laughter)—contradict anything she said. The one point—and we were actually just talking about this in the office earlier today—on the solar packages, some of you may be familiar with, and I know ExxonMobil has supported some of them, is pay as you go solar panels and solar lights that are being very popular throughout the developing world. You pay on your mobile phone, sort of on a—on an installment basis. And then at the end of the payments you own the solar—the solar lamp. This has been—you know, it’s fascinating from so many different financial aspects. You’re—there are credit algorithms that are being derived against how frequently you pay and when you pay. Do you pay, you know, 15 minutes before your payment’s due? Do you pay, you know, a week before it’s due, whatever? But what’s fascinating for women in particular is that when you have completed that payment, you then own a physical asset. And as all of us—now I’m going to talk about credit, even though I said it was all about savings. But when—any of us who’ve worked in credit know that the biggest barrier to women gaining greater credit to access—access to credit is collateral. And so you’re starting to see some, not all, but some of these pay as you go solar companies actually turning more into financial service providers, because they’re willing to lend against that physical collateral of the solar lamp. The one that I’m most familiar with has actually come to us and said: the men that own the lamps all want to buy TVs on credit with the lamp. The women are coming to us and saying: You know, is there any way I could borrow for education? Could I borrow for inputs for my farm? So they are recognizing the different things that women want to borrow. And so I completely agree that we should be trying to think beyond just the clean energy provision and think more broadly about what that might bring to the life of that woman and her family. DOZIE: I was just—I was going to add that I think thinking about mobile money restricts what we can do, because mobile money is, like, confined networked. Interoperability is limited. And so it means we have the same problem Mayra was talking about, people just think about what they can do within the set. So I mean, for Diamond Bank we think of full digital financial services, full interoperability. And so that—when we came out with a better proposition, and also the Diamond Y’ello product with MTN, it was a full savings account. So it wasn’t one where you were just restricted to the telco and the bank. It was one where as soon as you opened an account you could transfer money to anybody in Nigeria and you could also receive money from anybody in Nigeria. And so what we’re trying to do is—the problem with mobile money is that without digital liquidity it’s only—it’s great for savings. That’s what it is. Great for saving in confined—like, in a small community. But you need to expand that platform so that anybody can play in it. And so that—so mobile money was great in Kenya because they had one—for that time, it was solving the problem that the banking industry needed to solve. But today, I think the more sophisticated platform in Nigeria, mobile money has not worked because there are many licenses, and the banking platform is more superior. It’s now how do we scale that? And to scale that, we need to educate. And we need to make sure that everybody understands what the benefit is. VOGELSTEIN: Many ideas here, with the thought and ideas to study. (Laughter.) A question down in the front. Q: Thank you. Ramu Damodaran with the United Nations. In most developing countries, traditionally husbands and wives have had joint bank accounts, normally initiated by the husband, and the wife is a co-holder. With more and more women opening their own accounts, husbands now become the co-holder. And in India, we’ve had a civil society movement saying that that should be made illegal, so that husbands don’t begin cashing their wife’s earnings. This, as you can imagine, was enormous opposition because of the questions of the institution of marriage, inheritance, and so on. But do you think that there is a case for declaring such joint accounts illegal, and ensuring they’re held only by women? VOGELSTEIN: Thoughts on joint accounts. (Laughter.) DOZIE: Well, I think in Nigeria—so what I think we—the KYC laws have made it easy for women to open an account, because to open an account you have to have your own personal identity. And so if you’re buying for verification, you have to have your own identity. You don’t need your husband or anything—in fact, he won’t even know you have an account as well. It’s confidential. So that is—so I don’t—so we don’t need to go that far. So I think it’s making a provision that allows people to—women or men to open an account without a partner being involved or having to sign a document. I know in some other parts of the world to protect women, for example mortgages, the woman has to sign off on the acquisition or the sale of the asset. But I think just to open an account, there are provisions that can be implemented to safeguard either male or female. BUVINIC: There is—you know, there is an incredible experiment result, and I think it was in Kenya—where they—men and women were given ATM accounts. And one when were individual—they could open individual accounts and joint accounts. And then they were given sort of access to opening and using the accounts. Men used the joint account and invested in the joint account, regard—you know. The women did not touch the joint account, because they knew if they invested the money in the joint account, it was going to go to the husband. So it was only the individual account they invested. So I think—I think, you know, there is an issue there. But also, there’s another—there’s another study in Malawi, I think, that finds out that really both men and women prefer individual accounts, particularly for business purposes. So I think as you were saying, you have to ensure that the accounts are secure and they’re private. And I think, you know, you have to sort of—always sort of have the choice of an individual account. VOGELSTEIN: Some important evidentiary basis to answer that question. Bonnie. Q: Bonnie—(off mic). VOGELSTEIN: Microphone. Q: What are the basic criteria to open a mobile savings account? Is it just a phone? And I assume it varies from country to country, but what are the basic criteria? ISKENDERIAN: Uzoma, want to talk about Nigeria? DOZIE: Oh, Nigeria is very simple. I mean, so once you—I think you have to go through the same registration. So that registration is the identification that we need. So with—if there were an ATM line all you have to do actually is dial star-7-10-hash. And then you open an account. So it takes about 45 seconds. And then you have an account open for you. A fully fledged—a fully-fledged account. So it’s quite—so there’s been a lot of advancement, because for us, I mean, I think one of the things, you know, and the—and the innovation created with this—like, I’m going to the bottom in Nigeria, because to get to the bottom of the pyramid you really have to be innovative and you have to go really develop solutions for that, so—and make the—make the procedure as simple as possible. So that—because the simpler it is, the more trust is actually introduced into the system. The more complex it is, you know, it’s very difficult. And it becomes very expensive as well to manage. So 45 seconds to open an account. VOGELSTEIN: Wonderful. Over here in the front. Q: I’m Nancy Kinsner (sp). I read yesterday, I think it was in the Financial Times, a startling fact. And that’s that 44 percent of Americans, were they to need $400 for emergency needs tomorrow, wouldn’t be able to come up with $400 and would have to borrow from somewhere. Given that probably half of those, at the very least, are women, I’m wondering if Uzoma could advise whether or not there is a similar system to what you have in Nigeria that could be used or is being used by banks in the U.S., and whether or not we should try that to increase savings here. DOZIE: So I think this technology issue, so while we don’t have any legacy systems because we are—I mean, Diamond Bank is only 25 years old. So the systems that we bought were value systems that could interface with the new technology that we have today. So you find—so, and currently in Nigeria it is only legislation and companies that are actually slowing down full digital banking because as of five years ago, I could actually make a payment, a P2P payment, a mobile P2P payment, immediate value transfer. So all I need is your 10-digit number and a bank, I put it in my mobile phone, and you have a value immediately. And so there are many use cases there. Now, it’s easy because the platform allows it to happen. And so—and that encourages savings. So we see a lot of savings because people find it is—I think savings increases when access to your money is easy. So if I can access my money at 2:00 in the morning or may a payment at 2:00 in the morning, I’ll put it in the safest place. And so I think it’s providing that platform where you can access it at a cost-effective price—at a cost-effective price. And so I think—and so even at Diamond Bank today we are actually reinventing ourselves, because before our system become legacy, so we’re building the next platform so to cannibalize the existing business. And I think it’s a painful, slow journey. But I think that’s what a bank needs to do every so often, because our customers’ preferences are changing. So, you know, my—the way my 15-year-old daughter is going to do banking in five years’ time is completely different from what we do today. And so we have to start building those systems which is going to be purely mobile and is going to be a—it’s going to be like Google-speak and not banking-speak at all. (Laughter.) BUVINIC: The other thing, you know, that you can do in the U.S. that works, and actually in the Tanzania study, reminders to save. And you know, sort of on a regular basis these women are getting reminders to save. So you have your mobile platform. It comes, you know, a little reminder to save. And those things worked and worked quite well. DOZIE: And I’ll just follow on. In fact, we just launched DreamVille. So it’s a platform. It’s a gamification platform for the youths to save. And so they get points for saving and they get rewarded and on. And so it’s interacting with ed. So the bank account is connected to the platform. So they save, they play, they get rewarded. And this is teaching them the value of money as well. I think once people understand the value of money, then they appreciate it and they save. If you don’t understand—my son doesn’t understand the value of money. So he doesn’t save. My daughter does. So she actually saves that. So we knows how much a dollar is. My son doesn’t know at all. (Laughter.) He just knows that I’m going to pay for it. (Laughter.) VOGELSTEIN: Well, according to Mayra—well, according to Mayra, that’s in line with the research. DOZIE: Right. (Laughs.) VOGELSTEIN: So there you have it. That’s clearly global—truly global implications from all of this work. Over here, please. Q: Hi. Masuda, Insight Group. Thank you. Masuda, Insight Group. For women that do save, and my experience is more directly from Afghanistan, I found that they don’t really know—I mean, besides maybe the very low interest, say, they get on their money, sometimes nothing at all, what to do with that savings. What are you finding in the countries that you’ve worked in in terms of women who actually do have some savings. Do they put it to use? Are there things, products that the banks target towards them? I found an extreme lack of knowledge for women who do have a little bit of savings on what to do with that savings, except for save it for an emergency. VOGELSTEIN: Mayra, what does the research say? BUVINIC: Yeah, no, they use it. They use it particularly for businesses. They’d rather save than get loans for business purposes. So it’s surprising. You’re--you know, it’s surprising, the Afghanistan finding. But— ISKENDERIAN: Well, I know women entrepreneurs are much more likely to use savings as a startup funding, because they’re less likely to get sort of the friends and family capital that men have easier access to. So we do see the same thing, that they’ll use it to support businesses. I think your findings also were supporting this kind of concept of, you know, savings for different—you know, saving for the wedding, saving for the family, saving for the retirement. You know, sort of different pockets that are saved for. And it all really comes back down to financial education. And I don’t know how much the women you’re going to be with have that— Q: So, sorry. I should have maybe clarified the question, which is what are the options? Let’s say a woman has saved $1,000. What are the options for her to earn on that money while she’s waiting to deploy it for something else? You know, we know that interest-bearing accounts don’t give hardly anything at all. Do banks think about products to target to them—CDs or other kinds of things? Like, where is that? DOZIE: So we’re going to see. So in Nigeria, so women save for many reasons. And it depends who you are. If you are a businesswoman you save. You have a plan about your business. If you’re a mother, you’re saving for your children. But also, they save for independence as well, just in case the guy walks away. Just in case—you know? So they save for the family just in case as well. So, but what we’ve done—what we’ve—I think one of the things that we’ve done in Nigeria for savings, because we can’t pay the high interest rate. So our basic savings product, which has been very successful for the last 10 years, is—you know, is a lottery program. So the interest rate is crap. But, you know, you have—like, you know you have people winning are decided for life, or different kind of things in their communities and grand national. And that’s why we’re successful. So, in developing countries, people like hope as well. So you have this thing, like if you save you might be a millionaire tomorrow. You save, you might just win this. You save—(inaudible). So that gives people hope as well. So it’s an incentive. I mean, you might not get high interest rates. I know the interest rates will not do anything for you because inflation is 15 percent and if I give you 10 percent you are losing value 5 percent every year. So people will buy—so you’re only saving for hope. And you’re not saving because you’re getting real returns on your money at all. ISKENDERIAN: The only thing I’d add to that is that the only thing that has made a bank like Diamond Bank and others like them find it worthwhile to take very small savings deposits is the digital equation. And so we’ve got to come up with digital solutions on the investment side for that $1,000. We’re—it’s very exciting. You’re starting to see some—and I’ve seen a couple in Africa—some digital pension products, so that a woman would be able to save longer term. In India, they’ve got still—you’ve got way too many restrictions around it—(laughs)—but there are pensions that can be—that can—you can enter into with very, very small, individual, monthly deposits. So it’s coming, but it’s going to be digital that’s going to lower the cost to whoever that financial service provider is, to make that return on investment, you know, worthwhile to them as well as to the woman to put her money there. VOGELSTEIN: Mayra, a final word. BUVINIC: I was just going to say that the surprising thing is that women will want to access a savings account even with no interest whatsoever. You know, they’re willing—they’re willing just to have the money saved in a secure place. They’re willing to do it. So and we were talking about, well, maybe they’re risk averse and that’s why, or they’re sort of more rational. But the alternative to risk aversion is that women versus men have a wider set of risks or their perception of risk because—you know, because they have a wider set of risks. So that’s why they’re seen on average to be risk averse. ISKENDERIAN: That’s a good way of putting it. VOGELSTEIN: Important insight. Mary Ellen. ISKENDERIAN: Well, and the guys that he was talking about, you know, going around the market holding the money, women would pay them to keep their money. It wasn’t even a question of interest. (Laughs.) So. VOGELSTEIN: Right. Really important context. Well, it is clear that more work remains, more research is needed to promote women’s financial inclusion around the world. But there’s no doubt that this new She Counts initiative and our discussion today are an important step forward. So please join me in thanking our speakers for being here today. (Applause.) Thank you all. (Applause.) (END) This is an uncorrected transcript.  

Today nearly 90 percent of nations still have laws on the books that block women’s work, including discriminatory laws and customs surrounding family life that perpetuate unequal access to assets and opportunities. In some countries, women need the permission of their husbands or fathers to work, sons and daughters lack equal inheritance rights to property, while married women can’t apply for a national ID card in the same way as men. Her Excellency Dr. Joyce Banda discusses strategies to overcome these barriers and encourage opportunities for women to participate in the economy. This meeting is part of a high-level series in collaboration with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to explore the economic effects of inequality under the law. Transcript BIGIO: Good afternoon, everybody. Good afternoon. Thank you so much for joining us today at the Council on Foreign Relations. My name is Jamille Bigio. I’m a senior fellow here at the Council’s Women and Foreign Policy Program. Our program has worked with leading scholars for more than 15 years to analyze how elevating the status of women and girls advances U.S. foreign policy objectives, including prosperity and stability. I want to take a moment before we begin to thank our advisory council members who are here with us today, as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for its generous support for today’s discussion. I also want to remind everyone that the presentation, discussion, and question and answer period will be on the record. We are lucky to be joined today by Her Excellency Dr. Joyce Banda, who served as the president of the Republic of Malawi from 2012 to 2014. She was Malawi’s first female president and the continent’s second. Since leaving government, she has continued her leadership with the Joyce Banda Foundation International and has served as a distinguished fellow at the Wilson Center and the Center for Global Development, where her research has focused on promoting women’s leadership. As she has pointed out, to improve governance and promote economic growth, one must address the barriers that prevent women from participating in public and economic life. Saudi Arabia caught the world’s attention with its historic move, permitting women to drive for the first time. But it’s important to note that there are legal barriers to women’s economic participation in nearly 90 percent of countries. These include discriminatory laws and customs surrounding family life that perpetuate unequal access to assets and opportunities that prevent girls from finding opportunities to learn and to grow and to become the leaders of the future in their governments and in their economies. Research has, in fact, documented that legal reforms can directly lead to economic and social gains. They saw this in Ethiopia, for example, where removing the stipulation that husbands could stop their wives from working, in fact, led to an increase in women’s labor force participation, with more women working in higher-skilled jobs. Recognizing how critical these barriers are, I’d like to first to take a step back, Dr. Banda, to look at how critical women’s participation and leadership is in the first place. It was under your leadership that you instituted reforms while president that led to a significant economic expansion. Malawi’s rate of economic growth in fact rose from 1.8 percent in 2012 at the start of your presidency, to over 6.2 percent in 2014—at the end of your term. How do you see women’s economic participation as contributing to the growth that you saw under your leadership? BANDA: Yeah, thank you very much. I’m truly grateful and honored to be here to discuss issues around women’s participation in leadership and in the economy. And I also see so many friends around the table, particularly those who have lived in Malawi. I see Dr. Natalie Hahn, who was our UNICEF country director. There are several issues that I must mention. I think, first and foremost, is to mention that there’s a stubborn link between participation in the economy—economic empowerment of women, and leadership. And I say this because the organization that I started in 1989 to assist women gaining economic empowerment, four of them ended up moving on to become ministers of—members of parliament and ministers of women and children. And in my particular case, all the way to statehouse. In countries where there’s no affirmative action, women must be economically empowered in order to be able to have the resources to compete on equal ground with men into elected office. Number two, during the time that I was head of state, maybe I should talk about what brought about the achievements that you referred to. Number one, was the uniqueness of female leadership. When I got into office, 2 million people had no food. There was no fuel for a day. The economy had grown by 1.8 percent. Companies were operating at 35 percent because there was no money for import (cover ?) or raw materials. The relationship between us and our neighbors was bad. And our relationship with our main donor, the U.K., had broken up and the ambassadors had called back. We were off track with the IMF. And I’m told that my predecessors had refused to even devalue the currency to be realistic because they didn’t want to lose the votes that come with that—with that fake situation. They needed—you needed to—in order to devalue, it’s obvious many people will go through a difficult time. And it is that pressure that my predecessors didn’t want. Female leaders tried to do their level best to do things right. It was—what I have studied, looking at Ellen Sirleaf, looking at myself, looking at all other female leaders, is that most of them come into leadership to serve. They don’t come into leadership looking for the power. So they’ll take risks. So in my particular case, the very same week I traveled to the IMF and met Christine Lagarde, and asked what did I need to do in order for us to get back right on track. And she told me, I needed to devalue the currency by 49 percent. And for that to happen—if that happened, then people were going to suffer. But for me, it was a necessary step to take in order to get to a better place. So taking risks is one of the steps that I had to take. And I know that it’s not only me, that female leaders would do the same. Number two is to make even unpopular decisions, if you are convinced they are in the best interest of the people you serve. Number three is the style of leadership, the inclusivity. The fact that if you know that you need to take such steps that are not going to be popular, then engage the people and let them know, because when you do engage them they will stand by you. Again, another important step that I had to take was to appoint fellow women. I found that when women participate in leadership—you are president—in my case, the chief justice was a woman—that I appointed was a woman. The head of civil service was a woman. The two deputy governors of the reserve bank were women. The inspector of general police was a woman. The solicitor general was a woman. There are times when the head of civil service, the chief justice, and myself—we had the three of us having a cup of tea, running matters of state. So we can do it. But I found that because they had not been given—I made 100 appointments. Not window dressing, on merit. The women are qualified and they’re out there. They just need to be given the opportunity to participate. And I have found that making better choices of both men and women to serve as leaders, principal secretaries and the technical staff, working together as a team yielded more for us than if when you try to leave a whole half of your human resource out. The next that I have found, the step that I took that I think contributed more, was that in an atmosphere that is tight, women don’t participate freely, even in business. Particularly in countries where most women are not educated. And they’re not allowed to speak freely. They’re not allowed to associate freely. Journalists are not allowed to write freely. Women are not allowed to be heard on the radio, and so on. That has an effect on how they will progress in participating in the economy. Dr. Natalie Hahn knows that when I started in Malawi mobilizing fellow women, it was a tough time but women running business was looked down upon. If you are in business, that means you are loose. You—we had to work on changing that mindset. And in 1997, when I received the African Prize for the work I had done in mobilizing 50,000 women and providing microfinance to them, and thank you to USAID that made that possible, Dr. Natalie Hahn was our guest of honor when we celebrated the African Price that I received for that work. So there is that to consider, that there’s the law and there’s tradition. So in a country like mine, where 80 percent of the people are rural based, if you are going to change—to pass even laws, then you must realize that you have also to take into consideration what the traditions is, because you can pass a law that it would not be followed. I just wanted to say that it is a lot of other underlying issues that will create an environment for women to thrive in business. BIGIO: Your research now has been focused on how governments and communities can—from day one of a girl’s life—promote women’s leadership. There are laws and customs around family life that prevent opportunities for girls and for women later, even, to engage and to participate in their economies, in public life. Can you speak about what some of those laws and customs are, and what are the challenges in seeing reforms, in seeing actual changes in practice and in behavior? BANDA: I will just cite a few that I have been involved in. One of them is domestic violence. I believe that as long as women are abused, they cannot prosper, and they cannot run business. But allow me to give examples. In 2004, when I was appointed minister of women and children, I decided that because I had come from an abused marriage myself, I was going to champion the passing of the domestic violence bill in parliament. And in order for that bill to pass, I needed to expose—because I was feeling the resistance on the part of men, because they didn’t think it was abuse, what I talked about. In fact, sometimes even women when I’d go to rural areas, and I told them: You know, you can change this situation. They would say, what’s wrong with this? So in order for me to get the support of the majority of the nation, I needed to expose some of the instances—horrific instances of domestic violence that would convince both men and women a time would come to pass a law that would protect the women. One of them was a woman who refused to go back to her marriage. She had left. Her husband followed her to her village. The woman said, no, enough. It’s enough. The man, who would stand in shame back home, went and hid by the river and waited for her when she went to draw water and chopped off both her arms. When I went to see her in hospital, that’s when she told me that she was one-month pregnant. But she had no arms. So she tells me, ma’am—told me, how am I ever going to hold this baby? And I made sure that the whole nation knows because even I, up until that time, who had been in an abused marriage myself, made me feel very small, because what it was witnessing now was really real abuse. A woman whose husband had told her: You must cook beans. When I come back, I want beans. He comes homes, there’s no beans, he scooped out her eye. So, fast forward. I established what I called the one-stop destination for abused women. So the day I went there to open either place I found a man and a woman with a baby, and I thought it was husband and wife and they’d been fighting. And when I asked the man said, no, I’m not her husband. I’m her neighbor. I’ve been hearing this baby cry for the past 12 months. So the baby was 18 months. So that means the baby was eight months when this neighbor started hearing the baby scream every day. So I broke into the house and found her husband sleeping—defiling the baby—sleeping with the baby, the 18-month-old child. So when he must have started, this child was eight months. And when I asked his woman: How could you have just stood by and watched your child be abused that way? She herself was 15. She said, look at me. I have nowhere to go. I have no parents. I have no means. I have no business. So straightaway I told her: Go pack your bags. I’ll give you capital to start business. Found her a home. Unfortunately, a few months later there was a woman crying at the gate, she had lost the baby. So obviously the child had been infected with AIDS. So economic empowerment and gender-based violence are related, because when a woman finds herself in a situation where she had no choice but to stick around in this abusive home, she goes through that so much that at the end of the day she can lose the child, she can lose arms, she can lose an eye due to gender-based violence. So we passed the domestic violence bill on the 19th of June 2006. The challenge is—let me jump to your next question—the challenge is, yes, you can pass laws, but the problem is how to domesticate them and to implement them. It’s the willingness on the part of the people that are being abused to take advantage of the laws that are passed. Most of the time it is the women themselves that will hide and not want it known that they’re being abused. Number two, it is the capacity or maybe political will on the part of governments who pass—to make sure that the laws that are passed are implemented and respected. In Malawi, we passed a law, the marriage act, the minimum age. Nobody gets married before age 18. And I was one of those that started the fight and the drafting of that bill. By the time it went to parliament I had left office, but it was passed. But now, it’s not being implemented. Even the domestic violence. Why? Because here is a family with a child that is 11, ready to go to high school. But they don’t have the $50 paid term to go to school. So the child sits in the village from age 11 to 18, because that’s what the law says. No possible. And it’s not happening. There’s one chief in Malawi who tried—wanted to pull out 1,000 girls from child marriages. Most of them run back. And she herself was despised all over the place because the families are saying: Why are you pulling our children out of marriages? What do you want them to do? So when you tell a girl child not to get married at age 11, then ensure that there’s an alternative. There’s fees—there’s school fees for her to go to school, or there’s an alternative for income. And most of the girls that are dying giving birth, women, they are between 15 and 19. So that’s the—going to school for four more years is not only about her future, it’s about her health, life as well. BIGIO: You highlighted the example in Malawi of the critical new law on raising the marriage age. And Malawi’s a country that has one of the highest rates of child marriage. Nearly half of girls are married before they’re 18. So this is a critical reform. What progress do you see in other countries, in Africa or elsewhere, to reform discriminatory laws around family life, whether it’s inheritance, land rights, or otherwise? BANDA: An example is the trokosi. The trokosi is a tradition in Ghana where girls are offered to the high priest, because the family has done something wrong. So they will charged, give a girl child. And the girl child is offered to the high priest at six years old. And when she goes, she goes for good. By 17 she had children from this old man. The Ghanaian government decided in 1998 to pass a law against taking these girls into captivity, because when they go they don’t return. Their life is doomed. There is no more opportunity for education, or business, or anything. They go there, and they just—all they do is produce babies from this old, old, old man. So the government of Ghana passed a law in 1998, I think. And but for many years, nobody cared because it is a tradition. And the government has passed a law, but there was no policing, there was no ensuring that the law is being respected. It took NGOs many years later to go to government, to push government. So the partnership between civil society and the government is what made it work. In fact, to an extent, that they had to raise money from donors and go and buy out the girls—pay the priest—the high priest, or whatever he’s called, to release the girl child. Now, as we speak, there are about 1,200 still in captivity. So that’s how long it takes. In the case of Malawi, the law is there against early marriage, against marriage before 18, against domestic violence. But the problem—the biggest problem is now when you go into Malawi—I don’t know if you’ve seen courts anywhere—the infrastructure, it is not there. The support system is not there. I don’t remember seeing a court in—Blantyre. I saw, when this woman has been abused and wants to go to court and can’t see a court, there’s no need. There’s no need. So ensuring that as we fight gender-based violence there’s also political will to ensure that the infrastructure, support systems, are also in place. BIGIO: You have focused in our conversation today on some of the barriers and abuse that girls are facing. And I know in your research you’re also highlighting where we can invest more in girls’ leadership. What priorities do you see in terms of ensuring that women and girls have opportunities for leadership in public and economic life? BANDA: I believe that most of the challenges women face, or families face, is because we don’t have enough women leaders. And I say this with all due respect, because I know that when women get into leadership they focus more on issues that affect women and children—social issues, health, education. And the—and I know that it is important that women should participate in leadership. But for that to happen, we need to focus on the girl child. My research has shown that girls and boys are born with 30 percent leadership traits. In the past, I used to insist that leaders are born. But now they are telling us, no, they’re only born with 30 percent leadership traits. Seventy percent has to be developed. Now, my concern—the case I’ve been making in all my research is that—that in a house—in a typical household, 80 percent of those that live in Africa and the third-world—80 percent are rural-based. Now, that’s where tradition and culture and traditional leaders, that’s where they thrive. That’s where they are. And so the girl child is born in this household. And without intending to do the child any harm, the girl child will eat with mother, the boy child will eat with father, because that’s tradition. But me, as a typical African woman, I will give the best to my husband. I want to impress him. So he’s having a better meal. So without discriminating clearly, I am feeding my son, who is eating with father, better quality food than my girl child. And then my girl child at five years old—I am a victim myself—I started carrying heavy stuff when I was five years old. And I remember at that time, they used to say: She’s a very good child, very hardworking. But now I have a bent spine. And I’ve been going to doctors. And each doctor, without fail, tells me: You started carrying heavy stuff when you were young. If you just close your eyes and look at Accra, Blantyre, Lilongwe, Johannesburg, you see little girls at five, six, carrying stuff, selling in the markets and everywhere. And the boy child is at school. So for me, child labor—and before it nutrition, at a very critical time when the brain is being developed and then—(inaudible)—and child labor. And then defilement. Whoever had told these wicked men that they can cleanse themselves of the HIV/AIDS if they defile a five-year or six-year-old, are targeting these girls to cleanse themselves. So they defile a five-year-old. The next is education. When resources are low, the boy goes, the girl child doesn’t go. But the most critical for me is harmful traditions. I have good pictures of my phone of an eight-year-old bride, nine years old. So when we—when governments, our partners in Africa and the third world earmark resources for support for the adolescent girl child—which is now in the past week, including in the Obama administration there were resources for education, health, income generation, and the harmful traditions from age 11 to 14. In my opinion, having told you what I’ve told you, it’s too late. By the time you start focusing on this girl child—UNICEF will agree with me—it is zero to 10. So, for me, my work now is zero to 10, because if, indeed, a girl child or a boy child is born with these 30 percent leadership traits, then we will lose—we lose them at that period. And then if she doesn’t come out—because, for me, how do we support this girl child with leadership? And how do we mentor her? How do we educate her? How do we support her to become the leader she was meant to be? If we lose her, then that 30 percent has gone to waste, because the 70 percent shall not be—she’ll not benefit from it. So for me, that’s what I’ve been waiting on. In order for me to aim at women leaders, we need to start looking at zero to 10 in order to fish them out, in order to support them, mentor them, educate them to become leaders. Why must women become leaders? Well, I will resist that women are better leaders, whether anybody likes it or not. It is just—it just saddens me that I am living in America for a year and a half, and I have been surprised—that is the best word I can use—to see that women are not getting equal pay and women are not getting maternity leave. And 201 years, there has been a female president—201. I mean, I’ve been talking to me favorite presidents here. I was talking to my President George W. Bush, that’s my favorite president—(laughter)—I think because of PEPFAR. I think he did a lot for Africa and he visited Africa 10 times. And so for me, he’s my favorite. I’ve been telling all of them the same. Really, there are no—not one woman in America who would have become president all these years? (Laughs.) But anyway, just come back to what I was saying is that there’s so much that needs to be done, whether we are in America or in Africa, to empower women to be on equal footing, because the last time I checked we are more than men. And the last time I checked, we brought the other half into this world. BIGIO: Well, Dr. Banda, with that I am sure we have a lot of great questions from the audience. We’d like now to open the floor. Please, if you could raise your placard. When I call on you, please introduce yourself with your name and organization. Q: Hi. Good morning. Thank you very much for coming to speak with us. It’s an honor to meet you. I have a question about the area of intimate partner violence that you were speaking about, the domestic violence legislation that was passed in 2006. And I’m wondering what local or large-scale interventions that you saw or see that are being implemented now, either with girls or women in Malawi do you think are the most effective at either reducing violence or allowing women to understand that they’re in violent situations, or leave violent situations? BANDA: I think in the case of Malawi what 2006 did was for the first—because we had marches as well. We marched all over the place. And I had a very progressive president. So I remember—I told him. I said, you know, you look very good if you allow your male ministers to go and march with me on the street against domestic violence. And for the first time, people saw me side-by-side with my colleagues marching on the street against gender-based violence. But the time we went to parliament, we struggled, yes. They called me all kinds of names, yes—the men in parliament, now my colleagues in parliament. Because it’s a parliament of 193, and we were only 27 women. So it was hard for us to pass that bill. But at the end of the day, with the support of Oxfam and UNFPA—because every Thursday they give me resources to invite all of them to a dinner and one-on-one. Why must I not beat my wife? No, I mean, you look better if you don’t beat her up. That—I mean—(laughter)—yeah. And the reason why I called it domestic violence because I was hoping that’s the only way I can get it to pass, because I kept saying throughout the campaign: No, I’m talking about you men as well, because I know that some of you are being abused. So this is about family. Domestic violence means even the child in your household, the worker in your household, yourself, and your wife. They were not very convinced. But at the end of the day, what worked best was the exposing of instances, because now even the musicians started to be composing songs: Don’t beat up your wife, Joyce Banda is coming. (Laughter.) So every day I was just like a madwoman on the radio. Whatever I discover, I would then put it on—I would then put it on TV. For example, there was this woman who went home, her child was epileptic. She went to the village to look for medicine—African medicine. And I’m told they agreed with her husband, she would be gone for a year. Left her eight-year-old in the house. And this—one day this man, father, goes into the bedroom of the girl and says: I’m looking for money. So the girl says then she woke up, put on her piece of cloth to help him look for the money. He said, you don’t understand, the money is you. My witchdoctor has told me if I sleep with you then my barber shop will make a lot of money. So he started defiling this child all the time the mother was away. Tried to tell a neighbor, who didn’t pay attention. And then the father had told her that it is your mother and I who agreed that we should do this. So when the mother came back, and he told—and this child told the mother, the mother went to church to tell the priest—we are very spiritual in Malawi—went to church to tell the pastor: This is what my husband has been doing to our daughter. The pastor says: That stuff is everywhere. Don’t even expose your husband. So now this child, her father got even more angry that she had even tried to report on him at church, where he was the senior in the church. So he said: To punish you, I’m not paying your school fees anymore. So this eight-year-old now comes to my office to say: I’m looking for Joyce Banda to pay my school fees. Why? Then she explained this. And I related this story to him. And I invited TV station reporters to my—and cameras to my office. And I asked—because you can’t interview an eight-year-old on TV—go and get your mother here. I asked the mother if she was prepared to speak on TV. And so every single day people watched a clip like that. So that by the time we went to parliament, everybody was fed up. But then, post passing the bill, yes, the woman knows now that she had this tool. She can even, under that law, evict her abusive husband. But you find that it is the women themselves that don’t want to take advantage of that, because then the community will laugh at her to say: You went to report your husband and he’s arrested? You evicted your husband? So it is—it has to be combined with change of mindset. Encourage the women to say it’s in their best interest to make sure that their children—I mean, this child of mine grew up—I had to leave my husband to protect my child. Here she is. So you have—sometimes you have to leave an abusive situation for the sake of your children. And you have to convince the women to say that is what the result is going to be. It’s going to work better for her and her children. Sometimes they don’t see it. Number two is what I said earlier, to make sure that we—I don’t know who supported us, but the UNICEF, when I was minister of women and children, bought us bicycles and supported us to recruit child protection officers. In every constituency, there were two under my ministry. And they bought us bicycles to make sure that there’s a child protection officer who can go around and also hear whether there’s abuse of women and children and report it. A few things happened. If you ask me, am I satisfied? I’m not. I’m not satisfied because even as I speak to you now it has not been—the law has not been translated, because the women have been told, maybe on the radio and so on, about what they have at their disposal. But they need to have it translated in the local language so that they can see what they have, that they are powerful enough to do one, two, three. Or to be told—a radio program that runs every day to tell them: If this happens to you, you can go here. That’s what is lacking. But I’m not in government anymore. But the good news is that the laws are in place. So it all depends on which leader comes into office. The tragedy is that when one leader comes, they change whatever you did as a leader. (Laughter.) And my priorities will not be high priorities here. Q: President Banda, it’s wonderful having you with us. Thank you so much. When I arrived in Malawi, and the country—40 percent of the kids were not in school. It’s the 13th poorest country in the world. And however, what your bio doesn’t tell us is what you were doing 20 years before you entered politics. Joyce Banda was out in the villages. She traveled throughout the country meeting with women. There was a new democratic government after 36 years of a dictatorship. And the women would say: We want to start a business. We want our kids in school. And you gave them hope. You showed them how to get a loan, how to prevent debt, how to get savings opportunities. You transformed the government. And when women knew they had a women president, let me tell you, Malawi was a proud, proud state. My question deals with the fact that we’re surrounded here today by many international women that have done a lot for Africa. Dr. Peg Snyder, who’s a founder of UNIFEM, United Nations Women’s Voluntary Fund, in the 1970s. Melissa Kushner has benefitted 900,000 children in Malawi with Yamba Malawi. BANDA: True. I’m a witness to that. (Laughs.) Q: We’re so happy to have your daughter with us today. And we know many, many partnerships that exist between American and African women. My question is, what else can we do for Africa? Because it’s not that we benefit alone. We learn so much also from our African sisters? BANDA: I just spoke at Kansas State University. And I talked about what happens when the American government decides to invest in one African woman. That’s what they did with me. I just walked into the USAID director. As Dr. Natalie Hahn says, that country was under dictatorship. So we didn’t have the freedom to speak. So there was a meeting of the private sector. UNDP had organized that meeting to ask why was Malawi not taking advantage of the private sector as the engine for growth? It was just me and—(inaudible)—the two of us invited to that meeting. And I stood up and said: As long as women are sidelined, this country shall never develop. And as long as women are sidelined in business, there’s no engine for growth anywhere. Look at this room. We’re just two of us. In that hall, in that meeting there was a gentleman called Don Henry who was leading a U.S. project called Rural Enterprise Development Project. So he called me during break and said: I’ve never heard an African woman—a Malawian woman talk like that. Are you not afraid of being arrested? I said, look, my husband has been arrested before. He has been under house arrest for five years. What else can they do? So he gave me a card and said: If you ever want me in the future, contact me. USAID sponsored me to come to the U.S. for a study too of the six-month exchange programs. I traveled from coast to coast. By the time I finished, I was concerned, because having left an abusive marriage now I was happily married. My children had a happy home. My worry was, what can I do? What about those of my friends who are not brave enough to walk out of an abusive situation? Because there you would just say. There’s no way you can walk out. But I did. What about those? What can I do? By the time I left this country after six weeks, I was very clear in my mind that I needed to go back, mobilize 100 women, and fight for our rights in business as well. When I got home I looked for that little card from Don Henry. I went and met Don. And Don said, go and meet my boss. And the boss was Carol Peasley. Carol Peasley was then leading USAID. Dr. Natalie Hahn was leading UNICEF. And what I have seen in Malawi is that even in those partner, international organization, when they are led by women, so much happens in in the country. Because then she sat down with me, and I realized that I was not making an impact, because she folded her pad and put it aside. And I wasn’t making sense. I was just full of fire. Malawian women need support. And I went back to Don and I said: Looks like I didn’t make any impact there. She said, what did you say? I told her. She said, no, we donors want statistics. We want you to tell us figures. Where is the problem? And I was so green, I didn’t know how to do that, in 1989. So Carol—I went back to Carol, and now asked properly. Can you fund a needs assessment study to assist me to find out the actual situation of women in business in Malawi? And that’s when for the first time I got the shocking statistic that said even those that went into business, only 19 percent had gone beyond primary school. So we had to change the whole focus. It wasn’t now about the 100 women. It was about the rest of the women in Malawi. And that’s when I woke up. And from that day, after funding that—they funded the institutional development grant. They funded the program later on. USAID brought to Malawi what they called the shared project that helped strengthen civil society. In a period of two years, there were about 200 small organizations shooting up everywhere. The issues were there, but we didn’t know where to go with them. So everybody is forming an organization. From that day they sent me to Bangladesh. I told them, I want to empower fellow women. They funded me to go to work with Muhammad Yunus. Came back and went to India to work with—(inaudible). Came back and designed our own program. By 1997, I had reached—the organization that I formed had reached 50,000 women. When I received an award because of that word, here in New York, I used my $50,000—it was a shared award with President Chissano of Mozambique. I told him, give me your 50,000 (dollars). (Laughter.) You don’t need it. You’re a whole president. He says, oh, no, no, no. (Laughter.) I took my 50,000 (dollars) went back home, started the Joyce Banda Foundation. Fast forward, the Joyce Banda Foundation now has reached 1.3 million Malawian. When the U.S. government invests in one African women, 1.3 million Malawians will be affected. What about if there were 1,000 Joyce Bandas? So, for me, I know that U.S. is U.S. first. U.K. is U.K. first. And we must respect that, as Africans. And we, as Africans, must take that as an opportunity to clean up our mess and to prioritize and to put our priorities right, because we are not poor. There are so many resources out there. But in the meantime, I must—am truly, truly grateful to this country and to this government for all it has done. I can go president to president. From President George Bush, to Jimmy Carter, to everybody. But I just want to respond now to Dr. Natalie, saying we need to continue to build women leaders. We’ve done well. The country with the highest number of women in parliament is on the continent of Africa. And Africa has had four presidents that are female. That’s why I’m asking, why haven’t we seen one here? Because it has been Liberia, Joyce Banda, Malawi, the Central African Republic, now Mauritius has a female president. But what I am looking at is the continuation of identifying those girls in that household, build them up, but not just give basic education but all the way to tertiary. To tertiary education because the only way we are going to be effective leaders is when we can challenge our male counterparts on saying, yeah, we are qualified. And you are not going to be qualified with just a basic education, when you can just read and write. You are going to be qualified to sit at that table. All those women that I appointed were women who had been to university. So what I have done is that right now, out of those 1.3 million, is schools as well. I have built secondary schools. This is Joyce Banda now. That’s not the country. This is Joyce Banda Foundation. We have built schools. We have one school that is free, free, free, for both boys and girls, but ensuring that we are focusing more on the girl child—particularly those that are coming from child-headed households. So, for me, what you distinguished ladies and gentlemen can do is help us educate more girls because this early marriage is going to continue if girls are not going to secondary school. These early marriages, this abuse is going to continue if the woman is not educated enough in order to contribute economically to the household. So that’s my opinion. How can we be assisted to send as many girls as possible to school? What women leaders in African are doing is that we are not just sitting back waiting for handouts. We know what we need to do to change our situation. In fact, we’ve just formed what we are calling the African Women Leaders Network last June under the U.N. Women. So there’s a whole database there. There’s a whole organization there. There’s a whole secretariat there where if there are interested parties in this room who will say: Our focus I girls’ education. They know that when they go there they will tell them: Joyce Banda is the one with education. But then in whatever other sector. We want to go into health sector? They have a database. And what women—who does what. Secondly, I could—I believe, truly, that the way to go is for us to focus on developing young leaders. And I have been amazed at what young African girls are doing. There’s a 13-year-old and—again, thanks to America—she lives in South Carolina with her mother. She was taken to Africa at seven years old. She saw her fellow children of her age going to school with the books in plastic bags—sugar, empty bags. She asked her mother, why don’t have—what do you call—backpack? Why don’t they have backpack? She says, no, they don’t—they can’t afford. She came back, she told her teacher. Her teacher helped her raise 50 bags. As I’m speaking to you now, she has just distributed 10,000. She has received an award from the first lady of South Carolina. She was in an event with the first lady of Cape Verde. And I am her second guest—next guest at her fundraising event. In my speaking engagements at Woodrow Wilson I invited her. She’s 13 years old. So we are seeing that—coming back to confirm what I said earlier, that they are born with 30 percent leadership. I knew at eight years old—somebody told my father: This child shall be a leader. A leader of what, I didn’t know. But I was listening. And my father laughed. What do you mean? She’s just a girl. And in my mind, he reminded me all the way as I was growing up, don’t forget what—remember my friend said you are destined to be a leader. So, me, is it in the church? Is it in, what, I didn’t know. But because I think of that seed, everywhere—even if somebody falls, I’m the one who jumps first. Because for me, I’m this type, to be a leader. So there’s all those children out there, young women leaders out there, even when we made the six—I think it was about 60 women who formed this network. They have one thing, if not 50 percent, were young women. BIGIO: We have a question here. If you can turn it on. Q: I wanted to ask you—I run a group called Donor Direct Action that tries to support advocacy groups around the world working for women’s rights. And you mentioned the important role in Ghana that the advocacy groups played with the trokosi practice. And I had worked with them many years ago. I’m wondering if you could say a little more about the advocacy movement for women in Malawi, and in particular NGOs that are leading that charge. BANDA: I think it was in 1997, International Women’s Day. I think that Dr. Natalie Hahn was in Malawi. Yes, I remember, we were together. Yeah, in 1997 we launched what we called the gender policy. And we mobilized women on that day from the civil society. And we formed what we called the Gender Initiative Network. The idea was to continue advocating for women’s rights and women’s opportunities, gender-based violence, health, education, et cetera. But by the Monday, it backfired, three days later. In fact, when the president called me, my husband said: Well, you mobilized the 4,000 women. I’m sure the president is going to appoint you Cabinet minister. When I went there, I almost ended up in jail, because he was very angry indeed, because he had been convinced that Joyce Banda is building herself up to become president or something. So the Gender Initiative Network was banned until the following year, when our leaders in the SADC region went to the SADC, and they started to discuss the 50 percent protocol for all positions in the SADC region. And they agreed that every country must have a gender network that will monitor and follow up and advocate for equal participation. When he came home, they told him, that’s what you banned. Because when they banned that, they also dismissed—fired all those women from government that assisted us, including Esnat Karyat (ph), who had assisted us to put together that event. So then he was told—the president was told that, no, that’s what you need. When he comes back, I was not completely sidelined because I had tried to mobilize women. He is the one that called me to say come back. Can you reorganize that thing? So we have in Malawi what we call the gender initiative—the Gender Coordinating Network. During my time—because then when he called me back, I was the first chair of that network. It brought together 69 gender-related NGOs. I don’t know how large it is now, but I know that the lady who heads that now, who is my successor, Emma Kaliya, is also the head of FEMNET, which is an organization for the whole region. So I would like to believe that they’ve done well. They’ve done well in the sense that through—because we in Africa, what we lack most is not training, per se, because training must be appropriate. I’m talking about training women seeking to stand for elected office must be appropriate for Africa, because when we get training from outside, then it’s opposite. If you tell me to be assertive, to look people in the face and to talk, then that’s the best way to lose an election. I must go to the chief and look down. And I have nothing to lose. Well, at the end of the day I’m going to be Cabinet minister or member of parliament. So it is to train trainers, that’s the support we seek. And we have found that this Gender Coordinating Network has been fighting for financial capacity for women participants, because that’s what we lack. And I’m grateful to the Norwegian government, because it’s the only organization that has worked with UNDP to provide the financial resources to all female candidates for three, four years now—three elections now. And we moved from 11 to 12 to 27 to 45 women, through the support of the Norwegian government. So, yes, there’s a gender network and it is very effective, because it is the one that controls that country, yeah. And so if I’m standing and I’m a member of parliament, I will have my t-shirts printed with the support of the Norwegian government, but through the Gender Coordinating Network. BIGIO: I know that there are more questions. I’m sorry we don’t have time to get to them all. But please join me in thanking Her Excellency for joining us today. (Applause.) (END)