Finance for Women

Date: 9 Nov 2006
Speaker: Secretary-General Don McKinnon
Location: Global Banking Alliance for Women Summit, Glasgow, UK

Perhaps it’s the presence of an old New Zealand colleague and friend Amanda Ellis, now heading gender entrepreneurship programmes at the International Finance Corporation, whom I once dispatched to Tahiti to harangue, single-handed, the French Government for its nuclear testing in the Pacific…

Perhaps it’s the presence of a host of extraordinarily capable and determined women here tonight … all just about ready to let off steam at the end of a marathon two-day conference…

…. but tonight I am here to talk about women.

Some are powerful women – but most are women with the potential to exercise huge power … the right sort of power… power that can make things happen, change families, communities, societies and even economies.

I realize I am your umpteenth speaker on the same subject, so let me go as fast as I can. I’d like to talk about women, in four ways:

Women as both strength and inspiration, not least to us men.
Women as those bearing the brunt of discrimination, particularly in the developing world.
Women as an absolute focus of everything we do in the Commonwealth, this family of 53 nations - rich and poor, of every colour and creed - for which I am so proud to work.
And finally women as the recipients of loans and other financial support: your conference subject these last few days.

***

I note that your theme for this second day of the conference is ‘Inspiration Day’. It’s right to remember the old adage that inspiration is in fact 90% perspiration – so I do salute the Bank of Scotland, the IFC, and all of you who do so much to give women the opportunity they deserve and which they are so ready to take.

But first I would in fact like to talk about inspiration, and some of the women who have inspired me…

Some of those women are part of my personal life…

… like Miss Chase my secondary school maths teacher in Washington DC in the 50s, who taught me so much about the principles of algebra and how to apply them.

… like the female cook in a New Zealand sheep shearing gang in the Wairarapa in the 60s, who fed 25 men three meals and three tea breaks a day, for 7 days a week, starting at 05:00 a.m.

Some are the women I have encountered in my professional life, latterly with the Commonwealth.

Here, I’m not talking about the extraordinary women in the limelight – like the Queen as the Head of our Commonwealth in her 80th year, like Nobel Prize Winner Wangari Maathai of Kenya, like Government ministers such as Billie Miller in Barbados or Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala in Nigeria.

No – I’m talking about people like the 21 year old woman I met in Sierra Leone in 2002. She had two kids – one leg, and one hand. The missing limbs had been quite literally hacked off by rebels in that country’s civil war. Yet still she smiled.

So too did the woman I met in Cambodia – this time minus one foot and one leg blown away by a landmine. She too was raising two kids on her own.

The same smiling strength was at the core of the New Zealand women soldiers who went to Bougainville in 1997-1998 and spoke to local women who were traumatized by civil war, yet determined to be part of the peace process.

I have seen it in grandmothers in Malawi looking after children whose parents have died of AIDS, and in wives and mothers in Uganda setting up local craft-making cooperatives.

I have seen it; you have seen it; we have all seen it: the inspiration and the smiling strength of one half (very much the ‘better half’, my wife tells me….) of the human race.

***

Partly this female inspiration comes from a natural wellspring; partly it comes as a response to adversity. Because my second sketch tonight is of women bearing the brunt of oppression.

You know the facts and figures:

Two-thirds of those below the poverty line worldwide are women.
Two-thirds of those who can’t read or write are women.
65 of the 115 million of the world’s totally un-schooled children are girls.
Half a million women die every year in pregnancy or childbirth; and the face of HIV/AIDS is now that of a young African woman.

Behind those statistics are the root causes – lack of education, lack of jobs, lack of rights and respect.

It goes on: women still lack access to land and resources, and they are still routinely kept out of decision-making.

Less than two weeks ago I was in the Solomon Islands, which has just had an election which returned not a single woman MP out of 53. I asked the Prime Minister why, and he couldn’t begin to answer. And yet there’s a Millennium Development Goal which seeks a 30% female representation in Parliament. I’m proud to be from a country that gave women the vote in the 1880s, and which at one stage just a few years ago had a Prime Minister, a Leader of the Opposition, a Governor General and a Chief Justice – not to mention a Head of State – who were all women. The key thing: there’s nothing remarkable about this. ‘Life went on’ – as normal.

Meanwhile I’m reminded of a development project of a decade ago, working with nomadic Masai tribes to keep rinderpest from spreading in cattle from Kenya to Tanzania. Training and information were given to the men, in the mistaken belief that it was they who tended to the cattle. Only when the project was abandoned as a failure was it realised that it was in fact the women – on top of all their family and community tasks – who had the task, at the end of the day, of checking the cattle for disease and injury.

Which shows us neatly how women are side-lined – and how they’re also the solution.

***

We all know and we all rejoice in the fact that the world is changing for the better for women – in both developed and developing countries. Worldwide, there are very high profile triumphs. The Taliban world in Afghanistan, where women wore the burqa and never walked the streets, is transformed: in last year’s elections 4 million women registered to vote. Girls can now go to school in that country.

So my third sketch tonight is of women as the focus of the way we strive for ‘gender equality’ in everything we do in the Commonwealth.

Last time they met, in June 2004, our 53 Women’s Affairs Ministers approved a new Commonwealth Plan for Gender Equality. Here it is (hold up) – a text which I have with me ‘on pain of death’, say my colleagues in the Secretariat who worked so hard to make it reality…..

It’s designed to promote women’s and girls’ rights, and to help them achieve gender equality – above all in the areas of democracy and conflict, human rights and law, economic empowerment, and HIV/AIDS.

It’s the Commonwealth contribution to wider global initiatives, building upon existing treaties and agreements signed by governments. These include CEDAW (the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women), the 1995 Beijing ‘Platform for Action’, and UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. Indeed we are prominent members of the UN Inter-Agency Network on Women and Gender Equality.

The Commonwealth Plan is in motion. It has sent gender advisers to governments, like Gambia, Uganda, South Africa and Sri Lanka – and to regional organizations, like ECOWAS in West Africa and the Pacific Islands Forum. It is working with the WTO to ensure that gender analysis is part of trade policy, and that women benefit from trade liberalisation and have access to global markets for their goods. From the global to the local: in Uganda we have worked with the Export Promotion Board to give women bee keepers access to global markets. We have supported the Commonwealth Business Council in setting up the Commonwealth Business Women's Network, with its own website.

The first committee meeting under the Plan was in March: its job is to advise on quantifiable targets, to be formally agreed at the next Women’s Affairs Ministers Meeting in Uganda in June 2007. It will address things like progress on the proportions of women in parliament, and on national budgets (and especially those of health and education) and the way they cater - specifically - for women.

***

The fourth and final of these sketches is about women and their access to micro-credit – your subject these last two days.

You have no doubt discussed the logic and the potential of empowering women with financial start-up cash, and – with it – advice and banking services.

No doubt you have talked too about the world’s shining example: the 30-year old Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, and its founder the Nobel Prize-winning Mohammed Younus, a man whom I’m proud to call a friend.

Younus is rightly proud of some of his statistics – of how (largely female) borrowers’ incomes go up by an average 50% in three years, allowing massively more expenditure on food for the family, medicine and health services, education for children. The fact that his loans are nearly all repaid is testament to the extraordinary effects of helping women to take control over their own and their families’ lives.

In just three weeks time, the Commonwealth, and both the Grameen Bank and the Grameen Trust, will run a joint seminar in Dhaka. It will focus on the ways in which the Grameen Bank approach can be replicated in developing countries, and how bank staff should be trained to provide these services. A dozen countries are sending representatives. We have already given practical help as the Grameen Trust provide initial seed money for new micro-credit lending operations in Cameroon, Ghana and Zambia to start.

Because we believe in the power of empowerment. We see it above all in our youth programmes, one strand of which is in youth credit initiatives. We estimate that in the last 3 years we have established 8,000 youth businesses across the Commonwealth. If we are right that each employs on average of 6 people, that’s 50,000 new jobs. We have made about £200,000-worth of loans in that time, worth an average of £500 each. And 90% of those loans have been repaid within 12 months. That’s a huge strike rate: the average is 60%.

So we in the Commonwealth, too, are honorary members of the Global Banking Alliance for Women.

***

Now I could end tonight by quoting from the Commonwealth Business Council’s recent paper on ‘Banking the Unbanked’ – bringing financial services to the very poorest – which was presented to our Commonwealth Finance Ministers in Colombo in September.

But let me in fact end by quoting from the Commonwealth Lecture of 2003, delivered by … a certain Mohammed Younus. I urge you to find the time to read it all. Younus talked about how he himself became involved, quote, ‘because poverty was all around me. I found it difficult to teach elegant theories of economics in the classroom in the backdrop of crushing hunger and poverty in Bangladesh’.

He described poor people's struggles in finding microscopic amounts of money to eke out a living. He was shocked to discover a woman borrowing $0.25 on the condition that the lender would have the exclusive right to buy all she produced, and at the price the lender decided! He called it ‘slave labour’. He decided to make a list of the victims of this money-lending 'business' in the village next door to his university campus, and came up with a list of 42 women, owing just $27. He wanted to pay the dues out of his own pocket – but no, he had bigger plans than that, and you know the rest of the story.

Now 95% of Grameen’s borrowers are women. And I’m sure that Younus was referring particularly to women when he gave us these words: ‘Poor people are like bonsai trees. They could have grown as giant trees if they were supported by the right environment for growth. It’s the size of the pots in which they were made to grow that turned them into sad replicas of the real trees. In a similar way, poor people are sad replicas of the real persons hidden inside of them’.

His theory is simple: everybody is a potential entrepreneur. ‘All men and women are created equal, each of them is endowed with unlimited creativity, and each of them is a potential entrepreneur. Understand this, and we can create a very different world, and definitely a very much better one’.

That’s ultimately what tonight is about: creating opportunities and a better world. Above all – for this group here – it’s about ending discrimination against the poorest of women, and unleashing all their economic potential. It’s about unleashing what I have called their ‘smiling strength’ …. Unleashing all of what I have called ‘women’s power to make things happen, to change families, communities, societies and even economies’.

Thank you, and very good luck to you all.

ENDS

Finance for Women

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