 Hello, everyone, and welcome again. Introducing our keynote speaker, Shalakpe Agagu-Hemond. Shalakpe Hamond is the former special advisor to the governor of Lagos State on Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs, and investments. Prior to this, she worked in the private sector for over 20 years in various capacities, gathering experience in management, consulting, risk management, banking, and financial advisory. So she is in the best position to talk to us today about women, finance, and gender equity. Welcome with me, Madam Shalakpe. Welcome. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening to all the wonderful women joining us from all over the world today. A special thanks to the Richa Women Festival, and it's an amazing convener, Umi Lola Oshikwaya, my darling Umi, for inviting me to give a keynote at this phenomenal gathering of women. Congratulations on the second edition of this festival, and thank you for the great work that you're doing. So I've been asked to talk about women, finance, and gender equity. Not sure I'm much of an expert. I think I grapple with a lot of the challenges that a lot of the women here probably grapple with as well. But I think the purpose of this entire festival is for all of us to learn, share, and grow together and encourage and inspire one another. So I'm hoping I can chip in a little bit on that. So I'm from Nigeria. As you can see, I'm wearing my Nigerian boo-boo to give off the rich anti-vibes in performance with the Richa Women Festival. And Nigeria is a country that's really diverse, super rich diversity, and has a very strong entrepreneurial spirit. I'm sure you, for wherever you are in the world, you've probably encountered a Nigerian selling something or doing some form of business or the other. That's what we do. And so it is a country that has very strong entrepreneurial spirit and women are not held back in that. But there are still many, many barriers that hinder women of every shade of every category sector from achieving true financial empowerment and gender equity. From the young budding visionaries that are just starting out, to veteran artists that have been at it for years, to fledgling entrepreneurs, to former employees transitioning, to the dabbling side hustlers, like those who sell things from out of the boots of their car, and even mega business icons, some of which we have here with us today. Finance plays a vital role in shaping the lives of individuals, families, communities. It enables all of us to achieve our basic needs, pursue our dreams, create a better future for ourselves, and for those we love. I think for women it's even more critical because empirical evidence shows that women do care for their families. Women devote an inordinate share of their income to their families and their children. However, when it comes to women's access to finance, there is still a massive gender gap that cannot be ignored. I think Omi spoke to quite a few of those issues already. According to the Athena report on financial access in country here, 2021 report, in 2020, 21.3 million adult women representing 20% of Nigeria's adult population compared to 17 million men are yet to be included in the formal financial system. More so bring me of the 69.7 million adults in Nigeria in the rural areas, 44% are exempted from financial system, while 16% only 16% access finance through informal channels and a greater majority of these numbers are women. And this isn't limited just to individuals for people who own small, medium and micro, small and medium enterprises across the world. The World Bank estimates that female lead businesses have a 32% financing gap for these categories of businesses. This means that women-owned businesses, small businesses are more likely to need financing but are also less likely to get that. Omi Lola spoke to the challenges around the corporate world where only about 11% of board seats around the world are the largest 2000 companies in the world are held by women. And these numbers are far, far less in much smaller companies. This lack of representation makes it difficult for women-owned businesses to also get financing. When you look at the stock exchange, the Peterson Institute for International Economics shows that women-owned businesses can only make up only 10% of the listed companies in the United States. Despite the fact that female lead businesses are found to be just as profitable as male lead businesses. And in the startup world, a lot of us know these statistics very shockingly. Only 2% of the ventures that receive venture capital funding are female-owned. So we have a real challenge around accessing finance, which is what is needed to make your business grow. And now some of these challenges come, they arise because of their cultural challenges, around financial inclusion, around traditional gender roles, around limited access to education, around all our discrimination, around lack of ownership of collateral and other things that are traditionally entrenched into the typical financing system. And there are a lot of these obstacles that block women's economic potential. And we can spend a long time talking about what the government and what NGOs and what development partners and what even corporates and individuals who care should be doing around these. With regards to, for example, improving that access to finance, there's quite a lot of work being done by institutions, we could do more. Nigeria had a financial inclusion plan 2020, which we underachieved in many ways. And there could be a lot more that could be done to address this. From an education perspective as well, we're still yet to achieve parity, especially, well, we've done that a little bit more, I think in the south, the west and southeast of the country, but there's still a long way to go to achieve parity around education, which we know helps to make it easier for people to access finance. And there's also a real challenge around financial literacy, people understanding how money works, how borrowing works, how savings work, the importance of keeping financial records, how to spend money and how to use your business's money rather than working with it as one single person, how to work effectively and run your business finances in a disciplined fashion. And there's just the need to even incorporate that into the formal education and informal education systems. So we can talk about those as well. And we can talk, of course, around some of the societal challenges that we have. Family buys owes property, but it's in the name of the husband. Property can pass down from fathers to daughters. We have a lot of these challenges. And it's not all dire, because we do have many glimpses of hope. As I said, quite a lot of work is being done, even though the work could be done faster. Lego State, for example, has a Lego State Employment Trust Fund that established a 10-billionaire fund for women-led businesses in conjunction with Access Bank. Did some other work as well with Edfin and First Bank around low-income schools. So there are a lot of interventions around helping to improve that access to finance. We have startups and great companies like her economy and her vests. Shall I place here as well? First check, who are also trying to do the same work around including women and help make it easier for helping to make it easier for startups, female-led startups also, we want to access financing. And we know that there's still a lot of work to be done. But what I want to focus on today is what we ourselves can do as individuals. Because even when the environment is not an optimally set up for us, I like to view challenge as the toga that opportunity wears. And women are very, very up for that. We're very good at solving challenges. So why don't we take the first challenge to be solved as that of solving the problem, financing our businesses? I think as individuals, we can start with some ABCs. And the very first I think that we can start with is association. For women, we tend to go their neural journey alone. There are not very many people who look like us. And so there are many things that we're experiencing and we don't think that we can share. But I want to challenge us today to try and do more. Let's find more people who are like us. The adage says, show me your friends and I will tell you who you are. So if you're not hanging out, if you're not mixing with, if you're not spending time with those who are like you or better still those who you want to be like, you would miss that opportunity for those, for being in that environment. Very often the learnings don't happen in sessions like this. That's great. We talk one-on-one. Everyone comes and tries to distill the nuggets of wisdom that they have and try to bring that to a public forum like this. But very often the learnings that can change our lives happen in informal settings, happen sometimes in the middle of the night on a fishing trip or a camping trip. But we don't really do those much in Nigeria. Maybe at a birthday party, maybe at a children's party, maybe at the pool where people are more laid back. They're also thinking through the issues. And then they share an insight that changes something, touches something in you. You have to be around people to be able to do that. So the one first challenge today is to work, to be with more people, more people like yourselves. Find them, study them. You may not be able to get close to them personally but follow their stories and not their, the stories that they post about how they look or how their lives are now, but the stories of how there's some amount of the challenges that they did and the things that they went through and the mistakes that they made. Those are particularly great for learning from. Seek their mentorship. You can surprise how eager people are to mentor and be willing to accept their mentorship in the way that they are able to present it, not necessarily the way you think it should be. They may not be able to be your best friend and spend four hours talking to you. They may throw you one single question or one single email and that may be the transformational thing that they can pass on to you. And then I encourage us to join hubs, join associations. Be at the center of the groups, the sectoral groups that are pertinent to the things you want to do. If you want to be a manufacturer, you should be in all the manufacturing associations and make yourself known. Get involved. When we're involved, when opportunities come up, people can see what we can do and then they can think of us when more opportunities come up. So that's the first thing, association. And I wanna challenge us to step out of our comfort zone and do a little bit more of that starting from today. The second thing is bold. So be for bold. So let's be bolder. I find, I tend to limit myself and it's very much said that women tend to limit themselves to what we think our capacity is, to what we think is manageable and we can achieve. And men tend to be a little bit more risk-friendly and just go for the mold. They don't limit themselves to what they think they can achieve. They go for what they see as the opportunity. And I think while there's a lot of sense in what women do, risk management, risk purpose, we also need to be a little bit bolder because very often what we think we can do is a limitation of what we can actually do. Particularly when it comes to finance. We tend to fair finance. We tend to be repelled by the thought of financing. We tend to be scared of raising finance but we need to not, we need to embrace financing. And it's because sometimes you don't understand. Financing is very simple. You borrow a cup of sugar and you learn cups of sugar. You borrow, you do a job, what we call in Nigeria, a job collection is essentially to fund things that you want to do. When you understand those principles, all you're doing with bigger, much more financing is simply scaling the same principles. And as long as you're sure of your business and you're willing to bet on yourself, it's the exact same thing. So take a much bigger bet on yourself. Don't take a small bet on yourself. Take a much bigger bet on yourself. I remember the first time I had to borrow money. I couldn't sleep, you know? And very interestingly, actually the first time I had to borrow money, I didn't borrow money for myself. I borrowed money on behalf of a male friend who needed funding for his business. And I couldn't sleep because I trusted him but then it became, hmm, what happens if he doesn't pay back? But then he did. And then we were doing something together and we're like, okay, instead of returning that money, can they round trip it back into the business that we were doing? And I just saw how it made such a difference. And then we did another one and then we did another one. I don't know if I would ever have gone directly to borrowing either. If I hadn't had that first trigger from this male friend but it just shows you how women and men think. But now I'm very, very confident about financing their business because I know what I'm building. And I encourage us all to do the same. Take a bet on yourself. Besides, business leaders estimate that they've probably failed some of the biggest business leaders in the world estimate they probably failed 15% of the time. So why are we so afraid? There's no such thing as failing, only learn it. So that's the second challenge today. Be bolder, take a big bet on yourself. The third is the sea, the collaboration. I personally find it much easier to do things when I'm doing them with people that I know. Whether it's going to a restaurant to buy food, whether it's clothing and fashion, whether it's traveling, whether it's even starting an intervention around, not for profits or something to do in the community. So why don't we extend this to investing and scaling our businesses? Why don't we work together and transform our relationships? I can't remember the book I read it in but I read a book about 10 years ago that made me think a little bit differently about how I use my relationships. And it says, I think it was something that said about, I think the person shared an experience about four couples going on a camping trip and the men had a look together and they talked about fishing and they talked about their family, but they spent a lot of time talking about business. And the women talked a lot about their babies and about their husbands, about fashion, about what was going on with the country and the intent of any time before talking about their businesses. And I started trying to use my personal relationships differently. Yes, we'll talk about some of the other things that really matter to us, but we have to start to talk about the businesses and our finances and all the other things that matter to us on the financial and professional level as well. I'm very proud that a group of us formed a vision boarding club together about three years ago and we're now contemplating doing some real estate investments together. So transform the relationships you already have. You have a lot of probably very wise, very smart women who are around you. Maybe they're building businesses as well. Maybe you can work together on an investment idea, but either we find a way to bring business, professionalism and finance into the conversation. Share your dreams, but also how you want to achieve them. Go together because going together gives us confidence and support that needs to overcome obstacles. To achieve true gender equity in finance, we certainly need more work on the part of governments, from financial institutions, from NGOs, from communities. We need policies that promote women's economic empowerment, including addressing the concerns around collateral, supporting women-owned businesses, enforcing equal pay for equal work. We need financial institutions to adopt inclusive practices and invest in women-led ventures. In fact, I think one of the lowest-hand inputs in this country, Nigeria, is a female bank. I have a friend I've been talking to about it for a couple of years and I think it's something we really need to do. A bank that looks at female businesses and does things differently. Most importantly though, I think we need to empower ourselves and each other. So ladies and gentlemen who are watching, let's look at this. I'm hoping this will be a pivotal moment for you in your personal history. You have the power to create a new future where women in Nigeria and indeed all women will stand toe-to-toe in the business world, scaling the very worthy businesses that we have created starting with you. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you so much, Mr. Lakbe Harbont for that amazing session.