 Good morning and welcome to CSIS. I'm Steve Morrison. I direct the Global Health Policy Center here. We're thrilled today to be able to host this program with Ambassador Russell, with Baba Tunde Osa Temehan, Executive Director of UNFPA, and with Keith Hansen, Global Practices, Vice President of the World Bank. We've had an overwhelming response to this to this event, both online and those of you who are here today with us, and I think it's quite remarkable, and it's real proof of the power of the issues that are on the table that are going to be discussed here, and the power of the individuals that we've brought together, and the influence that they bring in their respective institutions bring in shaping progress and policy on these very important issues that we're going to hear about today. So we're very honored and we're really thrilled to be able to do this. The issues that we're going to discuss today around global women's health, empowerment, status, all of these issues are very central to the work that we do here at CSIS, and that work is pioneered and led by Janet Fleischman, who's going to open the program with some introductory remarks and introduce our speakers. I want to offer special thanks to Bre Bacchus for all the work that she's done in pulling this together, and Carolyn Schroet, Travis Hopkins, Ryan Sickles who helped us all in pulling this all together. So Janet, why don't you come on up and kick things off. Thank you all. Thank you Steve, and thanks all of you for coming. We are so excited to have this great group together, certainly our panelists and also a wonderful audience. We welcome the audience online as well. I think as Steve said, the great turnout and interest in this event is a testament to the importance of these issues. So we're really thrilled to have you all here and look forward to a very fruitful discussion. US policymakers, UN agencies, multilateral institutions have all increasingly recognized that advancing women's global health and gender equality is among the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. This has led to an exceptional proliferation of policies and goals, initiatives and partnerships to address women and girls' health, development and empowerment. The importance from the abduction of schoolgirls in Nigeria to the rapes in India to the abuses of women and girls in crises across the world, in Syria, Central African Republic, South Sudan to mention a few. But there's also very good news. Growing evidence is demonstrating that focusing on women and girls, maternal health services, voluntary family planning, access to HIV services, education for girls, economic empowerment for women, preventing and responding to gender-based violence, not only are critical to improving health outcomes, but also produce substantive positive returns in terms of policy, poverty reduction, development and economic growth. And high-level events such as last week's summit in London on sexual violence and conflict show the possibilities for international engagement on these issues. So this is really a pivotal moment to develop a comprehensive approach to women's health as a smart and strategic way to advance US interests in saving lives, promoting healthy families and communities and protecting the rights of women and girls around the world. Despite the often polarized atmosphere here in Washington, this really has been an area of bipartisan cooperation. This includes the PEPFAR gender strategies that were initially developed under the Bush administration and certainly the Obama administration's elevation of women's health and gender equality as a key foreign policy goal. Yet we also know that prioritizing women's health and gender equality is persistently vulnerable at home and abroad. In the United States, high-level leadership and bipartisan support will be necessary to keep up the momentum on policy and program implementation. And this extends to the US partners in international and multilateral agencies, in national governments and in civil society. In 2009, President Obama appointed the first ambassador at large for global women's issues, a post currently occupied by our keynote speaker today, Ambassador Kathy Russell, who now heads the State Department Office on Global Women's Issues. This office is designed to ensure that gender issues and the advancement of women and girls' rights are fully integrated into the formulation and conduct of US policy. The Obama administration has built a strong foundation and created an enabling policy environment for women's global health and gender equality. Yet policy development on its own is not enough. The next step is to ensure that those policies are supported by political commitment and financial resources aimed at accelerating program implementation. We have a great program today. We will lead off with a keynote address by Ambassador Kathy Russell, who will discuss her vision for the Office of Global Women's Issues and her priority areas of focus. We will then turn to a roundtable discussion with Dr. Babatunde Asotimehen from UNFPA, Keith Hansen from the Vice President of the World Bank, and joined by Ambassador Russell. These leaders in women's health and empowerment will discuss how their institutions build on their respective investments and how they are strengthening the partnerships together, as well as addressing enduring gaps and challenges. So it is now my honor to introduce Ambassador Kathy Russell, our keynote speaker. For the past nine months, Ambassador Russell has served as the US Ambassador at large for Global Women's Issues. In that position, she has traveled to more than a dozen countries, including Panama, Afghanistan, Turkey, Japan, India, Israel, Jordan, China, and Nepal, to name a few. For the preceding four years, she served as Chief of Staff to Dr. Jill Biden at the White House. While the primary focus of that office was on military families and higher education, Ambassador Russell showed her deep commitment to women's issues by helping to drive the development of the administration's strategy to prevent and respond to gender-based violence globally, a huge task involving interagency coordination on a massive scale, which led to the August 2012 executive order on preventing and responding to violence against women and girls globally, and the strategy that holds that name. Ambassador Russell has a long history of activism on this issue as a senior advisor to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on International Women's Issues. She helped draft the original Violence Against Women Act in 1994 as Staff Director to then-Senator Joe Biden, and then helped usher in the international version of that bill, while one of his senior advisors in 2007. She's also served as Staff Director at the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senior Counsel to Senator Patrick Leahy, and Associate Deputy Attorney General during the Clinton administration. Ambassador Russell, we welcome you. Thank you so much, Janet. Thank you very much, Steve. Thank you for having me here. I really appreciate it. I'd like to thank CSIS for all the work you do to promote such important policy discussions. It's really an honor for me to be here, and I really would like to thank my colleagues from the UNFPA and the World Bank. It's an honor to be here with both of you, both really prominent in your field, and it's really an honor and a pleasure for me to be here with you. So, Ambassador at Large for Global Women's Issues, it's a little bit of a mouthful, and as Janet said, my job is really to advance the status of women and girls around the world and to do that really as a critical element of U.S. diplomatic efforts. Investing in women and girls, helping them unleash their potential. We believe it's important for two reasons. One, obviously we think it's the right thing to do, but I think most importantly and critically, we think it's the wise, strategic thing to do and an important diplomatic effort on the part of the United States. Women, we believe, are critical to every issue we face, including security challenges like terrorism and weak rule of law, health challenges like HIV, AIDS, infectious diseases, economic and security challenges, and democracy and governance challenges. Studies have shown that countries are more peaceful and prosperous when women are accorded full and equal rights and opportunities. I'd like to give you a sense of four areas where I hope to focus my time and effort over the next three years. First, as Janet mentioned, is an area that I've spent a lot of time on in my career gender-based violence. It's an issue that I think is just absolutely critically important. When I was at the White House, as Janet said, we worked on the first U.S. strategy to prevent and respond to gender-based violence, which really was at the president's direction, something that he recognizes as an important issue he did as a senator and certainly as president, something that he wanted us to work on and to really coordinate the efforts of the administration. We're now working to implement and make real the goals of that strategy. And this is an issue that I raise just consistently in my diplomatic efforts. And it's interesting because wherever I go, people introduce me and know of the work that I've done. And so it's an issue that other countries are very interested in. And it's something where I think that we have an opportunity to say it's an issue that isn't a problem in the United States. It's something we have not solved in the United States, so we come at it with a lot of humility. But we say we have some experiences to share. And I think many countries, most countries, are very interested in our experiences and it's an opportunity for us to really work together on that. We know an estimated one in three women worldwide has been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime. In some countries, 70 percent of female populations are affected. And it's interesting because I say these numbers so often that I sometimes forget. But when you really think about these numbers, they are absolutely staggering. Intimate partner violence is the most common form of violence experienced by women globally. And as many as one in four women experience physical and or sexual violence during pregnancy, endangering both mother and child. Again, really horrifying numbers. Further studies indicate the risk of HIV among women who have experienced violence may be up to three times higher among those who have not. U.S. supports comprehensive efforts to prevent and respond to gender-based violence in all its form, whether in conflict or peacetime settings, including intimate partner violence, rape, harmful traditional practices such as child marriage or what are loosely called traditional harmful traditional practices, female genital cutting and mutilation. This includes both diplomatic and development efforts, as I mentioned, and highlights our commitment to remain a global leader in addressing this global horrible scourge. This commitment is exemplified in the new Safe from the Start initiative, which many of you may have heard about, to prevent and respond to gender-based violence and humanitarian emergencies worldwide. Its initial commitment of $10 million, which Secretary Kerry expanded last week at the conference that Janet mentioned, will allow humanitarian agencies and organizations to hire specialized staff, launch new programs, and develop innovative methods to protect women and girls at the onset of emergencies around the world. And this is a problem, you know, again, it's something many of you may have heard about, but we find over and over again in humanitarian settings that women, in part because these settings are so unstable, but women end up in refugee camps or just in places like tornado settings or hurricanes and other destabilized situations, and women are so much more vulnerable to sexual violence and other forms of violence. And so we know that, it happens over and over again, but we are always in a little bit of a game of catch-up of trying to deal with these problems, and so we're trying very hard to deal with these problems from the outset. As I said last week, Secretary Kerry at the Global Violence Summit really made a powerful statement and talked about how we refused to tolerate rape as a tactic of war and intimidation and vowed that now is the time to banish sexual violence to the dark ages in the history books. That conference brings me to my second focus, which is political participation and women peace and security. Despite comprising over 50% of the world's population, women continue to be underrepresented, grossly underrepresented in every aspect of political and public life around the world. Today, only 21% of the world's parliamentarians are women. There are 21 women either serving as head of state or head of government. Only 17% of government ministers are women, with the majority serving the fields of education and health. And in many, many places, those ministries are very, very weak. Since 1992, women have represented fewer than 3% of mediators and 8% of negotiators to major peace processes. These are the places where decisions get made and simply put, there just are not enough women in them. Women often raise issues that others have overlooked. They reach out to constituencies that others ignore and have unique knowledge that stems from their societal roles and responsibilities. Women's participation affects the types of policy issues that are debated and decided in parliaments, local councils and government ministries. In India, research showed West Bengal villages with greater representation of women in local panchayats saw an investment in drinking water facilities double that of villages with fewer women on local councils. This highlights that women raise issues that are important to them and their families. Seems obvious, right? Nowhere is this more critical than in countries like Afghanistan where the voices of women leaders at the decision-making tables are essential to supporting a secure and stable future in their nation. The U.S. provides extensive support to bolster the participation of Afghan women in the political process. We've also advocated for the full participation of Afghan women during the recent presidential and provincial elections. Like millions of others around the world, we just watched the Afghan people show their commitment to a peaceful and democratic future for their country during the presidential runoff and we're very pleased with initial reports that Afghan women once again turned out in very high numbers and turned out despite some real threats of violence. We know women's unique perspective is critical to peace building and post-conflict reconstruction. Women often suffer disproportionately during armed conflict. They often advocate most strongly for stabilization, reconstruction and the prevention of further conflict. Peace agreements, post-conflict reconstruction and governance have a better chance of long-term success when women are involved. According to research conducted by the International Crisis Group in Sudan, Congo and Uganda, women who participate in peace talks often raise issues like human rights, security, justice, employment, education and health care that are fundamental to reconciliation and rebuilding and therefore to lasting and sustainable peace. This is why the United States provided training for Syrian women's civil society groups and negotiations, leadership and conflict resolution and why we advocated so strongly for the inclusion of women and the official delegations of the Geneva II negotiations in Syria. Third focus is adolescent girls and this is an area that's a little bit new for our office but it's an area that is incredibly important to me personally and I think it's an area that makes a lot of sense for our office. Perhaps some of you joined us yesterday. I spoke at Brookings about the importance of secondary education for girls. Certainly all of you and Janet mentioned this as well, the crisis in Nigeria has captured a lot of attention around the world. We see that adolescent girls face a particular set of unmet needs and addressing them is really a critical challenge. Healthy, educated, successful adolescent girls lead to healthy, educated, successful women and ultimately communities and societies. One extra year of primary school boosts girls' eventual wages by 10 to 20 percent, an extra year of secondary school 15 to 25 percent. A child born to a mother who can read is 50 percent more likely to live past age five and a child raised by a mother who has been educated is more likely to be healthy, safe and in school. But girls are especially vulnerable to certain threats. National Violence Against Children surveys from the Together for Girls partnership which is a tremendously important partnership that we are involved with in four African countries reveal around one in three girls and one in seven boys reported experiencing sexual violence and one in four girls report their first sexual experience happened unwillingly. Early and forced marriage is a significant issue for young and adolescent girls. There are more than 60 million child brides worldwide. One girl in three is married by 18, one girl in seven in developing countries is married before the age of 15. So the health consequences of early marriage are severe and long term. 15 to 19 year olds are about 40 percent more likely to die due to medical complications from pregnancy and child birth in young women age 20 to 24. So adolescent girls are at an age, a very precarious moment in their development, a time when they are most vulnerable to early marriage, sexually transmitted infections including HIV and dropping out of school. They and their parents will make decisions that will affect their lives and families for generations to come. But if we can ensure that more adolescent girls stay and graduate from quality secondary school, remain healthy and avoid early marriage and early pregnancy, they will indeed be on a course to a better life and positively influence the lives of future generations. And because of these investments countries will be more stable and more prosperous. The fourth and final focus is to continue the momentum on women's economic empowerment efforts. I'd like to spend a few minutes on this issue because as leaders around the world now understand economic empowerment presents a real opportunity to address so many of the issues facing women today. Recently President Obama told the assembled houses of Congress that when women succeed America succeeds. Secretary Kerry too knows how important women's empowerment is to any country's growth and security. So what do we know about women and the economy? First we know several of the barriers there are several barriers to women's economic empowerment. Many of them are the very challenges I've been discussing inadequate education, high incidences of gender-based violence, and widespread gaps in health services. These issues are all connected and in some ways talking about them separately is I think a little bit artificial. Other impediments strike at the heart of economic activity. The women business and the law report indicates that of 143 economies surveyed 128 make at least one legal distinction between genders that impact women's ability to participate in the economy. For example legal barriers and cultural norms in many countries inhibit women from accessing capital. In developing economies alone these barriers result in a $260 to $320 billion credit gap for women owned small and medium enterprises. This is not only a missed market opportunity for financial institutions but also an enormous constraint on women's ability to achieve the financial wherewithal to grow a business, raise crops, or protect against shocks. Second we know the benefits of removing these barriers. This is important because of the profound impact that economic empowerment can have not only in the lives of billions of billions of women and girls around the world but also on their families, their communities, and their nations. Growth in women's entrepreneurship boosts economies and rising numbers of women on the factory floor, the boardroom, improves the health of economies. Many of these benefits accrue to the women themselves. Women who take home dependable pay from decent jobs are better equipped provide for themselves and more likely to stand up for their rights. And investing in women also produces a multiplier effect. Women spend the majority of their earnings on local products and services that strengthen communities and on food, schooling, and immunizations that help secure their children's futures. At the macroeconomic level, countries can realize significant gains from focusing on leveling the playing field for women. The OECD found that the narrowing gap between male and female employment has accounted for a quarter of Europe's economic or, I'm sorry, annual GDP growth over the past two decades. And that closing gender gaps in the labor market in the Middle East and North Africa could increase per capita GDP in that region by more than 25 percent. The UN found that the Asia Pacific region loses upwards of $89 billion in GDP each year due to restrictions on women's ability to fully participate in the economy. Finally, we know that impediments to women's full participation in the economy are faced by women in all parts of the world by women in least developed countries and G20 countries alike. Last November, I traveled to Japan, the world's third largest economy, with the Vice President. I saw firsthand how Prime Minister Abe is trying to remove constraints on women fully joining the workforce to boost his nation's economic performance. Not only did he recognize such steps made common sense, he also saw they made good business sense for the businesses in his country and also good economic sense for his country. Our challenge is to go from what we know and from where we are to action, to find out where we, my office, State Department, the UN, the World Bank, add value, which is not always an easy question because there are a lot of players in the field. A whole of government, in fact a whole of international community approach, is needed to advance the economic empowerment of women and girls. Such an approach will require a variety of partnerships, strategic dialogues, and public diplomacy outreach. We're working to develop toolkits that our embassies and forward thinking governments or civil society groups can use to drive positive change. Such an approach will leverage the established international for that have already turned an eye toward economically empowering women, such as the G20 and APEC, and we'll look to see how we can enhance those efforts. The G20 is very focused on increasing female labor force participation and APEC, after successfully elevating the strategic importance of women in the economy, through high level policy dialogues that began in 2011, is moving towards regional action to support the consensus achieved in these dialogues. And this is really just the beginning. Gains made in a regional forum like these can and should be transferred to other regions. APEC really is a leader in this respect. Such an approach will allow us to draw on private sector engagement. With the private sector supplying the largest number of jobs in most countries, the importance of working with them to establish gender equality throughout internal and external business operations is crucial. However, women make up the majority of the informal sector and unpaid workforce, and we really need to ensure that our efforts may take this segment of the population into account. Such an approach will also convene new multi-member partnerships in support of women's economic empowerment. Over the past few years, the State Department has played a role in creating several key partnerships. The Equal Futures Partnership is an important initiative of the President's designed to drive action by member countries to empower women economically and politically. The Alliance for Artisan Enterprise is a public private partnership through which companies, nonprofits, governments, and international organizations collaborate and grow artisan enterprises. Both programs are terrific examples of what can happen when public and private sector stakeholders come together, and they demonstrate the commitment of the United States and other countries to continue to support the economic empowerment of women. I'd like to close with just an example of a program I heard about when I was in India that showed how empowering women to participate in the economy has a real and lasting impact. While I was there, I met a woman who started something called the Women on Wheels Campaign, which trains women for jobs as drivers in trucks, taxis, and personal limousines, which is very, very unusual in India. What I truly appreciate about the AZAD Foundation's work to recruit and train these women was the many ripple effects of their efforts. The trainees participate in modules on health and first aid because the Foundation recognizes that when women and their families are healthy, it benefits both the women and the companies that hire them. In families where the total household income was formerly 3,000 to 5,000 rupees per month, the women alone are now earning between 7,000 and 12,000 rupees per month, which changes the whole dynamic in the family. It really is a significant change. In communities where women's freedom was limited by the fear of gender-based violence in cars or on the streets, women who take the wheel help dozens of others access markets and much needed services, and that too is a significant change. So in all of these areas, gender-based violence, women peace and security, adolescent girls, and women's economic empowerment, I think we have a pretty good idea of what works and what the path forward looks like. So we only need to keep committing ourselves and recruiting others to join us in the effort. The President likes to quote Martin Luther King, who famously said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. And, you know, I sometimes think in my job that there are many days when I hear things from women who suffer just horrible, horrible incidences of violence or injustice. And there are moments when you really have to wonder about what makes people do the terrible things they do and are we really seeing progress? Can we really make a difference? But I always think about what the President says, and I think that it's true for women as well. And I think that overall, things are moving in a really positive direction and that we do have a very good idea of how to move things forward and that we have a lot of people who are pushing and pulling and working on our side to do it. And so I think if we can all continue to work together with amazing partners like we have here, we will continue to see real progress. So thank you all for being here. I really appreciate it and I look forward to it. So I'm going to invite the other panelists to come join us on the stage. Well, thank you all and thank you so much, Ambassador Russell, for setting the stage for our discussions today. It's a wonderful moment to be able to look at where we've come from and what some of the opportunities are going forward. And we have this distinguished panel to discuss this in a broader international context now. And what we'd like to do is allow Keith Hansen and Babatunde Yasotimehan to give brief opening remarks of just a couple of minutes, three to five minutes. And then we will have a moderated discussion here about some of the issues raised and some of the questions that we'd like to explore. And then we'll open it up to Q&A from the audience. So let's begin with Dr. Yasotimehan. Thank you, Janet. And good morning, everybody. Let me start by thanking actually the ambassador for very enlightening opening remarks. And I take note of the strategies in terms of the gender-based violence, the political participation, adults and girls and economic empowerment. I think that they're very powerful entry points to actually get to women and girls around the world. And I would take this further and talk about some aspects of the work that we do which are co-terminating us with what you're trying to do. And we'd like to thank everybody, including the World Bank for the partnership which we have and which we've been able to foster even more in the last one year. But now, let me start by speaking to you about a young girl, a 10-year-old, most likely living in a remote area in India or in Africa, who is forced to leave her home and to get married to some 62-year-old man who she's never met before. And you imagine that that day, a child who ends and she disappears from study state. Nobody knows. She actually totally disappears. And there are millions of such women in the world. If every two seconds, a girl like that under 18 is married off. And we have about 50 million girls in the world who give birth every year. And that's not so much the problem. The problem is that we actually then have a good number of them. Sometimes in countries, 40% of them actually die given birth. And twice that number actually have morbidities from giving birth. So in a sense, we see the issue of empowerment of women from a different perspective. And gender-based violence, as Kathy has said, is a global issue. It's all over. And we see that in the last few years, there's been quite a number of incidences around the world that has called attention to this and has brought it to center stage. So let me now concentrate on some of the things that I believe we need or we do at UNFTA, which actually can begin to work with what Kathy has said in terms of how we can empower women to go forward. I wanted to, what if there's anything that I wanted to take away from here today, is that whatever we do, either empowerment of women in terms of economic empowerment or trying to get them to go to school or making them stay in school or trying to get them to take contraception or whatever, it will work for some level of empowerment. But the total empowerment of women is what we do in our communities raising the status of women. So the status of women is what is the problem everywhere. And we have to understand that if we do not raise the status of women, we're not going anywhere. I'll give you one simple story. And I think that would contextualize what I mean. I was minister of health in Nigeria and I visited a hospital. When I got there, I saw this woman who was in labor. And I've been in labor for 36 hours and as a physician, I said, so what are you doing about this? And they said, oh, nobody was prepared to pay for this section. And I thought that is totally unacceptable. So I ordered that this section should be performed. Unfortunately, she and her baby died. But that's not in fact the saddest part of the story. Saddest part of the story was that I asked, oh, so where's the husband? And I was told the husband came and abandoned her because she is supposed to be carrying an evil spirit. And that's why she cannot deliver that baby. And so she, as far as he's concerned, it's a commodity, he's left her, he's going to go married another woman in that same community. So in a sense, how what we do in every possible way of empowerment has to deal with the status of women in our communities and how we raise the status. Because if we don't get gender parity, if you don't address the issue of gender parity, no matter what we do, even when girls have the same education as boys, they don't get the same opportunities. Even when they have, in fact, better education, they don't get the same opportunities. And I think that and when you talk about political participation, it's something, you know, you end up in a situation where women and girls are, you know, are not treated as equal partners in development. I think that we need to deal with that. Now, let me come back to the issues that we deal with in UNFP to a greater extent. We think and we believe today there are more than 200 million women in the world, two world family planning, they are not getting it. Now, those are the ones that want it. But going beyond that, we also believe that family planning and contraception is actually more empowering than just deduction of fertility or fertility control. You see, when a girl, the 10-year-old I spoke to you about, if she was allowed to stay in school and go through school and end through graduate school, she would actually be 25. She would have started her periods at the age of two, about 13, and she would end up 25. So there's 12 years of exposure. Now, the truth of the matter is that we can, and parents like me sometimes think that girls don't get to do things which they're not expected to do when they're not married, but they actually do. They don't sit around crossing their legs, they go around and they do things. And I think the reality of it is that we then need to ensure that they have comprehensive sexuality education. We must ensure that they have access to information and services. We must ensure that they access to family planning or contraception. Now, the truth of the matter, and that's the point I want to make, when you do that, what you have done is actually build an agency in that girl so that girl becomes an independent person. She can then decide what she wants to do, who she wants to get married to, or not married, how many children she wants to have, or not her children, when she wants to have them, and what distance between them. So in a sense, what you've done is you've created an independent person who can then take this together. And so it goes far beyond fertility regulation. It's about being individual. It's about building an individual that is able to take decisions about their life. So contraception goes in that direction. Now, of course, when you then look at this in the context of conflict, it's even worse. That is that these girls and women are forced into a conflict situation. The face of conflict is the face of a woman or a girl who is frightened, who is running away from war, or from a humanitarian situation. And in those kinds of circumstances, UNFP stands there, making sure that we provide them, not only safe spaces, we also provide them contraception so that they do not, because, you know, we conducted a survey, 40% of the men in that survey actually said there's something wrong with a woman. 40%. Now that, you know, so we need to deal with the judicial part of that, but, you know, the consequences, you know, they get pregnant, they get HIV and all of those. So we need to deal with that. And I think that the aspect of it, which we bring to the table and which we ensure that, you know, women and girls can continue to be who they want to be, is ensuring that they are safe, is ensuring that they are protected, is ensuring that they can be participants in development in their communities and their nations. And I'll just end by one simple statistic. There are two million women, there are two million young people in the world today, 600 million of them are young adult singles. Now, can you imagine, imagine a world, just imagine it, where every adult single actually goes, gets to go to school, stays in school, takes a master's degree. It's able, it's protected for gender misuse, can actually choose in terms of who to marry, when to marry, can decide when to have children, not to have children, can decide to go to parliament or not to go to parliament, can decide to get employment or not get employment, can become an entrepreneur and can create jobs. Imagine the world. Thank you. Thank you very much. That's very important to start imagining a world and figuring out what do we have to do to get there. And one of the things that's very interesting is the way the World Bank is now engaging on these issues in a new way at new levels. And I'd like to turn it over to you, Keith, to be able to talk a little bit about the World Bank's role and how things are changing at the bank. Thank you very much to CSIS for hosting and highlighting this. Thank you, Ambassador, for your excellent comments and to Dr. Jose Tammin, who has always, has really put an urgent sense of importance to this and for your leadership, both of you. I want to start by saying there's obviously profound intrinsic value and imperative to doing these things. The stories that we hear shock the conscience and everyone deserves the opportunity to develop to their fullest potential for their own sake, as a matter of human dignity. And I think this is important to bear in mind at all times. However, at the same time, beyond being the right thing to do, investing heavily in achieving the full potential of women is also excellent economics. And I don't want to boil this down to dollars and cents, but often when countries are looking for where to invest scarce resources, it does become a discussion of where they're going to get higher return. And so it's important that we go in armed with both kinds of arguments. And this is what people turn to the World Bank to do. The bank has recently renewed its mission and restructured itself to become more relevant and more effective for this generation. And we have committed ourselves to two explicit goals. One is to eradicate extreme poverty by the year 2030. And the other is to boost shared prosperity. Both of these are going to be measured and tracked in a continual basis. Obviously, the bank alone does not control these outcomes. So it's not about whether we can change poverty all by ourselves. It's rather about how well the bank works with the countries that we exist to serve and with all of our partners in the bilateral multilateral institutions, foundations, et cetera, to work toward that goal. And gender equality and women's opportunity matters immensely to the bank group because we cannot succeed in achieving these two goals unless we achieve everything the ambassador and the professor have talked about this morning. It is impossible. Gender equality is not just smart economics, it is imperative economics. There are tremendous economic costs associated with inequality. The first is sheer economic inefficiency. When you are systematically thwarting, stunting and obstructing the development of half your population to use the spirit of the world cup at the moment, you are scoring an own goal against your own development prospects every day of every week of every year. And there is no way you can achieve that. You are basically taking half the population and putting them to one side and trying to get by with half your potential talent pool. Just the arithmetic alone is very clear and the empirical evidence is overwhelming in this. Second, there is a huge intergenerational cost to inequality. As the ambassador mentioned, there are clear direct effects of an individual woman's achievement and education and ability to control her fertility with the outcome of her children. But because of the central role that women play in social fabric, there is also intriguing evidence that the average level of education of women in a community affects the development prospects of each of their children. Even if the mother of that particular child has a lower than average education, because of the social norms that develop, the opportunities, the spaces that come, those children actually have better chances as a result of that. And third, the exclusion of women from decision-making bodies, from norm setting, from institutions, results in what economists call suboptimal outcomes. Less is invested than should be in crucial services. Less is invested in children. Things like basic water, sanitation, education do not see the same level of attention or investment that they should. These three things together represent a powerful and almost insuperable obstacle to achieving development outcomes. Conversely, getting these things right can open up huge opportunities. The bank has estimated, working with others, that employment segregation by gender alone, that ending this could increase labor productivity by anywhere from 3% to 25%. There is no technological, miracle, or organizational stunt we could pull to increase labor productivity by 25%. I mean, this is on the order of a revolution. And being able to achieve that simply by opening the doors to have the population is a tremendous opportunity that many countries around the world still have sitting before them, like a golden bull that they can claim. Increasing the share of assets that women own and control we know leads to better health for their children, better nourish children, children more likely to be in school and to learn in school, which is even more important. And so, again, has this intergenerational impact that then, of course, ramifies to that girl's development prospects as she becomes a woman and enters the labor force. It becomes a member of adult society herself. Reducing exposure to gender-based violence, obviously opens up a whole set of opportunities as well. So all of these things work together to create far more economic chances and opportunities. But addressing this means we have to go about this in a different way than we have been. To date, much of the development agenda has focused on individual interventions, individual commodities, individual opportunities. And as the Ambassador mentioned, it's very clear now these things are really interlocking and they happen far, far upstream. It's not a matter of just opening a new clinic or providing a new form of medicine or getting a new textbook somewhere. It's really have to look at the whole ecosystem of things that either induce or obstruct girls and women's access to services. The clinic is no good if there's no decent road to get there or if the road isn't safe or if the woman isn't allowed to travel on her own or whatever it may be. The school is no good if the girl is embarrassed to be there during her menstrual cycle and is not allowed to be there and therefore misses crucial parts of school during the year. A whole host of things have to go together. And so in the World Bank Group, we are now moving our attention far upstream and we're trying to look at much more multifactorial determinants of what drives opportunities and outcomes as well as the crucial norms and opportunities for agency that really determine what women can take part or not. We're also trying to improve the evidence base. We simply don't know enough. We don't have gender disaggregated data from any crucial development outcomes. A large share of the poorest countries do not even have functioning vital statistics systems. We don't know who's being born, who's dying, where or when. It's very difficult to do good programming without this. So there's an urgent agenda to improve evidence both in its raw form and it's curated and interpreted form to make progress on this. On the bank side, what we have done is we reorganized ourselves in order to better serve these two overarching goals that we're trying to meet. We have put all of our technical practices together now under one vice presidency to remove any potential barriers to working together given that most development challenges are actually multi-sectoral in nature. And in addition to that, we have built in a cross-cutting group to focus on gender, not as an add-on but as a built-in. And the whole point of this group is to stimulate the integration of a gender focus in the work that all of these different sectors do. So not just the traditional ones such as health and education but ones like energy and transport. To say what are the gender dimensions of the energy policies that countries are developing? Are these differentially affecting women in the negative or in the positive? What can we do at this level? What about macro and fiscal policy? They're very important things that can be done in the financial sector to enhance women's opportunities. But all these things need to be seen as of a piece mutually reinforcing and sequenced in a way that's going to unlock opportunity as much as possible. And we're very excited about the possibilities that this will create. These new structures will begin on July 1st and we're going to be moving very aggressively both to measure and to disseminate the knowledge of what's happening as we try to move gender farther upstream, farther up the agenda, and put it much more at the center of what we're trying to achieve overall. Just as one example, during a trip to the Sahel last fall of the President of the Bank, Dr. Jim Kim, along with the UN Secretary General, committed $200 million for women and girls in the Sahelian region, six countries working in league with UNFPA, the European Union, the African Development Bank, African Union, looking both at things like reproductive health commodities and training centers, but also on things to boost voice and agency, enacting the lessons of the Adolescent Girl Initiative, on scaling up the multi-sectoral programs to empower adolescent girls, income generation, skills-building, training activities, recognizing that this is part and parcel of making progress in these areas. So they're also going to strengthen the Sahelian Center of Excellence to develop the evidence base and the skills to evaluate the evidence to see what's working and what isn't and share that with other regions. So this is just one example of the more integrative approach that the bank group working with our partners is trying to take moving forward on this because this is, again, not just an urgent agenda but an imperative one because otherwise we're not going to achieve the goals all of us hold dear and that we need if we want to see this become the development century and truly eradicate poverty once and for all. So thank you for having us. Well, thank you to all of you because I think you have highlighted a number of the key issues that we'd like to now explore. And there's so many we won't have time for at all but maybe I can start with Ambassador Russell. We've talked a lot about the importance of collaboration and you have your own experience within the U.S. government itself, the interagency process. And I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about how your office works with the other parts of the U.S. government, the other agencies in promoting the issues of women's health and empowerment. How do you work with PEPFAR? How do you work with PMI? Even the PRM office at State Department. What role does your office play in coordinating those efforts? Well, I think it really is the purpose of our office, honestly, is to try to bring all of these offices, all of these efforts into some sort of coordinated effort. And when I was at the White House, as you said, we worked on bringing all the offices and entities in the U.S. government who are working on gender-based violence together. It is no small task. It's a really big government and there are lots of entities that are working on these efforts. And it can be the case that even in our own small office, there are people who are working on things and you may not know who's doing something right next to you. And it's just the way the government works, the way any big organization works. It's very challenging. So the first task is really trying to really get a survey, people, and to try to understand who's doing what. We spend a lot of money on these efforts. And so we really are trying to do our very best to say, look, we're all in the time of limited resources. Let's understand what we're doing. Let's make the best use of these resources. Let's look for partners. Let's understand what the bank is doing, whatever other countries are doing. Let's make sure that we are trying to make the best use of everybody's efforts and expertise so that we can coordinate as best as possible. But we work incredibly closely with all of our colleagues at the State Department, PEPFAR, all of these organizations. And everybody is very much on the same page. So it's really an unbelievably positive collaboration. But I can't underestimate how challenging it is. You laugh because you know. But I will say this, I think just as you were talking, I mean, I think we're all on the same page in terms of what we're trying to do and how we see the importance of looking at these issues in a really comprehensive way. And I think that that really seems to be where the bank is, where our friends at DFID are, where really everybody is at this point. I think a real understanding that you can't look at any of these issues in isolation. And that understanding, I think, is really critical. One of the areas that I think all of you work on in different ways is the challenge of how do you engage men and boys? And where are their examples, the sort of positive examples of impact in that area? And Dr. Sotimehan, maybe you want to talk a little bit about some of what you've seen in your work of how you can really begin to engage men and boys to further access to contraception to family planning for women and girls. Thank you very much. I think that fundamentally the global community needs to engage with boys at a very young age. I think that's a very important thing. And I would like to suggest that comprehensive sexuality education and skills development of boys and girls in the same class are very important because that is what is going to build a young man who is going to be gender sensitive. I've seen it work and I think that we'll encourage it to happen across the board. That's the first. The second, of course, is that in a very practical way UNFPA is working with boys and men as partners in many parts of the world. And I'll give one example. It's an example in Niger Republic where we constructed what we call husband school. We brought together men in communities. And in a particular community, we bring together the Muslim cleric, the Christian cleric, the civil servant, the husband, and the married man. And there were seats and there would be a mentor who would take them through some of the issues that we deal with in terms of why women must have access to several things, including education, including health services, including contraception, and including the ability to generate income for themselves. And what we've seen is an incredible positive result from that. One, we found that in those communities, maternal mortality went down. We found that child mortality went down. We also found that there was an increase in the acceptance of contraception. So in a sense, if you work with men and you engage them in a very direct way, making them the sustainable proponents of women's empowerment and development, you actually get quite a substantial benefit from it. Now I'll end by just giving you a quick story. When I started this job in 2011, the permanent representatives who are women, the women permanent representatives in New York said it's not possible that an African man can run UNFPA because they actually wanted to ask me, what do I know about child rearing? So I went to this meeting, lunchtime meeting, and I sat there and they started asking questions. Couldn't they want to eat the lunch? But by the time we finished, they said, oh, okay, we are satisfied with you. I think you understand what the sensitivities of these are. So from today, you are an honorary woman. So what we need to do is to make every man an honorary woman. Keith, we can make you an honorary woman, too. So you talked a little bit about the data gaps, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you're improving the gender-related data through the bank's work. And what methods you've developed to address these gaps? First, I have to say, it's not just up to the World Bank to do this. I mean, this has to be a vast coordinated effort. One problem we have at the moment is most of the partners, the countries, and the professor will remember this for his days as a minister, all are coming in asking for their own measurement systems, their own indicators, and it is really sapping the time and crucial attention of policymakers and the countries that are trying to deliver these programs. So the first thing we need to do is get our own houses in order as the development partners. And to that end, we're looking at, as I said, starting with the basics. There's now an initiative underway to try to align around developing vital statistics systems around the world. We are looking at how quickly we can move to more gender-disaggregated data. We are looking at trying to find a measure of a broader range of things, not just access to given services, but presence in representation and decision-making bodies and unofficial representation and so forth. And again, this is part of the integration agenda working across the different technical practices. So in energy, for instance, looking at access to healthier forms of energy other than indoor cryptstoves, things like this, that we know are contributing to the problem, and yet we're not finding. And it's amazing when you get different kinds of people, different kinds of expertise into the room, just the different perspectives help shed new light on what we have all accepted as the right way of measuring something, and suddenly realize, well, if that's the right way, why is there no correlation between that and this outcome over here? And you realize, aha, because there's a missing link, and this is what needs to be measured. And we're finding more and more of those in gender and a number of other areas. So it's an exciting agenda. It's one that's made much easier now by the smartphone revolution. I mean, soon everybody on Earth will be actually be able to provide data even without trying to, simply by clicking in when they do something or show up at a clinic, and this creates a fantastic opportunity now to begin to see things that previously would have been just impossibly expensive to get at. But it also creates a responsibility to do so, because this is the only way we'll really know that we're making headway. Did you want to add something? Yeah, I just wanted to add something, and I think that with all this to the World Bank, sometime last year, Jim Kim, the President and the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, actually did a memorandum of understanding to try and put together all UN agencies that actually produced data, the World Bank, and regional banks, and try to create a kind of unified position for big data. And I think that it's slowly grinding on, and I think we believe that's one thing that will change the face of data around the world. And I think it's important because as we go forward, looking at development and looking at measurements, data is probably the most important. I know that we want to open it up for questions. I wish we had so much more time, but I'd like to ask Ambassador Russell just quickly, since you were just at the London summit, if you could talk to us a little bit about some of the specific new things that the U.S. put forward at that summit in terms of some of the justice issues and other areas you mentioned, the safe from the start expansion. But maybe you could just tell us quickly what some of the new things advance by the U.S. Sure. I think that the main new thing that we did, as you said, we did do an expansion of safe from the start, which I think is incredibly important. We also expanded, we have a fund that we've made available for victims of sexual violence that our embassies can apply for. So if a victim comes in and it comes up, it's something that our embassies asked us to do where sometimes somebody will come in and it's a horrific case and they don't have any way to help the victims. So we have a fund that's available for those people and there's an expansion of that fund. We also set up something called our accountability initiative and that is an expansion of, we have something that we're doing now in the DRC where we have a mobile court initiative and we are doing those for a couple reasons. One, because we've seen in these conflict situations that finding justice for victims is incredibly challenging to do. And I've met with victims who are just, I mean, first of all, the forms of violence are horrific and victims believe that the people who do this to them will never serve any time for what they do and that they will never pay any price for it and this sense of impunity is horrible on the part of the people who perpetrate and also for the victims who suffer it. So the DRC now has these mobile courts and we're supporting them and we go in and we train conglies, judges, prosecutors, and defense lawyers and the courts travel around so that people in communities can actually see justice being served and so now really the only recourse for the most part that we have is that people have to take cases to the Hague which is, we have some body of law being developed there but it's a very challenging way to prosecute cases and you can only do a few cases, you can't do many cases there. So this serves a couple purposes. One, people can see justice being served and two, and very importantly, we see it as a way to start to build up the legal systems in some of these countries which we think ultimately can be incredibly important. So the mobile courts are one example but there are other alternative ways of doing this. You can have 24-hour courts and other ways that we can start to build up these legal systems which we think is incredibly important. The other announcement that the Secretary made is that in something we're very excited about, it's a little inside baseball but it's incredibly important from our perspective which is that the Secretary, and I think it's actually going out today, is issuing the new gender guidance in the State Department and the way that works in the State Department is the Secretary will issue guidance for how he wants embassies and bureaus to do work on certain issues and so far he's issued his first guidance which was on climate and it certainly reflects his priorities. He'll issue several kinds of guidance over his time in office but gender was his second which we were really delighted about and he really sets out what his priorities are and what he wants embassies to do in this respect and I think it really establishes how important this issue is to him and how much he wants embassies to really integrate this work into their daily activities and how critical it is from his perspective and what a high priority he sees it as so we're really very excited about that. And I think that was the visa ban challenge is the other thing he did which is he talked about this, he earlier this year has made it clear that in the United States we have a ban, he's issued a ban on visas for people who perpetrate or allow egregious sexual violence in their countries we're not allowing them to come to the United States and he encouraged other countries to do the same thing and he sort of challenged other countries to do the same and said that there shouldn't be safe harbors for these countries and these people anywhere in the world and it was really interesting because we realized we didn't understand this before we got to London but that most countries don't have that visa ban for these perpetrators so it was really important and I think for him to come to London was very powerful, he made the final statement he got a standing ovation people were really excited to see American leadership on this issue and he just was really powerful and quite impressive so it was tremendous to see him there Well I'm conscious of the time so I do want to open it up because I'm sure we have a very informed audience and I know you have questions please identify yourself wait for a mic that will be brought around so that the folks on the webcast will be able to hear you and we'll take maybe a group of three questions at a time and if you want to address it to someone in particular you can make that known so we'll start over there Do we have mics? Here comes a mic Hi, thank you all for this great presentation this morning and thank you specifically for raising the issue of adolescent girls too often girls are left off the global agenda hopefully next time we have this event it'll be titled global women's and girls issues we need to just keep stressing the importance of girls so I'm Suzanne Petrone I'm with the International Center for Research on Women ICRW is also co-chair of Girls Not Brides USA and I want to ask a question to Ambassador Russell as you know the Violence Against Women Act last year that Congress passed had a mandate for the State Department to have a strategy to prevent child marriage I know that a strategy may not be the doing more strategies over and over may not be what folks want to do but I wonder if you can tell us what role you have played and what role the State Department has played in developing a better coordinated well-funded plan strategic approach for ending child marriage that's government-wide Well it's interesting because you know I used to work on the Hill as I said so when I was on the Hill I believe that the executive branch should be writing all sorts of strategies and now that I'm in the executive branch I'm like oh for the love of Pete all we have to do is write strategies I said that I do I'm a big believer in strategies honestly because I think that and I always say this to my team I think we need to wake up every morning and know exactly what we're doing because honestly I feel the sort of weight of time while I'm there and I feel like we have so little time to get our work done and it needs to be very clear how we're going to get this done so in terms of child marriage as I said we are we are I'm sort of lucked in to say this but we we have a strategy that we're I wouldn't say we're ready to put it out yet but we have we are the way I am working on this because of the way I see this is an adolescent girl strategy and that it is a I see this as an issue that includes girls education and child marriage I think those issues are totally linked I want to treat them similarly as I said earlier I I think all the issues are linked but I and so I'm low to divide any of them but I really think that those two issues that are linked and we're approaching those two things as really one comprehensive issue and it is looking at adolescent girls and so we are really in the in the throes of getting that done and so it is really a top priority for us so I I'm not giving you exactly what you want but I really want to reassure you that it is absolutely a priority for us and I I I am committed to getting that done and getting it done in a really effective way and doing the most we can to deal with that cohort because I think it's critically important I'm going to just take a couple more questions from the audience just this all right quickly and then we'll take a couple more questions just to add UNFB has a strategy already you know and is out there we're actually on the ground working in 12 countries with the adults and girls initiative where we actually take girls of at the age of 9 10 and build their agency with education with skills development making sure we create safe spaces for them and we have just graduated a set of girls in the jerry public and this is working for us and we're also part of the there is an initiative that DFID is putting together which would debut next month in in in London and we're part of that it's about ending you know child marriage and forced marriage just just a while thank you okay a couple more questions we'll take one from over here let's see behind behind in the white shirt yeah there's a microphone and then we'll take one from the middle and one more and then we'll get some response hi my name is Arushi I'm an independent consultant and my question is to the panel in general now gender-based violence in India is essentially a manifestation of patriarchal attitudes which emphasize in the subjugation of women now statistics show that intimate partner violence in India is more nuanced and rampant in higher socioeconomic strata as a society it goes unreported and is not addressed and these women that we're talking about are aware of the law they're educated so I was just wondering what your thoughts are on how we might address this paradox in India and I'm sure it's the case in a lot of other countries thank you good morning I'm Francis Ashgorns from HHS office on women's health and I'm very interested in the issue of trafficking and trafficking and health and how it's addressed in your programs and I'm giving this to all speakers one last question we'll go in the back over there hi I'm Clara Aleman I work at the Inter-American Development Bank and specifically the question is for Dr Osom Timahin sorry if I didn't pronounce it correctly when trying to support countries in having their comprehensive sexual education and enhancing access to sexual and reproductive rights for adolescent girls and boys meaning contraceptives and counseling how do the how does UNFPA address the issue of religious institutions that have a very important role even if ministries of health and education in their policies and programs might intend to to do this they find it very difficult to what to implement it in practice when religious institutions are very powerful so I think what I'm going to suggest is that we let each of the panelists respond to whichever these questions they would like to but also wrap in some closing remarks that address partly what these questions highlight which are some of the enduring challenges and what are the next steps that need to happen from each of your institutions and from each of your perspectives so that we can really advance this agenda so why don't we start with Ambassador Russell the questions just again are on gender-based violence in India trafficking and the religious institutions well let me let me address the India question because I think it really is sort of encapsulates some of the issues that we're trying to deal with and I think the the challenging thing about India and the really intriguing thing about it is that the cases that we heard about recently have been so so stark and so really heartbreaking and have really captured the attention certainly of people in the United States but most interesting to me is the way they've captured the attention of people in the country of India and the way people have really reacted so strongly in the country and demanded some action on the part of their political leaders there and I've heard from many people in the country some anticipation about what the new government will do and how they're looking forward to some change in the way the government will respond to some of these issues so I think that you know I did spend some time in India recently and I think it's a very I mean I don't have to tell you this it's a very complicated country there are many there are many issues class issues cast issues other other issues that come to play there that are very very challenging but the one thing that I said to to leaders that I met there is that in every country you know domestic violence intimate partner violence whatever however you want to categorize it comes into play it is not an issue that any country has managed to to solve and that as I said in my remarks we come at this issue with a tremendous amount of humility we have we have spent many years on this and the one thing that we've managed to do from the time I started working on it is is change this from an issue that we treat as a as a family matter to now treating it as a crime and that is that's a lot of progress but we haven't solved the problem so we are always offering as as we do really in every country that I go to to say we will share our experiences we're happy to do that but it is not this is this is a persistent problem everywhere in the world I guess in terms of next steps what I would say is you know we are looking we are looking for all partners to come to us share whatever experiences they have everyone has a role to play here you know there are many people who have just tremendous experience and we're really interested in hearing it we again come at this with a lot of humility we've got a lot of experience in the office I I came into a great team I had a wonderful amazing predecessor who did tremendous work secretary Clinton did an amazing amount of work but you know we we're we're pushing forward as quickly as we can we rely on private sector folks to help us interest groups many others you know certainly our other partners amazing partners at the UN and other places so we are you know really open to suggestions and looking for opportunities to work together and I think we've all got a lot of work to do and I think if we can continue to work together we'll make some progress going forward Dr. Sotimehan last words and any response to these questions thank you John let me quickly add on to what the ambassador said with regards to the complexities of the context that we deal with in different countries but to offer one example which I saw in Liberia and and I think that India is caught on in terms of legislation and pushing through judicial processes in Liberia what it did was create a parallel court system and that court system must dispense judgment in six weeks so if you are accused of gender based violence you you go into that court system in six weeks you will ever be discharged or you you'll be convicted and what we saw was that in metropolitan Morrovia the prevalence of gender based violence dropped so I think there has to be a specific push to make sure that impunity is not is not tolerated so that's that's one now the specific question I got which was about religious institutions and other traditional institutions in terms of comprehensive sexuality education I think that the best possible answer for you is to let me tell you what I did in Nigeria but I think that's the only way that I can put this in the context Nigeria if you didn't know about it I'm sure in the last two months you know now it's a very complex country multi-ethnic and multi-religious but when we try to build CSC in Nigeria what we did was we brought everybody to the table religious leaders, community leaders, government leaders and we agreed on the content of what we wanted to expose young people to so that content must included the things like what they must know about their bodies what they must know about their transition from childhood through adolescence to adulthood what they must know about their vulnerabilities as they go and what are the things that they're exposed to which in fact might affect their lives and and totally take out their potential HIV or pregnancy we agreed on this but I think we built that curriculum on that and we also ensure that everybody agreed on it now what it is called in different parts of Nigeria might differ but the essence and the substance remain the same and I want to tell you of the 36 states in Nigeria the first to adopt the curriculum was the most conservative northern Muslim states so it's I think it's about it's about making sure that everybody buys into it it's about ensuring that everybody's on the table talking about it and it's about ensuring that we all have these these issues which are totally sensitive but then you know they they are part of our nature and we have to deal with it I I was told that I was going to talk about trafficking but I will let you talk about it last word for you actually I'd like to speak I won't speak specifically about India but a different dimension than what you mentioned generically which is that this is sometimes coming from higher status households and this is proof of a larger concept which is that norms are sticky and they're not necessarily just the province of the poor or the ignorant or something else in this country for instance there was actually far more openness to women in a workplace in the difficult years in the 20s and 30s than there was after world war two I know this because I lived this natural experiment when my mother was in one of the few professions that they were allowed to women were allowed to stay in after the war which was teaching and I watched her relative to her cohort most of whom were sent back to the kitchen and thwarted from their opportunity to develop and it made a tremendous difference in the sort of life opportunities for me frankly and my peers but the point is that this is part of a larger dynamic we see that economic growth or household prosperity does not necessarily automatically correlate with enlightenment or expansion this is why we need deliberate proactive efforts to open up this space by creating more opportunity by preferentially giving access assets opportunities to those who are being deprived because if we wait for it to happen organically it can take a very long time um and it's an important point that is relevant in most of the countries but all these issues that have come up um religion norms etc point to the importance of local culture obviously and there's a there's a vast but limited amount that external partners such as the world bank and the un system the us can do by ourselves and we really need to do is be extremely sensitive to the local dynamics and tap into the openness of leaders because there are always leaders who are more open than others um and let them figure out the most appropriate way to adapt this to local circumstance the example the prof just gave some of the successful examples of eliminating female genital mutilation which involved engaging the elders who were sustaining the practice many of whom were women in these countries and finding the way in with them rather than coming in with something one size fits all but again that's why a comprehensive and highly tailored approach is necessary and that's why in the bank side we're going to be looking to meet each practice in each area on its own terms to say all right how can we frame this in a way that will help you achieve your goals at the same time that we're helping to achieve everything that we're here about today so thank you very much we look forward to working with both of you and all of our partners well please join me in thanking this very excellent panel I wish we had more time continuing the conversation with all of you so thank you very much