Key economic issues for women

51350 Transcript No. BM3 A World Bank Program on Gender, November 6-17,1995 Monday, November 13, 1995 KEY ECONOMIC ISSUES FOR WOMEN Mr. Ishrat Husain, Director Poverty & Social Policy Department, Chair PaneUsts: Nancy Barry, President, Women's World Banking Noeleen Heyzer, Director, UNIFEM Germina Ssemogerere, Senior Lecturer in Economics, Makerere University Sponsored by: The Office of the Senior Adviser on Women's Issues and The Gender Analysis and Policy Group C> The World Bank (text reproductions must include this copyright statement)  BEYOND BElnNG: KEY ECONOMIC ISSUES FOR WOMEN The following transcript has been edited for clarity; no substance has been cut. MR. HUSAIN: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I am Ishrat Husain. I am going to chair today' s panel. I am very thankful to all of you for turning up at your lunch hour to spend the next one-and-a-half hours with this panel on Key Economic Issues for Women. One of the main messages from the Beijing Conference was that we in the international institutions and the donor community should pay more attention to strengthening the economic opportunities for enhancing the status of women. And that, apparently, is our comparative advantage. There is a growing feeling, especially among the women's organizations from the developing countries who were represented in Beijing, that even during periods of economic growth and revival, there are not sufficient economic opportunities generated to absorb the women in the labor force into the formal sector. Consequently there must be means and attention focused on the role of the informal sector in generating income and employment opportunities for women. In that particular context, one of the main topics discussed was the provision of financial and technical services to assist women in creating or strengthening micro­ enterprises. These were cited as promising approaches. Panel after panel dwelt on the success stories of Grameen Bank, Women's World Banking and ACCION International, which were cited as examples of these successful approaches. And we are quite fortunate today to have Nancy Barry from Women's World Banking on our panel today. But there was also concern that credit should not be considered as a magic wand which will solve all the economic problems of women. There are other considerations which should be taken into account, including the time allocation and resources which must be invested to ensure the sustainability and financial viability of these programs. Some of you may have seen Lynn Bennett's article in the current issue of the World Bank gender newsletter, in which she tries to raise these questions. I also believe that women's ability to develop micro-enterprises is affected by the legal and cultural constraints on women's rights to own property and accumulate assets. And in this area, the Bank has not paid sufficient attention to identifying what the constraints are. This configuration of the issues will form part of the presentation by our opening panelist, who will be Nancy Barry. Beyond Beijing 1 Economic Issues (11113/95)  The second issue debated in Beijing concerned women's access to labor markets, and to the new employment opportunities generated through economic growth. Many delegates felt that legal, political and cultural constraints tend to segment labor markets and, in doing so, limit women's access to the high-productivity sectors and therefore direct them to lower-paid sectors. That happens not only in the developing countries. Even in developed countries the differentials between the wages of women and men are quite persistent. Although the gaps are narrowing, this has been an historical trend . . Others in Beijing argued that increased demand for labor will gradually reduce these barriers, and therefore there is an issue of the timing and sequencing of economic growth. One of our panelists, Noeleen Heyzer, has written extensively on the experience of women, especially industrial workers in East Asia, and she has examined labor market segmentation. We are quite happy that she could join us here to talk on this particular question. The most hotly-debated issue, not only in Beijing but in my own discourses with women's organizations, has been the impact of macro-economic policies, including structural adjustment, on women. Critics have consistently argued that adjustment programs often fail to take into consideration the needs of poor women and children, and consequently these groups are often negatively affected by the reform programs. This has been a theme of many NGOs in the developing countries as well as in the international community. The Bank, on the other hand, along with others who have analyzed these issues, have argued that adjustment programs are necessary but not sufficient to correct existing economic problems and take care of the crises. The crises themselves have much greater negative impact on women, and most adjustment programs are designed to correct this and protect health, education and other essential sectors. The main beneficiaries of the increased economic opportunities created by removal of these distortions are women. But this is by no means accepted conventional wisdom. We are fortunate today to have somebody from Africa who is a learned scholar in her own right, Germina Ssemogerere from Uganda, who has analyzed this issue and looked at the impact of macro-economic and policy reforms on women. She is joining us on this panel so that we can learn from her own research and studies. A final set of issues at Beijing, and on the minds of women everywhere, is the impact of heavy domestic and non-paid productive activities on their ability to enter the labor market and to create their own businesses. As you all very well realize, there is a serious underestimation of women's contribution to national economic activities. Beyond Beijing 2 Economic Issues (11113/95)  We should be doing more in this institution in order to, first of all, account for the full set of the economic contributions of women, but also to give attention in our projects and policies to liberating women from time constraints through labor-saving technologies. I hope that those of us who are looking at these issues would make gender analysis a standard tool in our project analysis, to provide a more accurate assessment and estimate of women's time burdens. With these words, I am delighted to introduce to you Nancy Barry, who as most of you know was in the Bank for fifteen years. She is considered an innovator in small­ business programs. She has been the Chairperson of the Donors' Committee on Small and Medium Enterprise for a long time. In addition to her Bank experience, she worked with the Peruvian Government on small enterprise development, in Tanzania on rural enterprise strategies, and for Stanford University on enterprise management in Eastern Europe. So she is somebody who has hands-on experience, the Bank's perspective and now, as the president of Women's World Banking, a very unique perspective on the access of women to credit. Nancy. [Applause.] MS. BARRY: Good afternoon. I would like to take this opportunity to thank and congratulate Ishrat Husain and Minh Chau Nguyen for putting together this initiative. If Beijing means anything, it will be what happens beyond Beijing. I would also like to take the opportunity to congratulate the eight men in this audience. [Laughter. ] MS. BARRY: The Bank clearly has a way to go in having the men and the leadership of the World Bank fully recognize the importance of women's economic participation in development. What I would like to do first is to share with you the excitement and what I think is the success of Beijing, and then to say what I think it means for the world, for the World Bank, for Women's World Banking and other organizations and, most importantly, for the world's women. I believe that Beijing was a success. As in all of these United Nations meetings, success is really determined by how well the preparation for the meeting and the meeting itself have a clear message, a message that mobilizes the energy of the participants and the world at large. Beyond Beijing 3 Economic Issues (11113/95)  In the case of Beijing, when it [planning] started out two years ago, it was a kitchen­ sink approach to development. The prevailing attitude was that women -- especially poor women -- need a little housing, a little water, a little this, a little that, and maybe credit thrown into it. We were extremely happy that if there was a single message from Beijing, it was that low-income women's economic participation, access and power is the single best way to tackle poverty. If a low-income woman is able to increase her income and her assets, she will use that to educate her girls, to take advantage of health clinic services, to reduce violence in her home and in her society, and to realize her potential as an economic and social-change agent. Furthermore, in the Action Platform for Beijing, which I would recommend that you all read, a good one-third of the document dealt with the importance of opening up finance and enterprise systems to the bottom half of the economically-active popUlation, which is where you find most women. And the document actually went much further than any other UN document that I have seen in how to do it. It talked, for example, about the need for a range of institutions, large and small -- cooperatives, credit unions, commercial banks, NGOs, grassroots groups -- that are serving the needs of these 500 million people, of which only 10 million have access to finance from anybody but the money-lender. Secondly, the document says that these institutions, regardless of legal structure, need to meet very high standards [in terms] of performance, reach and business practice. We, as the practitioners in micro-finance, are willing to hold ourselves to standards that are much higher than normal performance standards of commercial banks. All of us, the leading actors -- whether it be ACCION, Grameen, Women's World Banking, FINCA, the credit unions -- have a 95 percent on-time repayment. You know, the development banks of this world would love to see that portfolio with their large corporate clients. We believe that low-income women need access, not subsidies. I've seen people in the World Bank who are otherwise very rational beings, very strong on financial sector systems, say, "oh, but poor people cannot pay. So all we've learned about the importance II of access, not subsidies, gets thrown out the window with these social adjustment programs. That is doing no good to anyone, because it means that you are backing a project, not an institution. You are financing it today, but that institution will not be around to serve low-income women in larger and larger numbers tomorrow, and into the twenty-first century. So, what you find are much clearer messages than you found with the Social Summit, and I think much more room for hope than with Rio, because you also find the instruments for action. And those instruments for action are not women's ministries; not the government; not UN organizations with the exception, of course, of UNIFEM. It is really a recognition of the leadership [role] that the non-government sector has played in showing that low-income women repay their loans, and that you can build sustainable institutions that serve larger and larger numbers of women. Beyond Beijing 4 Economic Issues (11/13/95)  What we found emerging from Beijing was a new development paradigm, which is saying, "structural adjustment is necessary, but it is far from sufficient." Most people in Beijing, and certainly all members of the International Coalition on Women and Credit, which involves the leading microenterprise practitioners, argue that poor women are the ones that suffer the most with hyperinflation. No one is saying, "stop structural adjustment." We are saying that it is not enough, that institutions matter, and that you cannot rely on market forces in and of themselves to take care of opening up this access to 500 million people. You need not only a range of institutions that meet high standards, but if those institutions meet standards, you need mechanisms at the national and international levels that provide capitalization, loan funds and institutional development support -- not the when-you've-got-a-problem-throw-in-a-foreign­ consultant variety -- but using practitioners and networks of practitioners. So that was a clear message. The second criterion for success is: Did it have energy? Did it mobilize energy? I was at the Social Summit. I was [involved] in preparations for Rio, which was like a black hole of energy -- great preparation, but the meeting itself sucked energy in and nothing came out the other end. Everyone had their own Beijing, so I will share with you our Beijing. Our Beijing was, first of all, a recognition that we could declare a victory upon arrivaL One third of the document had been written as a result of the UN Expert Group on Women and Finance, the UN Expert Group on Women and Economic Decision-Making and the UN Expert Group on Women and Poverty -- all of which I happened to chair in my spare time. When the Platform of Action was being drafted and the authors were looking for good language, they just looked to our reports. We can take a lot of pride [in that]. One of the primary authors of the Beijing document said, you -- meaning the International Coalition on Women and Credit and Women's World Banking -- wrote all of the sections of the Action Platform that were not in brackets. That meant we did not have to spend our time negotiating little sentences. If you look back twenty years to Mexico City, when Women's World Banking was born, Ela Bhat and Esther Ocloo, who were founders of Women's World Banking, had to spend their entire time in Mexico City getting one line in the final conference document that said women need access to credit. This was because women were still dealing with themselves as victims, or passive beneficiaries of social services. In 1975, no one was saying, "women are the farmers, the transporters, the traders, the informal-sector industrialists." But this message was very clear and present in 1995. With Beijing, it was possible for the members of the International Coalition on Women and Credit -- which Women's World Banking leads, and UNIFEM was instrumental as a catalyst in forming -- to take the message to the streets. Beyond Beijing 5 Economic Issues (11/13/95)  As Ishrat aIiuded to, we had at least three to five workshops happening at any point in time in Huairou and in Beijing. We had a credit comer where the women of SEWA Bank, twenty of them, sat on pillows, talking about how they had built a women-owned bank that has a much higher level of profitability than the overall Indian banking system. And you had a real creation of a movement where NGOs and poverty banks that had very separate corporate identities -- Grameen, Women's World Banking, ACCION, WOCCU -- came together around common messages. And that is a very powerful thing, and we have actually brought forward that spirit to CGAP, and I will come back to that. Personally, I was shocked at how much fun it was to be in Beijing. We had basically written off Beijing, and had used the Expert Group to influence the Donors' Committee on Small and Medium Enterprise, getting our recommended guidelines [adopted] as the guidelines of all the donors. We believed that none of the real decision-makers were going to be in Beijing. So in April of this year, we called a global policy forum in India with Finance Ministers, Central Bank Governors, heads of donor agencies, and together wrote a report titled, "Missing Links: Financial Systems that Work for the Majority." But I think Beijing was a very important opportunity for celebration all of the women there -- the NGOs and the delegates. As women, we do not spend enough time acknowledging that we have done something to be proud of. And so, we celebrated the women who founded Women's World Banking at our twentieth birthday party at the Palace Hotel. It was an opportunity to say, we have created something where there was nothing. Twenty years ago there were only money-lenders, and today there are strong, growing institutions that are dealing with the finance and enterprise needs of low-income women. All of this is very nice but it's still paper and it's just energy exerted on the part of NGOs. What does this mean for the world? I think the first thing it means for the world is that the Bank itself has got to adopt this new paradigm, saying that structural adjustment is necessary but not sufficient. The answer is not in public-sector expenditures on social services. The answer is in building finance and enterprise systems that work for the poor majority. Low-income people need money. Low-income people need assets. And they will create their own social safety nets. Look at SEWA Bank. We would agree that finance, credit is a starting point, but it is a starting point that only 2 percent of the world's poor women have; so let's not declare victory until we have 100 million microenterprise clients. But institutions such as SEWA and Grameen that have succeeded in opening financial services, have gone on to deal with other needs of women. Beyond Beijing 6 Economic Issues (11/13/95)  SEWA Bank now has its own social security system. It borrowed (US) $1 million from GTZ, that has been used to create a health insurance system for its 100,000 members. And in that health insurance system, the premiums are paid by the interest on this $1 million and by the women themselves who have plowed in money. SEWA has structured this fund so that in seven years it will be able to repay GTZ. SEWA will have $1 million as the corpus of the fund and it will be self-sufficient in providing health services for disasters, for the death of the woman herself and now for maternity. That service would not exist unless there was a connectedness, an organizing around credit that SEWA Bank has provided. So one of the critical things in talking about sustainable strategies and institutions, not projects, is that the Bank could get much more creative than it is -- even if we are talking about health or education services -- in backing non-governmental organizations and creating financial instruments that are not just what I call the "beg-and-spend" strategy. You know, you get a little money for staff and for vehicles; you spend it and then you are starting over the next year. Let us talk about capitalization as a strategy for financing strong institutions and building them as self-sustaining, self-determined organizations that do not depend permanently on donor or government funding. The second thing that I think Beijing means for the world is that women ~.re no longer waiting. Women are not whining, women are not talking about WID anymore. What women were talking about in Beijing are the issues of our times. Women are taking action with or without support from others, but in a way that embodies the values of our time, which are love and responsibility. Women are highly pragmatic in saying, "unless we have economic power, we will not have any kind of power. II So if you are an investor, if you are a conservative World Banker, the single investment that you can make is in women and in institutions that serve women. It is blindness that this room is not 50150 men and women, because this is important not just for women. It is not a gender issue, it is not an equality issue, it is not an equity issue. It is simply that the world needs women in decision-making positions; it needs to open the productive capacities of more than half of humankind or the world is not going to work. The World Bank, I think, has made a tremendous start with CGAP [Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest]. Hopefully, you all know what CGAP is. It is, I believe, the first time that the World Bank has created a fund that finances non-governmental organizations directly. It is using the profits of the Bank; it is using the prestige of the Bank to mobilize about (US) $250 million more of bilateral parallel funding. I participated two weeks ago in the Policy Advisory Group of CGAP, which involved the same cast of characters, the same leaders of SEWA, Grameen, ACCION, BRI in Indonesia, et cetera. The World Bank let us write the eligibility criteria, the procedures, the terms and conditions of CGAP -- without screening what we came up with -- and asked us to present it to a public meeting of 500 people. I think that is a very new Bank. Beyond Beijing 7 Economic Issues (11113/95)  I was in Zimbabwe two weeks ago, for the Women's World Banking regional meeting for Africa. In the adjoining conference room was David Cook, a man I had worked with on small enterprise projects in Sri Lanka twenty years ago, and he is now the World Bank's Res Rep [Resident Representative] for Zimbabwe. It was a meeting of 40 heads of NGOs. And it was a policy consultation. The Bank is learning to listen, and it is learning to use its power to create decentralized structures and processes that involve asking more than the Minister of Finance and the Governor of the Central Bank how to run the country. Once you open up those decision-making processes, not only will the NGOs have a voice but, most importantly, low-income women will be given a voice in policies and resource-flow decisions of their country. For us in Women's World Banking, it means that we will definitely continue the major thrust on policy-impact activities. We have been absolutely stunned at the vacuum that we have filled. Many of our policy activities which began two years ago were a result of my being in a donors' committee meeting on financial sector development chaired by the World Bank. In this meeting, the Bank was introducing financial sector restructuring, kind of the new wave of structural adjustment. All of the bilaterals were nodding reverently -- you know, follow the leader, the Bank. So I raised my hand and asked, "After structural adjustment, after financial sector reform, will the bottom 50 percent of the economically active population -- not the poorest of the poor -- have more, or less, access to financial services?" And the guy from the Bank was honest enough to say that studies so far indicate that the answer is less. Then he said, "Women's World Banking is providing leadership on filling this gap. What should we do?" It is amazing to have the World Bank say to a small non-government organization, "tell us how to fill that gap." With the 40 leading practitioners that form the Expert Group, we have moved to try to fill that gap and to show how you can build financial systems that work for the majority. We [WWB] as an institution need to be very careful to maintain a balance between our policy-impact activities and our affiliate-strengthening activities, because one of the things we have found is that the single biggest constraint to expanding -- to move from 10 million low-income women entrepreneurs to 100 million by the year 2005, which is the objective of the International Coalition on Women and Credit -- is the limited institutional capacity of the retail-level institutions. So, network organizations of practitioners such as Women's World Banking really must keep tending to the knitting on helping local institutions strengthen their own institutional capacity, and strengthen their own integration mechanisms with the local banking Beyond Beijing 8 Economic Issues (11/13/95) system, so that they can make the changes from 10,000 to 100,000, to 1,000,000 loans to low-income women. Finally, what does this mean for women as a whole? One of the things I think it means is that each of us -- and that very much includes everyone sitting in this room -- needs to think of herself or himself as a leader, and to figure out, "How can I use my own leadership wherever I am to create these transformation processes?" When we were at the global policy forum, we took the Central Bank Governors to the villages. Many of them never had been to the villages, including the Central Bank Governor of Bangladesh. He went to Ahmedabad, met the women and came out of that experience saying not "isn't sad how poor all these women are, but "all of these women are II leaders! " And when Chanda Ben, a founding member of SEWA Bank, spoke at the inauguration in Gujurati for five minutes with no translation, it was very clear what she was saying. She was telling the Minister of Finance of India, who was sitting to her right, how to run the country. We need to create more opportunities for that kind of connectedness to happen. At the end of this policy forum, many heads of development agencies said "I have been at this business for twenty-five years, and I see the entire challenge of development differently". I think that women have a comparative advantage in dealing with what I call the double bottom line, to create a world in which there are sustainable institutions, which means profitable institutions that are using a business-like approach to social and economic change. I believe that women in the Bank have always migrated to these messier sectors. It is a real challenge not to get soft on the poor, but to use all of the tremendous talents and money in this institution to create fmancial systems and enterprise systems that work for the poor majority. Thank you very much. [Applause. ] MR. HUSAIN: Thank you, Nancy. Our next panelist is Noeleen Heyzer. She is the Director of the United Nations Development Fund for Women. She is a native of Singapore, and she worked before joining UNIFEM at the Asia and Pacific Development Center in Kuala Lumpur as the gender coordinator. Not only that, she has authored ten books and numerous articles, and her famous books include Missing Women, Daughters in Industry, Women Farmers and Rural Change in Asia. It is my great pleasure to call on Noeleen. [Applause.] Beyond Beijing 9 Economic Issues (11113/95)  MS. HEYZER: First, it is a great pleasure for me to be here among some of myoid friends. I would like to thank the organizers for calling this meeting. I will divide my talk into four parts, beginning again with what has Beijing meant for the world's women, and then drawing on some of the lessons of Beijing from the perspective of Asia, and then from the perspective of the women's movement (Part 3). Then [I will talk] about the implementation of the recommendations coming out of Beijing in terms of the United Nations system and the role of UNIFEM itself. Very often people ask me, in a few words, how would you describe Beijing? And I say, if I have to describe Beijing, it is really the unbracketing of women's lives. We went in with 30 percent of the document bracketed, and the brackets were along the lines of human rights, women's rights, women's health and [rights] of the girl child. So it was really quite a struggle. If there was another way of describing Beijing, I would say that it was not a world conference of women; it was really a women's conference about the world. Because the scope of issues discussed was just amazing, the interlinkages built were very profound. I have not attended too many UN meetings and conferences, and that is why I have not yet suffered from conference fatigue. But if I can use the background of the Third World conference to portray what was achieved at the Fourth World Conference, there was definitely [in Beijing] a vision of what development was all about and the kind of development that women wanted. And that came out extremely clearly. The other thing that was really very, very advantageous in the preparation of Beijing was that processes were put in place. Beijing was not an event; Beijing was a process. I was very much involved with the preparatory process before coming to headquarters in New York. What took place was really a process that tried to engender development thinking and practice at the national level. It was the bringing together of diverse voices, making sure that there was an attempt to build public education, public awareness, so that mechanisms and processes for implementation were already in place. In other words, Beijing, unlike the Third World Conference, was really a conference where action and implementation were thought of at the national level and at the regional level. So that by the time we got to New York, there was a fear that the global platform was, in fact, much weaker than the regional platform. It was really a case of the regions and the countries saying, we will go ahead, whatever your global platform looks like. It was a case of the global platform trying to catch up with the regions and the countries. And that I thought was quite a change from the Third World Conference. Beyond Beijing 10 Economic Issues (11/13/95)  The other issue that was hotly discussed was that of resources, and that one was fully bracketed. Where will we get resources? How are you going to implement this platform? Now. what were some of the issues which came up, that really were at the heart of the commitments, because it was a conference of commitments? There was a call that if we want to commit ourselves, we have to commit to the closing of gender gaps in basic needs, because you have to close the gaps in education, in health care, in access to resources. And it has to be done quickly. But the environment in which this is allowed to happen has changed, and that is a cause for concern. Globalization has created new wealth and new poverty. Does the state have the same kind of strength to bring about the closing of gender gaps which it did twenty years ago (from Mexico till now)? That was a major concern. The other concern was the issue of violence against women and women's rights. Again, if there was a way of describing this platform for action, we could call it an agenda for women's empowerment fully rooted in the framework of women's rights. And that came out extremely strongly. If, again, I compared the Third World Conference to the Fourth, at the Third World Conference people were just beginning to talk about violence against women and trafficking of the girl child. But here, it was really a global mobilization to eliminate all forms of violence against women, and to call for declaring the systematic rape of women a war crime. So again, it [the Platform] went full force into action and very, very specific action. Another major concern was that the feminization of poverty had, in fact, taken [place] on a global scale. It was a global phenomenon, and the quote that the UN used very frequently was that 70 percent of the world's 1.3 billion poor were women, and that poverty had a female face. This was the slogan which people constantly were confronted with. And that had to be addressed. The other issue which came out very strongly was peace-building and conflict resolution. It was almost like saying that if we want to deal with people's advancement, we have to take care of social integration. We have to take care of communities. We have to have social cohesion. We need to build on the social fabrics of our societies, and we need to really start building peace and mend those broken fabrics. What was of concern was the fact that there were so many war-torn societies, and we have testimonies of children, of women coming out of war-torn situations. UNIFEM was very central to that, very central to the issue of feminization of poverty as well. What was the response to these key issues? We decided that it has to be not just in terms of economic empowerment, but in terms of political empowerment, and the two cannot be differentiated. We have to have the two prongs of economic and political empowerment. Beyond Beijing 11 Economic Issues (11/13/95)  The way we defined it, you need to look at economic empowerment not just from the micro-level realities of women's lives -- that is extremely important -- but also what is very much being shaped by macro-level realities. You need to interlink the macro and the micro; they have got to be brought together. UNIFEM's work, then, consisted of trying to focus on key questions. What are some of the trends at the macro level? How do we bring about gender-responsive economic policies at the national level? How do we sustain women's livelihoods at the community level, as well as deal with the issue of natural resource management? Those were the questions in the area of economic empowerment [defined as the access and control that women have to economic assets on a long-term, sustainable basis]. In terms of political empowerment, we need to really go back to women's vision of development, the ethics of development -- what is it based on, what is development for? And at the same time, to ensure that this new development takes into account women's realities, perspectives, experiences and action from the micro level and integrates that into the areas of policy-making and decision-making. This means that we need to ensure that we invest in women's leadership. We need to invest in women's capacity to negotiate. At the same time, we stressed the need to develop a rights framework, because in many countries what was of concern was that women do not even have rights to their own person. Therefore, how can you talk about rights to assets and so on? It has to be seen within the context of women's rights. The other component is that of peace-building, and trying to create stable lives and healthy communities. Now what are some of the lessons -- because I was told to talk about some of my experiences in Asia as well -- in terms of the future, in terms of implementation? At the end of the day, the value of these conferences is that we can, and we need to, convert many of the recommendations into action. How can we do that? What are some of the lessons we have learned from different development experiences, that we can use to guide us in implementation? When you talk about Asia, you are talking about a continent that has experienced growth. But at the same time, you are also talking about a continent that houses half of the world's poor. The development experiences have ranged from high-growth [countries] that have invested in social development, to low-growth [countries] that have still invested in social development, and low-growth [countries] struggling to deal with survival issues. And these obviously give very different lessons regarding state/market/civil society interactions. It is very clear that if we are dealing with poverty, the poor is not a static population. The poor class is created by larger processes [of dispossession, dislocation, deskilling], and we need to ensure that these processes be addressed by development frameworks and strategies. Beyond Beijing 12 Economic Issues (11113/95)  What Asia did basically was to go on a two-pronged attack, if you like, to deal with the poverty issue. One [prong] was to incorporate it fully into its development strategy and gender issues are very much part of that. If I remember the experiences of the 1960s and the 1970s, especially for the high-growth countries, they centered on investing in people's social capacity. I came from a country that had no resources to spare. It had to invest in every single human being it had. And so Singapore invested very much in education. It invested very much in women's education, because it did not have the lUXUry to differentiate between male and female. So it was equal education for all. And that, in fact, strengthened it very quickly and gave it the competitive edge over its neighbors, because it had an educated skilled population to compete when it came to the opening up of markets. But at the same time, the state played a very strong role in regulating how the benefits of that growth were going to be used, and it reinvested in people's capacities. Malaysia, another country of fluctuating growth that had to shift from a commodity­ based economy to an industrial-based and service-based economy. could not run away from making political choices. The need for political will and commitment is the second prong in the attack on poverty. Malaysia had to deal with the issue of ethnicity, and it had to invest in its rural areas. So it invested in rural education. Many people said it is an Islamic country; yes, true, but it did not differentiate on girls' education. And because of that, when it was the opening up to the market, what it found was that once you had an rural/urban drift, that rural/urban drift did not concentrate on the informal sector. It was able to be incorporated into new labor markets, into the industries that were being set up, into new opportunities. Of course, they had a whole series of other social problems to contend with, but the point is that it was very different from the type of urban growth which you saw, say, in Thailand. Maybe I should stop there regarding the Asia experience and move quickly to the United Nations. The United Nations now has to implement the recommendations [from Beijing]. As a system, it is trying to set up inter-agency task forces. The World Bank will be heading one of them. UNIFEM's role --let me get very quickly to that -- is very much grounded in the fact that it is the operational arm of the United Nations [mandated] to bring about women's empowerment. As such, it will be working along the lines of three different strategies. One; we are still avery, very small fund -- it is a shame that after twenty years, we are still one of the smallest funds in the whole United Nations system. But, at the same time, we have been able to invest our $12 million in the best possible way. So if you are investors and you want to invest, I would recommend UNIFEM because we have a track record to show what we can do with $12 million. With that $12 million, we have been able to be at the cutting edge of some of the most innovative development strategies. This has Beyond Beijing 13 Economic Issues (11113/95) taken place in a variety of areas, ranging from credit to human rights, to trying to bring about women's economic and political empowerment. Two; we try constantly to ask the question: What are the key lessons, the best practices that can be pulled out of our experiences on the ground? And we have experience across 65 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. We constantly try to crystallize that [experience] and bring it to the visibility of international policymakers, so that these lessons learned can be incorporated [into their development practices and activities]. Three; because we are so small, we have had to build catalytic partnerships. Increasingly we are asked to serve as special advisors in the implementation of the Beijing platform, within the context of the [UN] resident coordinator system at the country level. This means we will be the special advisors to the resident coordinator in trying to get countries to come up with their strategies. At the same time, we call ourselves the voice and conscience of the women's movement within the UN system -- and that is not without reason because we have been very, very instrumental in preparing the women's movement for the Beijing meeting by demystifying the whole UN process. If any of you have the Secretary-General's report which has just come out today, you will see that one of the recommendations for UNIFEM is to empower women now, after the conference, to implement the conference outcomes. So there is a lot of work ahead of us. I would like to end by saying that I was very touched by the statement of your President in Beijing. From the feedback that I got from very many women, it was a message of hope. And out of that message of hope, I hope that we can also build new partnerships. I thank you. [Applause.] MR. HUSAIN: Thank you very much, Noeleen. I didn't want to cut you off but it is very rare that Bank staff get an opportunity to have interaction with such a distinguished panel. So I want to give them a chance to interact with you and to ask questions. The next panelist is Germina Ssemogerere, who teaches at the Department of Economics at Makerere University in Uganda. She has a PhD in Economics from Duke and BA cum laude from Vassar. She has taught microeconomics, international economics and economic development in Uganda, [and other subjects in] the United States and Kenya. She has published a lot, including Structural Adjustment Programs and the Coffee Sector in Uganda, Mobilization of Domestic Financial Resources in Uganda, and she has been really a prolific consultant in several African countries on topics such as private sector assessment, UNDP country programs [in Swaziland] and women's welfare under structural adjustment. It is my great pleasure to introduce Germina. Beyond Beijing 14 Economic Issues (11/13/95)  [Applause.] MS. SSEMOGERERE: Thank you very much, our hosts, for giving us this opportunity to talk about women's issues. I also want to thank my hosts for inviting me. I have the daunting task to talk after two distinguished women, and still keep my audience's attention. My concern with structural adjustment is not that I don't recognize the distortions that these policies were intended to address; we cannot deny that distortions were there. In fact, in my country if you asked anybody, "who wants to stand in line to wait for the allocation of foreign exchange?" they would all tell you to go to hell. They would prefer to go to the open market and buy the foreign exchange at their pleasure. However, I think there is an opportunity cost in these SAPs. If it is the dominant policy, then other policies cannot come to the fore. And, therefore, it is legitimate to ask the question: How well is this dominant policy addressing the needs of various groups in society, including women? So I am not telling you to go back and flX producer prices. I am not telling you to go back and ration foreign exchange. But I am asking you, when you are applying the liberalization policies, how are different groups being affected? I intend to touch upon only two aspects of structural adjustment. [First] the liberalization of the tradable sector, and here I am going to concentrate on agriCUlture, and I will justify my reasons. I also will talk about restructuring public spending. I am aware there are other aspects of structural adjustment, but I cannot possibly touch upon all of them in such a short period of time. Before I start off, I would like to make apologies. I was invited to Beijing and I didn't make it. So I don't have the first-hand experience of how Beijing worked, but I wrote a paper for a network of NGOs, which they presented to Beijing. I kept track of what was going on there. And I will be assisting the people who went to Beijing in concretizing their action plans in my country. Let me talk about the tradable goods' sector. Structural adjustment strives to improve the prices of tradables relative to non-tradables in order to increase the comparative advantage of the tradable goods' sector, to lead to a more efficient allocation of resources. We could divide the tradable goods' sector into agriculture and industry. In most of our countries in Sub-Saharan Africa -- which I will use as my reference point because I only have limited access to the problems of women in other countries; I have been in Bangladesh and followed the Grameen Bank, but I haven't had extensive experience there -- within Sub­ Saharan Africa, the largest tradable sector is agriculture. Beyond Beijing 15 Economic Issues (11113/95)  The most prominent policies within SAPs have been on the liberalization of the exchange-rate regime, so that exporters will receive the market-based exchange rate rather than the fixed exchange rate, so that you remove that implicit tax on exporters. Of course, within industry, you remove the implicit subsidy on the importation of inputs. But within tradable agriculture, the export sector in most of our countries is quite small, maybe 5 to 10 percent of GDP at most. The largest component of the agricultural sector is non-tradable, and this is what produces the food. I wouldn't mind overlooking the food sector if it didn't have such problems, so profound for Africa and for women in particular. I have a table in my paper showing the poor production conditions of food, of falling per capita output. We are embarrassed by what goes on occasionally in Ethiopia, in Somalia. We are tired of begging for food from other countries. And I can tell you if we are going to tackle women's problems, number one, something must be in the pot. Without that, you know, women just cannot function. The following issues are key in the food sector. This is where women are in Africa. Most of them are food producers, and they produce it for free because everybody just comes to eat. No one asks a woman where they have bought the food or [if they] got it anywhere else. We provide it free of charge. We need it for health. I think human beings are entitled to have enough food. And this is a provision within the United Nations which is never looked at. I think governments should be sent to prison for starving their populations, if we observed the UN conventions. Also, food is a wage good that goes into other productive activities. If you want structural adjustment to succeed in order to have other productive activities [be] competitive, the most important expenditure for unskilled labor, that is food, must be kept to reasonable proportions. Unfortunately, the food sector is outside the market economy. It is semi-subsistence. What concerns me is not that the SAPs are wrong, but if we concentrate our attention on the SAPs as applied today, they by-pass the food sector. In other words, those women in food have no relevant mechanism or connection with the SAPs, and that to me is a problem. I think we have to bring this sector into the monetary economy, and I think the following have to be paid attention to. When you are dealing with an under-developed situation, you have to create rather than liberalize the markets, because the markets don't exist. We have to construct feeder roads; we have to circulate market information. We have to build the rural infrastructure that will enable us to market the food, such as storage, shelter, transacting in cash, providing sanitation at the marketplace and levying reasonable taxes in the villages -- not in the town -- because that is where the food is. If these are in place, the people will have a place to take their food for marketing. Beyond Beijing 16 Economic Issues (11/13/95)  We have to provide the marketing know-how of preservation, of sorting, of packaging, of bargaining for better prices. One of the reasons why women don't get good prices is that they bring everything mixed up in the basket and they sell it in a heap. And those traders just take the whole heap regardless of how many kilograms you have put there. We do not have to just create markets, but we have to make markets behave competitively. You may liberalize a market and get rid of a parastatal marketing monopoly, but then the next traders also should be competitive. Otherwise, we switch from public monopolies to private monopolies. This does not improve the share of the producer in the market price. You know, it all goes either into state rents and taxes or it goes into private monopoly profits, and the profiteers are not necessarily the women. Furthermore, when you create a market, you have to allow participants to enter. And I think the women have to be empowered to enter. It is the size of the initial endowment that is going to affect the equitable sharing of the benefits of the market. I would like here to join with Nancy Barry, whose colleagues I have been interacting with very closely in the credit system. Women have to have access to credit, to accumulate the necessary capital requirements. But we also need access to production technology in order to increase the surplus we bring to the market. We need education and health to improve our human capacity. And it is only with these endowments that we can gainfully enter into the market. Eventually, we will need processing, transportation and marketing know-how so that we can also add value to what we produce. What I am telling the implementers of structural adjustment is not necessarily to do less liberalizing, but to look at who the participants are in the new markets which they are liberalizing. The women are very few in number there. They are highly under-represented, and those who enter are not sufficiently endowed to gainfully participate in these markets. As long as we are applying structural adjustment, this is where the attention should go. I want to go to my second point, and this has to do with the allocation of public spending. There is an inclination within the world bodies applying structural adjustment to orient expenditure away from wasteful resources -- loss-making parastatals, excessive militarism and so on -- into social sectors for education and health and, at least in my country, agriculture as well. There are a few key issues that I want to call attention to. When I was given the terms of reference for this particular meeting, I was requested to outline how governments can ensure that the benefits of structural adjustment are in the long run shared by women. I have to reply that there are no benevolent governments out there who are going to ensure that this happens. [Laughter.] Beyond Beijing 17 Economic Issues (11113/95)  At least the governments I have seen across the continent, including my own, are not so benevolent. We have got to ask, how do we get women to organize into vocal pressure groups to argue for an equitable allocation of resources? Resource allocation is not a matter of shifting budget lines. It is a matter of political action to get the allocation made properly. We are not going to get accountability. We are not going to get equity if we just sit back. Weare going to have to go out there to argue that this penny has not been properly accounted for. Let me tell you what African governments spend money on. A great many of our structures are undemocratic. The real fat expenditure is not on roads, it is not on education; it is not on health. It is not even on budget lines which you can identify that easily because the governments know very well that you are going to examine these budget lines. It is on hidden budget lines in spying, surveillance, secret purchases of arms and repression. This is where the expenditure is. And I think we have to educate women to find these hidden budget lines that are really repressing us instead of adding to our human development, and insist that resource allocations be moved from there. It is on political patronage. And here I think women have to be extremely careful to make sure that when they join politics, they are not co-opted into existing structures, that they really do have a voice to change these structures. I notice that I have little time left. I have the following to say to the world bodies, the World Bank and the IMF. Be true to yourselves. You have liberalized the economic system. You have to liberalize the audiences you listen to. It is not sufficient to stop at the Permanent Secretary, at the President's chamber. You should also listen to the private sector. You should listen to the NGO sector, where many women are, and you should listen to trade unions and so on. And as you listen to these other publics, you should look for whether the women's voice is coming through. In my country, the World Bank is just beginning to put up the NGO forum. It is a very welcomed measure. But please enlarge your audiences, because in the final analysis in a liberalized economy, if we are implementing structural adjustment right, the supply response you are looking for is not going to come from government alone. It is going to come from other sectors, including the women producers and consumers. Lastly, I want to ask a question. We all accept that we should restructure the public sector so that we don't have wasteful employment of people who are just sitting in the government offices and not producing anything. We should thin it out. We should put in place appropriate incentives to deliver public goods and services. But here, I want to alert you to two key issues. Beyond Beijing 18 Economic Issues (11/13/95)  [First] that those who remain in the public sector deliver all the way to the grassroots. We are looking forward to the survey coming to check up on the delivery system because the women are way down in the villages. We want to see a delivery system that actually delivers to those villages, not to stop in the middle. Our cross-checking reveals that even when funds are allocated, they are not delivered all the way down. Secondly, if it is necessary to retrench, let us have the resulting unemployment as truly transitional. Let us fmd where the unemployed are going, because the most painful thing for women is that whether or not the men have an income or any cash, we still have to feed them. So when they are unemployed, they still present themselves to the table, and that adds to the women's burden. Thank you very much. [Applause.] MR. HUSAIN: Thank you very much for a very thoughtful exposition of the subject. The floor is open. I know it is getting late, but I thought you should have the opportunity to ask questions to the panel. QUESTION: [Microphone not working] ...the other side of credit is you're creating women debtors. Are they coming out the other side? Because everything I have heard about the Grameen Bank and all of that on showing positive benefits by the repayment rate and taking larger and larger debts outgoing from one dollar to $250. But what does that mean in the long-run and are they going to be in a continuous cycle? MR. HUSAIN: Nancy, would you like to answer? MS. BARRY: Yes. I would not worry too much about creating some middle-class housewives out of the poor women of the world. What we are really talking about here is 500 million low-income women who are making less than a dollar a day. And every incremental dollar that they get goes directly into the mouths, medicine and schoolbooks of their children. And they are the backbones of their local economy. So, I don't think we are going to be talking about all of a sudden creating this consumer madness. I would also like to add, as we talk about the environment or about changing global values, that the onus of that really needs to rest with us, the consumer countries of the world. And if we are worried about that, we should change our own actions. Then, instead of having "Dallas" on TV in Bangladesh, there would be a whole other set of values being projected into these economies. But I don't think we should tum that around and say, therefore, poor people should [not] get less poor. Beyond Beijing 19 Economic Issues (11/13/95)  In tenns of debt and credit, I think that is a useful thing to keep thinking about. First of all, in the first and the second and the third tranche of these loans, what you are really doing is replacing the money-lender. These women are paying 5 percent a month, a week or a day. So immediately you get an income kicker from that because these women clearly are able to pay 100 percent, 200 percent interest rate a year. By providing them credit at what is often 40 percent a year in most countries, because you need to pay the financing costs and 20 percent, you are still giving them a real break. But I think. all of us are very concerned the credit alone is not going to get poor people out of poverty. It will make poor people less poor. And everyone, even the minimalist lenders, will say that credit is a useful starting point. But it is, in fact, a useful starting point because with credit alone, as long as savings is built into that system, you do give a woman more control over her future. And then the segment of those that want to grow will need marketing, technology, other inputs, in order to really grow out of poverty. MR. HUSAIN: Thank you. QUESTION: Yes. For any of the three speakers, what is the importance and what are the prospects and strategies for change in women's right to own property? MR. HUSAIN: Noeleen, do you want to take that? MS. HEYZER: Okay. I also wanted to talk a little bit about the first question, about the issue of indebtedness, because I think that it has to be linked up. It is important to ask the question: How do women become poor? And there are, as far as I can see, three different thoughts or processes. One is dispossession. In fact, even when you have the situation that women did have rights to land, there is a process very much beyond their control that could dispossess them from the traditional access to land. So you have to put this issue of ownership, of rights to inheritance, within the context of what else is happening. The other issue is that of dislocation, because there is also the fact that people are thrown out of their communities by ecological crises, by the way we use land, by the way we make use of natural resources. So in a sense there is a competition over utilization, the politics of utilization -- who gets to the site, how things are being used in our world and for what purposes. That has to be something which we talk about. The third issue is that of de-skilling, because even if we have the fonnation of our labor markets, the question is: How do we insert women into this labor market? Very often it is in the fonn of almost de-skilling what they have -- as casual workers, casual laborers and as contract workers, as people in the low-wage sector. Beyond Beijing 20 Economic Issues (11/13/95)  Even if they have had formal skills, say in terms of ecological skills or indigenous knowledge, you will find that because of the destruction of communities, that knowledge cannot be used in the natural context anymore. These people get de-skilled in one context and then reinserted into another context as casual workers. The other set of issues that I think falls through the cracks -- because we talk about the informal sector and we talk about the formal market sector -- is international migration, whereby the whole de-skilling process has thrown out people who formerly had bridge jobs and now are migrating internationally not into the formal sector but into households, raising the whole issue of domestic work. Many of them, in fact, go into the situation of indebtedness because they do not fall into [the category of] the hard-core poor who have access to informal credit; nor do they have sufficient assets to be able to borrow from banks. Therefore, they are caught in the middle, and become increasingly indebted until they can get out after a couple of months. But during that process, they are totally victims of recruitment agencies. And that is something that we have to think about. Should we extend credit to help these people? Can we get the Central Banks involved to ensure that the money which they send back is sent back safely, not through informal career systems? What are some of the safety nets that we can use to protect these women? So I would like to put all that in a much larger context. Thank you. MR. HUSAIN: Thank you. MS. SSEMOGERERE: On the property problem specifically, I think perhaps the best thing that happened because of Beijing is the raising of consciousness that women want to own, and should have the right to own, property. Legislation is coming upfront to that effect. All international organizations are pushing for legislation at the national level to be implemented. But I think the key is enforcement. You can have a law in place, but women have very severe disadvantages to have laws enforced in their favor. They need information as to who are the people who are counter-contending for their wealth, and that takes time to accumulate. They need time to negotiate, to go through litigation, to stand the fall-out in order to hold their own. And I still think we have to look forward to a lot of local education for networking, for setting in place women's stock shops where they can go to have this reinforcement. In my country, I pay special tribute to FIDA [Phonetic] which looks into these issues to make sure that the legal framework which is on the books is actually being enforced. And we have to work very hard to see that whatever little property we have access to, we can actually enjoy the rights from. This should not be taken for granted. Beyond Beijing 21 Economic Issues (11113/95)  MR. HUSAIN: Thank you. QUESTION: Ms. Barry, is Women's World Banking financing communications education and information to reach the persons in rural communities? Are you doing distance learning projects? You pointed out earlier the need for communications, human and networking. MS. BARRY: Maybe it would be useful if I just described briefly what Women's World Banking is since it is often thought of as a branch of the World Bank of men. [Laughter and audience comment, "I wish it was"] MS. BARRY: Women's World Banking is a global, not-for-profit, financial institution devoted to opening low-income women's access to finance, information and markets. In that capacity, there are 52 affiliates in 41 countries of Africa, Latin America, Asia, North America and Europe that really act as retail-level institutions, providing credit services. In 30 percent of the cases, they directly mobilize savings. In all cases, they help women mobilize savings. And then there are what we call non-financial business development services, in which the area you are asking about I think could fall. The tradition of Women's World Banking affiliates has been to offer fairly conventional training to micro-entrepreneurs. But over the last five years, there has been a massive move in Women's World Banking to get away from traditional classroom training, recognizing that, while access to information and markets is as important as money, training in the traditional sense is a big waste of time for most micro-entrepreneurs -- putting twenty women in a classroom, et cetera. So, many affiliates have become more innovative in using the media, using radio particularly, as a communication tool to bring information and awareness, as well as know­ how, to low-income women. The thing that we are most proud of in that regard is something called enterprise learning and networks, where best-practice entrepreneurs in small and medium enterprises come together with our affiliates and they open up their factories, their firms, to women in micro-enterprise in the same subsector. Networks of enterprises have been formed that now are capable of exporting. So you've got leading women creating networks, really subcontracting networks that are non­ exploitative in nature which are real value-adding things. And I would say it is still people-to-people technology more than it is communication, but I think use of modem communication technology is still an untapped resource. QUESTION [continued from last speaker]: How best would you like to see communications technoligy used, Ms. Barry? Beyond Beijing 22 Economic Issues (11113/95)  MS. BARRY: I would love to see the World Bank take a lead in this. QUESTION [continued from last speaker]: I think they should. I'm Dr. Claudia Hall, Global Satellite Broadcasting. We see the opportunity to come together as communications experts with Women's World Banking at the rural level you are talking about to communicate those resources and use them for bringing together macro policies with the rural policies. And when you are deciding on overall programs for countries, what you are listening to is; "let's have a communications component, which is just community development." Not sustainable development. We want the big-boy exercise and not just the sandbox. We want the sandbox mixed with the big-boy stuff, so we can get on downstream. And we'd like to see Women's World Banking help us, and the World Bank take a part in this. MS. BARRY: Right. I think the one major first step is Internet connections, which makes that very possible. And that is something that I understand the Bank is taking more of a leadership role in. MR. HUSAIN: Alicia, before you lose your audience, you have an announcement to make. MS. HETZNER: As you exit the building, if you look up to your left, you will see the two quilts for the art exhibition which have to do with the circumcision cycle. And they are very dramatic because consciousness-raising is not just through the intellect but also through the senses. The exhibition was put together to complement the symposium series in terms of the Beijing themes -- equality, development and peace. And tomorrow we are having a group of curators, artists, and professors from New York talk about "Women and Art: Empowering Narratives," the kinds of messages that we get through the media and through art, how to change them to empower us, and also to help women bring out their creative potential throughout the country. MR. HUSAIN: Last question, all right. QUESTION: I have a question for Ms. Heyzer and for Germina. How does UNIFEM work in terms of having a project financed? How do you fund the project? Where does the demand come from and things like that? And I would like to know more, if you have some idea, Germina, about how women can get organized in finding a hidden budget line in government's official budgets? MS. HEYZER: We have twelve field offices at the moment scattered over Asia, Latin America and Africa, and these field offices work very closely with the women's groups and with local communities. And, therefore, the demand would be the needs that are being Beyond Beijing 23 Economic Issues (11/13/95) expressed in the local areas, in the regional offices, at the national levels. But increasingly, we also try to identify how we can empower women to take advantage of new opportunities that are coming up. People who are able to identify these opportunities, take part in task forces scattered around the world who help us identify how best to use our funds. In a sense, we are a very small fund--$12 million scattered across 65 countries. Basically, it means we have to use it in a very catalytic way. We use it to leverage other funding basically and also to work within the context of building partnerships with the other UN organizations. We also put a lot of work into advocacy, trying to empower, to build linkages. And related to that, I would like to touch on communications and technology, because we feel it is extremely important, and really the next place to go. We are trying to upgrade technologically and trying to use that in our advocacy work, and also trying to build international networks. We had a whole network on domestic violence, the international coalition on credit that Nancy spoke about, and also a network on conflict prevention and peace-building. MR. HUSAIN: Germina. MS. SSEMOGERERE: About the hidden budget lines, I think we are trying to educate women. If policies or a set of policies are not serving you, how do you go about changing them? If you walk into any government department or ministry, you are going to find the shelf is full of very well-written policies. You would agree with all of them. You know, they are rational; they show the cause, they show the objectives. They usually have even the interesting clause that this is a top priority for government. The question then to ask is not so much whether there should be a new policy -­ maybe that will be asked down the road -- but why is this good policy not being implemented? We expected so many funds to be allocated to it. Where did they go? If you really start raising the facts, ask whoever is in that machinery and eventually you will get to know where the hidden budget line is. Usually women don't get access to this information because we raise general complaints, that the government is not doing this, the government is not doing that. Break it up. Which part of the government? Which ministry? Which desk? What is the written policy? What is the time-frame when it is supposed to be implemented, and why is it not being implemented? I think if you break it out to that finally, you will eventually find out where the money is going. As for us, we have got to train our women that this is the way to analyze policies, not just a general complaint, but a complaint specific to a particular policy measure and a Beyond Beijing 24 Economic Issues (11/13/95) particular implementation agency, which within a given time-frame, has to tell us what has happened. We are asking the world bodies to create the forum for us to express our findings. Because if they just come and visit the Minister or the Permanent Secretary, they are simply going to take these nice statements and put them on the shelves, and they are going to think that the policies ar~ being implemented. If we had another independent audience and, in fact, if we knew that the World Bank is coming to address the women's forum in our country, we would prepare ourselves. And we would raise the questions, so the world body could then use its influence to go and query the government about these [policies]. And in the final analysis, if nothing is forthcoming, in the next credit line from the IMF or the Bank, we would appreciate if it is a conditionality that they answer our questions. [Applause.] MR. HUSAIN: Well, on this very constructive note, I would like to take this opportunity to thank each one of our panelists for a very impressive and excellent presentation. I am sure the audience really benefitted a great deal from your presence here. And, I would like to thank all of you for coming to attend this panel. Thank you. [Applause.]' Beyond Beijing 25 Economic Issues (11113/95)  Transcripts Available from the Beyond Beijing Series BB-O 1 Messages from Beijing and Their Implications for the World Bank {Bank staffonly} World Bank President James D.Wolfensohn, and a panel of Regional Vice Presidents chaired by HCO Vice President Armeane Choksi, discuss operational priorities for promoting gender equality through the Bank's work. BB-02 Keynote Address, First Lady of the United States, Hillary Rodham Clinton Mrs. Clinton speaks and answers questions on a wide range of issues including women's education, economic empowerment and strengthening women's organizations. BB-03 Beyond Beijing: Kry Economic Issues for Women Women's World Banking President Nancy Barry, UNlFEM Director Noeleen Heyzer and Makerere University Senior Lecturer in Economics Germina Ssemogerere discuss women's access to economic opportunities, constraints and effective responses. Chaired by Ishrat Husain, Director, Poverty and Social Policy Department. BB-04 Women and Art: Empowering Narratives A panel on strategies to empower women in the arts, organized by the World Bank Staff Art Society (WBSAS), chaired by Alicia Hetzner of the WBSAS. BB-OS Promoting Gender Equality: Our Shareholders' Views World Bank Executive Directors Ali Bourhane, Ruth Jacoby,Jan Piercy and Shengman Zhang express their views on key issues related to women in the Bank and in its lending activities. Chaired by Vice President and Chief of Staff Rachel Lomax. BB-06 Breaking Glass Ceilings: The Experience of the Bank of Montreal Bank of Montreal President Anthony Comper talks about his institution'S ground­ breaking work to promote workplace equality. Session chaired by S. Shahid Husain, Senior Vice President, Management and Personnel Services (retired). To order transcripts contact: Office of the Senior Adviser on Gender EquaJity* The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W. Room E3-0S7 Washington, D.C. 20433 "'Formerly Senior Adviser on Women's Issues