Women Entrepreneurs Can Ignite Social Change
Washington — Proclaiming that women have a “unique opportunity to ignite social change,” Farah Pandith, the U.S. Department of State’s special representative to Muslim communities, opened the final panel at the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship on April 27. The panel focused on “unleashing the power of women entrepreneurs.”
Pandith told the women they are role models and agents for long-term change. “Women entrepreneurs can impact generations, creating a ripple effect by setting an example for young girls. One person can inspire change on the local level. Through investing in the ideas, the creativity, the passion and vision of women, lives can change inside and outside the home.”
She was joined on the panel by Valerie Jarrett, assistant and senior adviser to President Obama; Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank; Dina Powell, global head for corporate engagement at Goldman Sachs; Tamara Abed, director of Aarong; and Faridah Nambi Kigongo, founder and managing director of Nambi Children’s Initiatives.
Yunus told the summit that his business started bringing financial services to poor people and not just poor women. “Loan-sharking in our village” in Bangladesh “enraged me,” he said.
He said he went to a bank and asked them to make loans and they refused. “So I started complaining about the banking institutions. … They give loans to people who already had money. They would not give money to people who did not have money. I said, ‘This is ridiculous, this should be the other way. Not only do you reject poor people, you reject all women.’ That is how I got into the woman issue.”
In Bangladesh at that time, he said, not even 1 percent of the borrowers in the banking system were women. “Something is wrong in the system,” he told himself, and then he started offering himself as a guarantor for women’s loans.
At first, he said, women were reluctant to borrow funds because of cultural sensitivities. “It took a lot of patience … six years’ time … to achieve a 50-50” ratio of women and men borrowers, he said.
Loans to women brought much more money to the family than loans made to men, Yunus said, and as a result he began to focus on lending to women. “Today we have over 8 million borrowers; 97 percent are women and they own the bank. … They sit on the board and make the decisions.”
Then, Yunus said, they started educating the children of those women to build new generations who are skilled. Now there are 52,000 students in school thanks to Grameen, he said.
These students complain there are no jobs, but Yunus says that is the wrong attitude. He said he tells those students to pledge every morning, “I am not a job seeker. I am a job giver.” He encourages them to use their new skills to create new jobs for themselves and many others.
In the end, Yunus said, “all human beings are entrepreneurs.”
Dina Powell of Goldman Sachs, who immigrated to the United States as a child from Egypt, told the group her company’s program “10,000 Women” aims to educate 10,000 women entrepreneurs worldwide.
“Investing in women as entrepreneurs is a smart investment,” she said.
The 10,000 Women Program seeks to reach 10,000 women with pragmatic business and management education on how to write a business plan or access capital. Some 2,000 women have already been educated under the program, she said, and five of them were entrepreneurs attending the summit.
Tamara Abed is a former investment banker who also worked for Goldman Sachs and is now director of Aarong in Bangladesh, which supports some 65,000 women artisans. She said women often have the drive and passion for doing business and for many, it is a “fight for survival” if they have no husband and children to support. “Women are the agent of change. If you can inspire them, you can empower them.”
Faridah Nambi Kigongo is the founder and managing director of Nambi Children Initiatives in Uganda, which works to improve the lives of vulnerable children and assists women with health care and basic needs.
She started a local television show in 2007 called the Nambi Talk Show. It features elders sharing local wisdom and knowledge.
Kigongo, who has a master’s of business administration degree from Edinburgh Business School in Scotland, said she founded the children’s center on the severance package she received after resigning her well-paying aviation job. “It was a conscious decision for me,” she said, to look after the children.
“Coming from my background, I had productive, educated parents and seeing these children, I said, ‘OK, these are my neighbors, I need to do something about them.’ … That was the beginning for me.” Moving on to work with women entrepreneurs was a natural fit, she added.
President Obama hosted the summit, which covered issues including technology and innovation, access to capital, unleashing youth and women’s entrepreneurship, mentoring and networking, fostering a culture of entrepreneurship, promoting and enabling business, and social entrepreneurship.
Some 250 entrepreneurs from around the world attended, along with a host of American entrepreneurs, business executives and top U.S. government officials.
Participants came from Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Brazil, Brunei, Cameroon, Canada, China, Denmark, Djibouti, Egypt, Finland, France, The Gambia, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kosovo, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Libya, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mauritania, Morocco, Netherlands, Niger, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, the Palestinian Territories, Paraguay, the Philippines, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Uganda, the United Kingdom, the United States and Yemen.
