 busy program and I want to keep us on time since we're partnering with a Swiss company. So I think we want to keep it on Swiss time here. In some ways we want to retitle this conversation about global value chains and the role of women in global value chains. I think it would be a better way to rethink the conversation we're going to have. And I think it builds very nicely on the discussion we were having in the previous panel and I think you're going to hear from some very thoughtful folks on this panel. I think it's very gender balanced. I provide a little gender balance to the conversation I was really happy about. So glad you guys. I'm glad CSIS thought to add a guy to the panel which I was happy to see. But I think there were a number of issues that came out of the previous conversation that I think we're going to pull out. We're going to go to another level in this discussion. And in some ways I think Janet Boot who is the global head of public affairs at Nestle who really leads the creating shared value work for Nestle. I think it's in some ways also going to provide a little bit of a response in some of her comments to the conversation we're having about what's the role of private sector in this, in the conversation that was sort of seen set before from our friends and in the public sector in the previous panel. So I think think of the next several panels as sort of private sector responses to the first conversation that we had that was about what are the challenges we're facing out there and that government can't do this alone. So I think you have their biographies in front of you. You have Janet Boot who is the global head of public affairs at Nestle. We have my friend Margaret Anna Spears who is the director of Office of Market and Partnership Innovations for the Bureau of Food Security. And I knew Margaret in past lives in the field in Columbia as well as we were also in Bolivia at one point in Bolivia. And then my good friend Deirdre White is the CEO of Pixar Global. And then Makani Tungara who's the director for program development at TechnoServe. So thanks for being with us Makani. Just one other thing I want to just add around when we think about creating shared value and the conversations around global value chains. I want to make a plug for some of the work CSIS has been doing. And you'll see more of this over the next several months. We've been working in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation on post harvest loss. And this is something the Swiss government has done quite a lot on. Ambassador Danden who's in the back will know that for 30 years Switzerland has been trying to crack the code on market driven solutions to post harvest loss. And they've had a very important made a very important contribution in terms of working with small, small, medium sized enterprise development, selling a specific technology starting in Central America and then bringing that to Africa. And they spent a long time self helping develop the value chains around that and to create that as a business. It's something that Rockefeller and others are thinking about. And we talked about food waste and post harvest loss in the previous panel. And a big part of that solution is going to be about the private sector. So just watch this space for that. We'll be doing some things in April with the Rockefeller Foundation on post harvest loss that will be related to the conversation we're going to have now. So without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to my friends on the panel. I'm going to start with Janet who's going to help set the scene. Janet, over to you. Well, thank you, Dan. And thank you everyone for getting up so early this morning and to join us in this very intense discussion about creating shared value. And hopefully today we'll make creating shared value real so you can touch it and feel it. But what I wanted to do to begin and respond to the previous panel is to reiterate the fact that creating shared value makes business sense. So it makes sense to the public sector, yes, but it makes sense from a business perspective. And if you go back to the creating shared value definition, at least as used at Nestle, is that for a company to be successful over the long term and to create value for shareholders, it must create value for society. You can't have a false dichotomy between shareholder and society. They must come together over the long term. Now for us, rural development is one of our absolute key focus areas. We're the world's largest food and beverage company. And the success of rural farming communities, so the farmers, the farm workers and their communities, particularly in commodities we buy, cocoa, coffee and dairy, is essential to our business success. So the societal investment that we make is really intimately linked with whether we can or cannot still serve Unespresso or Nescafe, or whether we can create, you know, deliver all of our different dairy businesses or provide you a treat and a lot of nice confectionary products. So it really is very, very intimately linked with our business success. The other thing I have to say, which was not part of any prepared remarks, is it's funny, the conversation about Africa, I look forward to the day where that conversation changes, because that was one of the first, the fastest growing parts of the world of parts of Nestle's business. Africa presents the continent, and again we're talking about 52 countries, is a massive business opportunity, not just a development challenge. So I think we have to start changing the dialogue, certainly around certain geographies of the world. So let me get down from creating shared value is real, and it's good for business and it's good for society. For Nestle, rural development is essential to societal development, sustainable societies and farming communities, and also to our business success. And so where does this women's issue fit? Well, again, addressing issues related to women makes good business sense. And why? If you look at any of the data on women, you look at the, and I don't know what's happening with the guys, but the number of women, look at the graduations from university graduates across the world, you're talking about 60% of university graduates, both undergraduate and graduate degrees, are women. So there's a shift in the academic profiles. So if you look at, we're a food and beverage company, who goes shopping? Now, again, women, the majority, who produces the food? Again, women in the majority. So if you're going to create shared value and you're going to do something about farming communities, addressing the needs of women becomes a societal, is a societal issue and a business issue. So just, we're quite excited with some of the slow and steady progress we're making on addressing gender issues in our value chain. I wouldn't, at no point say, this is, you know, that we've accomplished a great deal. We're on a road to measurable progress to be a gender balanced company. And part of that journey was to sign up to the women's empowerment principles. These are a set of principles defined by the UN Global Compact, and also by UN Women's. And we signed those principles. And they help frame our thinking because they have companies look at women in the workplace, in the marketplace, and in the community. And we looked at the principles and realized we're actually doing a lot in those areas. We were happy to sign. And the first step a company should do is find out, well, what exactly are we doing in the workplace, in the marketplace and community? Many companies measure gender balance in the workplace. And of course, we have a gender balance program with clear commitments and objectives. But we hadn't measured exactly how many women were we reaching in agricultural communities? How many women were we employing using really as micro entrepreneurs? Either in the streets of Rio or in the streets of Lagos selling coffee or selling other dairy products. So we started to quantify that and discovered, my goodness, you know, through in the agricultural communities, we were reaching about 130,000 women directly with agricultural training and extension services. And as micro entrepreneurs, we had some 600,000 women employed in all kinds of different geographies. Because again, the data shows the degree to which they're very dependable and very happy to run a business that allows them some flexibility and yet the income for the family. So I guess that's a long story to say creating shared value makes sense both for the public sector and for the private sector. That's where the convergence of interest comes. And when you take it down, you look at each individual issue, addressing women's needs across the value chain makes good business sense. And so we're very committed and we're committed for the long term. Janet, before I go to the other panels, can I just ask you to share a little bit of how did creating shared value get started? Because I think that's an interesting story and there's some, I think there's a role that Nestle played in that. Well, there, thank you. My colleague, Justin Baku, is here and he's responsible for the shared value initiative. Nestle works a great deal with that Justin's team also. But the story begins in the Swiss Alps. It really does begin in Davos with the chairman of Nestle who stood up at a meeting that was addressing the topic of corporate social responsibility. And in order to stimulate an interesting conversation, which is something our chairman likes to do, he said, but I don't have to give back to society, I'm giving by doing business. Of course, everybody in the room got upset and it definitely put some heat in the dialogue. But that controversial comment led to deep conversations between our chairman, Michael Porter and Mark Kramer to say, well, is that statement true? Would you please go look? So we've worked with Michael Porter and Mark Kramer and they did some work for Nestle in Latin America and indeed really zeroed in, particularly on the work we were doing in rural development with farming communities and how we were creating societal value for those communities as well as the business. So that's the long story short. Thank you. Okay, Margaret, you've been at AID and you've been someone who's built multi-sector partnerships with the Bureau of Food Security. And so when you think about global value change, you think about them in the rural context. But you've also, before doing this job, you also were doing this sort of work in a number of different countries. We were talking about this last night and how Nespresso was a partner of yours in Colombia. Can you talk a little bit about how AID through its multi-sector partnerships is thinking about how it thinks about partnering around global value chains and how that relates to the rural sector? Yeah. Well, to echo what Janet said, creating shared value, it makes not only business sense, it makes development sense. Really working with the private sector is very important to achieve what we're trying to achieve through Feed the Future, which is the US government's global hunger and food security initiative. With working through value chains is, as you know, the Feed the Future prioritizes value chains in each focus country. And it's important for creating sustainable markets and increasing incomes and jobs, not only on the farms, but also off farm, which is very important. And working with women also makes addressing women's needs makes good development sense, just as it makes good business sense, with women being the producing, while making up a significant proportion of the agricultural labor force, producing 60 to 80 percent of the food in most developing countries. And also it's shown that women participate in all aspects of rural life, including paid employment, trade and marketing, raising crops and animals, and are more likely to reinvest back into their households and ensure families' nutritional needs, health care and school fees. So with those two priorities, as partnering with the private sector is key in terms of achieving those goals and engaging women in value chains. And so this has been something that we've looked for in working in gender inclusive value chains, those that happen to, for various reasons, disproportionately incorporate women farmers or workers, so that might be in the fruits and vegetables or staple crops in Africa. But then also as we look at value chains that don't necessarily disproportionately incorporate women, such as cocoa or coffee, prioritizing activities that really help their participation. And so we've seen that in a variety of ways. As I had mentioned last night that Dan mentioned that in our partnership with Nespresso and various countries, including Columbia, this partnership helped to create opportunities by helping to train the farmers with the quality and other specifications that they need to really sell to high quality markets, creating more of a sustainable opportunity for them. We've also been working with private sector in terms of, for example, Walmart reached out to us a couple of years ago, interested in providing training to small holders in Asia and Africa as part of the company's global women economic empowerment initiative. So up to that point, they've been struggling to how exactly to reach women, you know, given their point in the value chain. Yet this was important for their, their sustainability goals, but also business goals in the longer term, considering the supply chains and value chains. So since the, in the two years since that first conversation, Walmart made investments in five of our implementing partners that will result in training for over 500,000 women farmers across the world, ranging in Bangladesh, Burwanda, Zambia, Ghana, Kenya and other places. We've also been working with, with firms to try to help in terms of getting appropriate and better technology to women in value chains. For example, through our Feed the Future Partnering for Innovation program, there's a partnership with Compatible Technology International that also is working with a local Senegalese manufacturer to get, introduce labor-saving tools that reduce post-harvest losses and allow women to go into other value-added areas such as processing. And in the first year, the tools have reached more than 1,000 communities, reaching 14,000 people, most of them women. You know, so those are just a couple of examples of how really partnering with the private sector can help bring innovation, technology and markets to women in value chains. Great. Thanks very much, Margaret. Deirdre, you work across a number of different industries in terms of their global value chains. You also have a particular focus on companies that are asked to think about localizing their supply chains in a number of contexts, both in the rural and, it's agriculture in the non-agriculture context. If you could just share a little bit about your work on global supply chains, why companies are working with you and bringing the gender lens to this. Sure. Thanks, Stan. Yes, you're right. We work in a lot of different industries and in particular, we're not particularly ag experts, but what we are experts in are bringing the public, private and social sectors together to solve global challenges. So pretty much every project that we have as an organization has a significant private sector partner. And I thought I'd bring two examples to the table of where we have worked with small holding farmers, with a large portion of those groups being women farmers. And I was delighted to hear Anne's comments earlier because I think the areas that she said the private sector can play in these types of programs, both of these programs touch on most of those, most of those topics. So the first one was actually a program that was supported by the Global Development Alliance at USAID back when they had a very visionary director. But this was a program called J.A. Farms, Jamaica Farms, stood for Farmers Access to Regional Markets. And the program was supported by GDA, but actually had eight or nine to one funding from the private sector. And the private sector partners in this case were actually Jamaican companies. So it was a fairly unusual model in the case that it was not larger multinational partners. The work that was done there was largely a network farming contract farming model. And what we were able to do was work with one key partner, Jamaican partner, called Rock Mountain Herbs. And Rock Mountain Herbs already had a contract with KFC to provide cabbage for the coleslaw that was produced in Jamaica. They could not actually meet the needs in terms of quantity of KFC. So they looked out to say, well, how can we up our quantity? We can't grow anymore. And what they did was looked in their own local community and they actually created farmers where these were not small holding farmers. They reached out to women in the community and said, who wants to have a job growing cabbage for this for this KFC contract? They had a number of takers and what we were able to do together with them was to provide a protected agriculture technology, a very simple high tunnel house that was appropriate for the Jamaican environment that was inexpensive, less than $1,000 for each one of these, which those of you who know the cost of greenhouses can understand that $1,000 high tunnel house is a really good deal. They were hurricane proof, which was a wonderful thing in working with Jamaican. In fact, we unfortunately had the chance to test that out when a hurricane came through in the middle of this project. And across the island, greenhouses were destroyed everywhere. And of all the high tunnel houses, we had some 30 or 40 of them across the island. Not one was destroyed or one was destroyed. And that was the one we left up as a test case and everyone else just rolled off their plastic. And the next day they were able to replant their crops while everyone else was still rebuilding greenhouses. And that was due to the investment of Rock Mountain Herbs in supporting these growers with the technology. So one of the lessons out of this is that issue of appropriate technology. And I think we all like to think about high tech, but really sitting down and thinking about what makes sense in a particular environment. Another piece of that program was the provision of expertise directly from Rock Mountain Herbs and the other anchor business, the other local business for the project, which was Walkerswood. And any of you who have ever eaten jerk chicken have probably had some Walkerswood jerk sauce. And Walkerswood came into the project after Rock Mountain Herbs because they were importing all of the pepper mash that they were using for their jerk sauce from Costa Rica. Because it was cheaper for them to import a partially produced product from Costa Rica than to go to the pepper farmers in there, literally in their own backyard. So they came into the project and said, how are you going to help us with pepper farmers? So now we've got sort of cabbage and peppers and the way we were able to help was by bringing the Walkerswood experts on peppers, the quality that they needed, to work directly with the farmers. So again, that private sector providing extension services of some sort. Third piece of this project that was terrific was a few years down the line we started to collaborate very closely with the Ministry of Agriculture. And we did that in two ways. One was training extension agents to build these high tunnel houses so that it was not going to be just these two businesses that were benefiting, but that we could spread this technology across the country. And it has been highly successful. And these high tunnel houses are still being built across the island years later. The other collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture was around creating a management information system around pricing. Because one of the challenges was the growers that were not part of these contract models needed to understand pricing at Farmgate wholesale retail. And we created this, created this database and armed the extension agents with smartphones. And still to this day, they go around the island every day and provide pricing from different points around the island. And that's really important because the pricing can differ a lot from Kingston to Negril. So the end this pricing is available to the farmers either pushed out through their cell phones. So they get a report every day on on what peppers are selling for in Montego Bay. Or they can go online and do a you know, do a larger a larger bit of research on that. So that's that's that's one model where I think that the public private and social sector is coming together has been extremely successful. The second one I want to touch on briefly is a program with John Deere in rural Rajasthan, India. It's called Jiva, the joint initiative for village advancement. And this program, the entire focus of the program started as reducing women's drudgery, very just very big topic and figure out figure out how to do this. And so what took place was a very intensive participatory needs assessment where we sat down for weeks on end with the community to understand really what their problems were. And what we came up with in terms of solutions together with the community were again, appropriate technology. In this case, very low tech mechanization. So mechanization for sewing, mechanization for weeding. But these tools were actually developed by the local agricultural University, specifically for use in the environment in Rajasthan. We also worked together with the agricultural University to develop demo plots in the communities. And so giving a real visual of how things can be different if you if you use this mechanization and if you use some different fertilization techniques. And the third thing in this one that I think is really important is that it also includes an element of support for children and families. So one of the best ways I think to to get women to be able to participate in supply chains more robustly is to support the things they care about having the right kind of educational environment for their kids having having ways for their children to be engaged so that they can concentrate on the on their agricultural careers. The last thing I just want to say about that is that programs very interesting because it's a very deep investment in a very small geography. And that's something you don't see a whole lot in this field. John Deere has made a five year multi million dollar commitment to work in this small space. And what's happened is it's transformed these communities in such a way that others are coming in to learn from the communities. And that's the kind of model we want. And I think I'll stop there for now. Costa Rican jerk chicken. I'm very upset about this. So you've been telling me all these years I've been eating jerk chicken and it's not. Oh, thank thank goodness because I feel like it. Well, anyways, thank you for that. Good. Mekani, you're what techno serve and you work around the world on agricultural supply chains and partner with companies and with donor agencies like AID. Thanks for being here. Good morning, everyone. I want to talk about women's economic empowerment and how we get to women's economic empowerment through supply chain development. Just because a woman is involved in a value chain doesn't mean she's actually getting value out of it herself and value that she can reinvest in her family. As the other panelists have talked about, you know, when women do control their income, they are much more likely than their spouses to invest in the family and invest in improve the outcomes and health results of their families. So. The key takeaway, I'm going to start with the key takeaway and then go from there is that spousal relationships are key to economic empowerment. And so as corporations come in and want to engage supply chains, they need to ensure that women and men, you know, particularly women and their spouses are both engaged in the process. When you have a crop like cash crop, normally it's men that control cash crops because it makes money. Women don't have as much of an opportunity to control cash crops. And so the more that women can be involved in decision making and be partners to their spouses in business decisions, the more likely it is that they'll have greater transparency within the household on what that income is. And the more likely it is that they'll therefore be able to have a greater share of that household income. I'd like to illustrate some of this from our coffee project in East Africa. Over the past eight or so years, we've been running a $65 million project funded by the Gates Foundation in Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Rwanda. And the goal was to bruise the incomes of smallholder farmers by increasing the quantity and quality of the coffee that they were producing. One thing to keep in mind is that if you don't track women, you won't know what the result is for those women. So when we first started this project, women were only counted as the spouse of the husband. We weren't counting them separately because we were counting households, not individual farmers. And so by focusing only on the household, we therefore somewhat by accident were only focusing on the male head of household and counted the woman only as, you know, spouse to household head participating. So when the people graduated from the program, they, the husband would get a certificate, even if it was the wife that had showed up for all the training. We later changed that so that we were counting farmers, not households. And by counting farmers, we were able to count female farmers in the household and track those females and therefore track their results. So the framing, you know, households versus farmers was very important in our ability to understand the household dynamics of the project. And that's a learning that that came out through the process. One important part of this project to get the results we wanted was the farmer training. And it was important that we include women in order to get results for women. It was important that we include women in all of the training. Normally, a lot of projects will go out and talk to the husband and say, you know, please come and please have your wife come too. And what we found is that if you're just talking to the spouse, the wife doesn't think you're talking about her. If you're in the community and you're saying, oh, farmers need to come, women do not necessarily feel that they are included in that number. So we went through a number of specific steps to include women and make sure that they participated in the farmer training program along with their spouses. This included making it valuable, so making sure that the needs of both men and women were included in the design of the training curriculum. This included a three pronged outreach strategy. First, start with the community leaders of various kinds, whether that's heads of women's groups, village elders, municipal government leaders, socializing with them in advance the importance of women's engagement and the value of that engagement and getting buy-in from those leaders that women are important. We also invited women through their husbands, so making sure that the husbands understood that if you bring your wife, there's going to be greater value in this for you. And then we invited the women specifically. This included going directly to the farms and speaking to the women directly and also going through women's community associations or village-level savings associations and saying to them directly, we want you. And through that, we were able to get, I think our target was 30% of the participants being women, 33% and we were able to achieve those targets. So the invitation directly was very important. We also then in the curriculum specifically emphasized gender inclusion throughout the curriculum. We had a high percentage, I think it was about 30 or 40% of the trainers themselves were female, for example. We, in emphasizing who the focal farmer was, we ensured that women were chosen as focal farmers. So at every step of the training process, ensuring gender integration and the importance of women was key to ensuring the success, the integration of the women so that the women got the information. Now this training wasn't just for agronomy. It was also financial management training. Some of the results that, some of the surveys we saw, men were saying that they didn't trust their wives to do much of anything. They're good for labor, but they're not good for much more. So by giving the women and the men together, financial management training, then that put the spouses on more equal footing. The women oftentimes had greater attention to detail. And in follow-up surveys we found that in some household women ended up doing some of the record keeping, which would not have been possible had these women not been in the room with their spouses learning information together and going through that learning process together and seeing the value of the tools together. The results we also saw in some follow-up surveys that women could then remind their spouses, oh, isn't it time to apply a fertilizer? And they were better able to make decisions together as a result because they now both had information that was relevant to the crop and to household income. So the engagement on the financial management as well as the agronomy was critical to improving the transparency within the household about what should be happening and then also improving transparency on the sales and the overall income so that women were able to have their, I wouldn't say fair share, whatever their share was supposed to be, they had a clear understanding what the baseline was within the household. We did a follow-up survey in rural Ethiopia and in some of those results we saw that 50% of women in the survey indicated that they participated in getting the product to market and 42% were involved in some kind of way in the sales transaction. So this is also increasing transparency and involvement of women so that they have greater visibility of what's going on within the household. Women also indicated in this particular survey, this is rural Ethiopia so it's not necessarily what happened across the entire program because there were specific dynamics but it's just to give an illustration of some of the results. Women also said that 36% of women said they received more coffee proceeds however they interpreted that. There was also a sense amongst the women that they had a greater share of control so their own perception of economic empowerment as they interpreted it increased as a result of this engagement and discussions within the household. This is a survey about 120 farmers in the focus group but 88% of men and women said they increased conversation within the household. They actually talked to each other about the business which was something that wasn't happening before and among those who said a very small percentage I think it was 6% or so who said they were talking less it was because they were agreeing more so they didn't have to talk as much. And so we delved into that and follow-up surveys it's like well why are you talking less you're a small minority oh we agree more now so it's fine. So those are the benefits of engaging men and women women and their husbands together. We've also been exploring so that's through the farm college. We've also been exploring through producer business groups ensuring that women are part of the producer business group leadership and are participating. And in there I think it was like 1% of women in Ethiopia when we started were part of the cohort of producer business groups and amongst the populations we targeted we got it up to 33%. So if the husband is a member of a producer group making sure that the wife as well as the member member of the same producer group so that she can be involved and understand that the market dynamics the transactions the volumes is critical to women's economic empowerment. The way this links back to shared value it's important for corporations as they continue to expand their supply chain to push for this type of engagement. It's not about households it's not just about farmers it's about women and men women and their husbands being able to engage in these businesses together and be real business people in these value chains. Thank you. Before you open it up thank you very much. I wanted to ask Chan if you want to just respond a little bit what you just heard here if others as well if Margaret or Geer do you want to just respond and welcome them as well. Well I think as the conversation flowed down the table and particularly ending with Makani it's really important to notice that this is not easy addressing women's economic empowerment in value chains working and empowering women in smallholder farming communities for example the work that's done by my colleague Peggy Dibby Peggy if you'd please wave your hand in the back there from Nestle who's working in Côte d'Ivoire on the COCO plan and trying to work on women's economic empowerment this is not easy it takes a long term systematic approach which I just wanted to throw out for discussion requires partnerships requires partnerships because the private sector can be very good we have agronomists we have veterinarians on our payroll we don't have gender balance experts on our payroll maybe one or two so we have to work with people who really understand the issues and how to resolve them likewise in child labor in some of the deeply embedded societal issues the private sector has a direct interest in the issues being improved but not always the expertise to solve them you have to partner. Margaret. Yeah it was good to hearing about all the challenges in terms of measuring the impact on women's empowerment and that's something that in Feed the Future we have been looking at and wrestling with as well and so in all of the Feed the Future programs we do separate by gender in terms of tracking the results and then as an additional tool to ensure our programs are having the intended effect on women Feed the Future partnered with the International Food Policy Research Institute and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative to develop the Women's Empowerment and Agriculture Index which was launched in February of 2012 and the INBEX measures the empowerment agency and inclusion of women in the agricultural sector in an effort to identify ways to overcome obstacles and constraints and unlike other tools it also measures women's empowerment relative to men within their households which was something that McKinney had pointed out providing a more robust understanding of gender dynamics within households and communities and that helps us to better adjust our programming to promote women's inclusion in value chains and this innovative and rigorous tool measures rural women's roles and the extent of their engagement in agricultural activities relative to men's in decisions over agricultural production access to and decision making power over assets and resources control over use of income leadership roles within the community and use of time and the recent baseline results from the use of this index and 13 feed the future countries showed a strong positive relationship between the female empowerment index and the prevalence of children receiving the minimum acceptable diet and also showed other positive correlations with indications in the family in addition to economic inclusion factors so this information helps us to explore how women's empowerment affects other aspects of our programming such as maternal behavior nutrition and area critical tending hunger and also help us to understand how women and men in particular geographic regions are empowered or disempowered and then we can better target our policy programming and public-private partnerships towards these areas. I actually wanted to reflect back on something Janet just said which is the sense that women's economic empowerment this is not an easy issue it requires partnership and also just to remind us all that and partnership is not an easy issue and I think that this is something we really overlook we're all talking about these wonderful projects we did and these great results but the process of engaging in a real partnership that's gonna get you to these results is such a long-term one. Someone on the first panel I don't know if it was Anne said about the building trust and the blame and shame versus we don't trust people who make money that's all still way too true in this field and so for the private sector really being willing to invest in the partnership for the long term is critical and I think sometimes that's really hard it's sort of you're sort of feeling out your way and saying yeah you know we're in this for five years doesn't always happen and then certainly also for the civil society or the public sector partners we also have to be in it for the long run and willing to work out all those misunderstandings and such but I just feel like we gave some really nice examples up here without the caveats that this didn't come without a lot of blood, sweat, and tears so. McKayne has come with a lot of blood, sweat, and tears? Yes, a lot. But I mean what's I guess the I think what's important to sort of respond to Margaret's point about the index is that if you don't measure it you don't know what the impact is on it I mean you have to so per our initial sort of focused on households it prevented us from really having a real understanding of what which women were participating and what they were doing same with the producer business groups where we weren't focusing on gender and producer business groups you know the gender participation didn't change so if you want to change it you have to have the right indicator around it and you have to track it rigorously and you have to really want to make it happen so it has to be explicit and yes there's a lot of blood, sweat, and tears around it. You've all been very patient I want to open it up to questions from the audience and we've got a significant amount of time to take a wide variety of questions and comments so I want to hear from this woman here this woman in the blue shirt, these two folks and then my friend who's at based who's bi-national Liberian in the United States so these three women here we'll start, we'll bunch those two together and we'll take some over here as well so. Hi, my name's Ann Johnson I'm a grad student of global human development at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service and my question is about access to investment capital kind of building on what McConny and Margaret mentioned about access to income. Previously I worked with Coca-Cola and their five by 20 initiative which seeks to engage five million women across the company's value chain by 2020 and we really found in Ghana at least that the difference in engaging men and women very often came down to their access to the capital needed to invest in inserting themselves into the value chain and so I wanted to kind of gauge your perspectives on how this can be addressed among all the different kinds of projects that you work on. Hi, my name is Fenosa Kliu I'm from the University of Maryland. My question, I'm originally from Ethiopia by the way so my question is to McConny in regards to the coffee project that you guys are doing. I'm aware of the political bottlenecks that there are in Ethiopia with the government so how do you exactly ensure that there won't be any political bottlenecks and the women receiving their fair share? Good morning, I'm Barbara Simmons Dean of International Education at William VS Tubman University in Liberia. Dan calls me by national. I'm an African-American living in Liberia, so. You know what I mean. I mean, I consider myself bi-national because my wife's from Argentina and I, you so. Yes. So do you consider yourself a resident of Liberia at this point? Because I see, because you split your time between the. Yeah, and technically before Ebola came most of my time was in Liberia. But now I want to clarify, you were here all the time here now, right? Well, I'm on my way back to Liberia. Right. We have a project at Tubman and first of all, Tubman is you located in the southeast most part of the country. We're not in Monrovia, the big city, so we're already rural but we have a project that's even in the more rural area of, it specifically was geared to empowering women but what we found, and so I definitely did owe what you said, Ms. Tagana about the need to involve or at least to at least have made contact because first of all, before you're gonna get entrance into the community, you have to talk to the leaders, you have to have permission to do that. And then after gaining the trust, we looked at first of all, it was a cultural change we had to require because traditionally there were some roles that only the men did. We had targeted women who the title used was were vulnerable because they were either widowed or for whatever reason were not married. So it becomes critical in terms of the, what's referred to sometimes as the cultural competence piece that the private sector and the public sector and civil society has to be very sensitive to. So I would ask how can we work to ensure that as we approach projects that we are we are on top of where the community is, where the culture is and how can that be impacted in terms of how the funding comes about? Thank you. Thanks. Janet, why don't we start with you and we'll just go down. If you wanna, you can respond to any or all. I'll just begin with the access to investment capital question. And I think that was a very good question. One of the things that companies like ours can do and we do actively, for example, we have a lot of micro entrepreneurs who are in our sales and sales force. And so we have women, it started in mostly in Nigeria and Central West Africa, my own business and they can sell a Nescafe. And we front end that basically. We invest in the equipment and we also do lend them credit to get them started. So there is a startup capital in that we can be helpful. Likewise, we do the same with women who sell Maggie through cooking vans in Central West Africa and we're talking about 600,000 female vendors. You make that possible, you provide the training. So there is a jumpstart in terms of access to investment capital. Likewise in Rio and Sao Paulo we have micro entrepreneurs and again there is a micro finance piece and an equipment piece of the startup to them setting themselves up as small business operators. Margaret? Yes, the access to capital can be a key constraint for women, farmers in general, but women in particular. And a couple of tools that we've been employing through the Feed the Future program to try to help this. One of them is credit guarantees through the Development Credit Authority and that really helps especially in situations where the perception doesn't always match the reality in terms of the risk level. So if a woman hasn't had credit before, hasn't had a credit history, sometimes it becomes harder for her to get credit than a man in a comparable position. And the credit guarantees work particularly well when the farmers or entrepreneurs are in value chains because they do have then market opportunities that can also be taken into account. So in our credit guarantees oftentimes we do focus them on populations that are underserved in terms of the financial sector. And many times women in isolated or rural areas is one of those key points. And then we're also through our other programs in my office analyzing different other tools that can contribute to access to financial services in general, not just credit, but savings, which can be an important source of investment capital for women micro entrepreneurs. And also connection with other sources of investment. It could be larger firms, value chains, and so on. So those are some of the things that we've been looking at and still continuing to try to develop new tools and services in that way. On the question on Liberia, it is not only in Liberia, but everywhere it is important to engage with local partners, local entrepreneurs, local community groups to make sure that how we are engaging does fit with the community. Also that helps to ensure that in the value chain partnerships and working with the private sector that we don't ignore the local, that the farmers are entrepreneurs, that there are, and in Liberia I spent some time there in 1999 and saw a really strong entrepreneurial spirit among people with very little resources at that time of conflict especially. But they were able to do great things working together. And so to make sure that that can be also not only incorporated, but serve as a base of the project is extremely important. Dear Drew. So I'll touch on the investment one first. Most of the good answers have been set already in terms of credit guarantees or partial credit guarantee funds and also just a building the investments into the project itself. One of the other things that we found is very effective is working with local banks and training them on how to assess credit worthiness, where they don't have the usual measures and how to take things like maybe the network contracts that these farmers have or in other industries, an oil and gas industry, if there's a contract for services that a company has, how can you use that to provide proof of credit worthiness? So really informing the banking sector we found has been something that's very effective. On the community piece, I actually want to tell a particular story. I talked about the Jiva project and I've been working in this field for over 25 years and I have never seen a project that has had more impressive early results than this project, which is sort of two and a half years in right now. And the reason I think that it has is because such a huge investment was made in understanding what the community wanted, not what the company wanted to give. And that was done by bringing in some 15 John Deere senior level folks from around the world, agronomists to financial experts, to strategy folks to cross the board. Together with the local agricultural university, our local NGO partner, fantastic local NGO and folks from Pixar Global that had expertise in community development. And between us, we spent 60 person weeks on the ground for three villages that don't amount to 1,000 households. So no one invests that kind of time, unfortunately in needs assessment, but it really provided such a deep understanding of what was needed and where that matched with what the company needed and wanted out of this. The way we were able to do that, it wasn't actually all that expensive either. If you think about spending 60 person weeks on a USAID needs assessment, that would be quite an expensive undertaking, but we did this through corporate volunteer models. So the John Deere folks were providing their time on a pro bono basis out there. And the company saw that this was a real value in terms of leadership and talent development, retention and just building affinity for the company. So it was a good investment from the company side. And then they funded the rest of it through cash. And so it was a really affordable thing to do and really drove a powerful program. And then the interesting thing just to tie on to that is there's an ongoing involvement of John Deere on a pro bono basis in this project. And because it's in India where many of you may be familiar with the 2% law, the 2% of pre-text profits that have to go to corporate responsibility activities, the current understanding of that law is that pro bono can be counted toward it as long as it's Indian companies providing Indians to do the work. And so the Indian offices of John Deere continue to provide pro bono assistance to support this project. And the company continues to benefit from all of the good things that come with a pro bono project and the project continues to benefit. And there's that deep understanding of the community that goes throughout. In response to the access to finance question, I guess one way that it's important for women to get access to finance is also through the producer business groups. If women are a part of the leadership and an active part of the membership, then they will have access to decisions made on behalf of the group, finance accessed on behalf of the group and be able to benefit from the results of that access to finance. As has been said, women's access to land or collateral is more limited than that of their spouse or men in general. And so putting women in a context where they can be part of a system that allows them to access finance is an important part of that. And the producer business group, gender piece that we're involved in is part of expanding that access. For the question on the political bottlenecks in Ethiopia, at this point, I'm not aware of politics interfering with the community and household dynamics that I illustrated, we'll discuss earlier, that those are more sort of have an impact on the larger value chain dynamics. But for the household and community level dynamics that to which I was referring in the women's economic empowerment, the political bottlenecks have been not as relevant. Kate, I want to hear from Steve Rockland, this woman back here, and then this woman over here. So these three folks is Steve, this woman and then this woman. Thank you. Steve Rockland with IO Sustainability and fascinating panel, thank you. And a CSIS alum, if I recall correctly. A proud CSIS alum, yes. Wonderful to see the new venue. So I have a comment and then a question. A comment is that the shared value relies on the business case as well as the social value case. On the business case, I think I have good news. We're launching with Babson College a project called Project ROI that finds that not only the direct sort of business case for these activities, but the broader rewards that accrue to companies from these types of activities are real, there's a causation and they're significant. Whether we're talking about share price, reputation, sales, or human resource benefits. So I think that this will be an impetus for this type of work and investment going forward. And in that context, I'd be very interested to hear, do you think that we're ready, you're talking about great practices, do you think that we're ready and in a position to scale those up? And if so, what do you think is needed to get them scaled up? My name is Julia Tuakaria. I'm from African Women's Diaspora Women Initiative. My question, I wanna join my friend here, Rose, from Kenya. For the panel, those of you who work in Africa, you know how much the rural area, especially the women, don't have access to fun. And for the agriculture, women are mostly the farmers in the farm, in the chambers. I'm from Mali and my husband from Kenya, I stay in Kenya for 10 years. In Kenya, mostly in every farm, the women who are farming in there, in Mali is the same. I just came from Congo in November. It's the same, everywhere in Africa. But I'm from the rural area and when I was in Kenya, I did a campaign in the rural area. For the rural, she, Mrs. Tunkara, the rural women in Africa really don't have access to fun. And if you go to the market, they are the one who sell the farm product. The wholesaler are the women in the farm product. How, I'm just appealing to the panel, how to create more program and to empower the women in the rural area in Africa. Thank you. Thank you. Over here. Hello, my name is Joyce Rogers Holliday. I'm the executive director of the International Association of African NGOs. I'm also a member of the think tank on social accountability with the wall bank. I'm quite pleased to hear about the successes of your various sectors. But I just feel that there should be a mindset change, particularly in the continent of Africa. I'm a Nigerian for one. There's a sense of entitlement with the citizens that the government is responsible for everything. As such, most citizens sit back and wait for government contracts. I was home this Christmas and I found myself having this discussion about why are you waiting for the government to do everything, but that's just the mindset. Even with the private sector, I think they need to understand their role as catalysts for economic growth and development. So there needs to be a lot of education going across the board to understand this concept of shared value for economic growth and development. Thank you very much. Okay. Janet, why don't we start with you and we'll just go down. Those are a good set of comments and questions. Back to Steve, I completely agree that there is a very much a valid business case and a societal impact case for creating shared value. And we're looking at it at Nestle and we can certainly attest that our focus on nutrition, health and wellness, well it grows revenues, increases profitability and that our work in the area of water can help reduce risk to the supply chain and reduce cost. And likewise in packaging, you reduce packaging, you reduce cost and you improve environmental impact. So this is definitely, there is a strong business case. I think we'll all get better over time at elaborating it and explaining it but there is a definite business case and a societal case for creating shared value. Your question is about what is needed to scale up. I think one of the things that large companies such as Nestle can do is make sure and it is what we do, we make commitments that are global in nature. So when we publish a creating shared value report which we do every year at the same time as the annual report and the financials are released, it's bundled with the creating shared value report, we make commitments that are global in nature. So we will do the following things in the area of nutrition, be it reduce fat, sugar, salt or provide portion guidance or better labeling. In the area of rural development, we will roll out a rural development framework in 21 countries to better understand and measure the needs of the farmers, the farm workers and the farming communities. So one of the things you can do at least as a step along the way to scaling up is to make sure that the efforts of large companies are systematic and global in nature. So that helps. Doesn't mean we've scaled up by any matter of means. This effort has a long way to go. In terms of how to reach women who are really in rural areas, when you think about creating shared value you have to think about which companies can help reach which rural communities. Now in the case of Nestle and the work of my colleague Peggy where we can really dig in and reach women in rural areas is through the COCO plan in the Côte d'Ivoire because the vast majority of COCO in the world comes from West Africa and we are deeply embedded in the community there. So there we can play a role. We can't play a role in all commodities across all the countries. So you have to figure out which company can play a contributing role. And in terms of private sector role to change mindsets I think that's a really good challenge for all of us. The creating shared value work really challenges are thinking about the role of the private sector and the role of the government. And you see it just in this women's issue. Today we know that, for example in the COCO sector women are responsible for the majority of the work more than 50% of the food yet they get 10% of the income and they own maximum 1% of the land. Now the company what we can do is certainly work on the income side and we can educate and inform and work with communities to change mindsets but the land issue come back really requires the government to get involved. So there has to be this interaction between public and private to address issues like land ownership that's not. So the company, sorry and I'll finish on this has to use its influence. We talk about what we can influence. The companies have to step up and use their sphere of influence and then work on those specific areas where you have a sphere of control. We can control how many communities we reach, how much we invest in educating women farmers and how we invest in partnerships that will help provide the data to know whether we're being effective or not but we can't change land rights policies alone. We need to use our influence there. It's actually something where partnering with organizations like AID or the Swiss aid agency or multilaterals like the World Bank or UN agencies is where that actually comes into play because they can lead those sorts of policy discussions. So Margaret. Yes, thanks that was a good segue into speaking of the mindset change. One of the key things is promoting public-private dialogue to help get the policy environment right so that the incentives for the private sector to do their job are there. And then also that the government understands which areas really they do need to get involved with such as the land issue was mentioned. And so one of the things that we're doing to promote that is to support public-private partnership platform dialogue. For example, through the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in the African countries that are participating in that, they are now developing platforms in country that can help promote dialogue and accountability between the public sector, policy environment, the private sector who is making concrete investment commitments for investment in agriculture in their countries and then also the donors that need to align and support the goals of promoting the investment in African agriculture in those countries. And at the same time, each year they're tracking metrics to see really how much is being invested by the private sector, what policy changes and reforms are being made in this sector and how is the donor spending both in terms of quantity and support for that is incredibly important. And then I just wanted to make one comment on the question on how to scale up the shared value projects. As far as on the US government side, one of the things that we've been doing in USAID to help facilitate this scaling up is assigning for companies that do have this kind of systematic and global goals that are working in multiple countries to assign relationship managers to them so that they work with the same USAID person in each of the countries to help facilitate interaction with the mission and adaptation of the program from country to country. So they don't have to start from scratch, for example, moving from Colombia to somewhere else. This can reduce the transactions costs on both sides in terms of developing the partnership, you build on what you have and can help to scale up and take advantage of those multi-country goals. Could you just talk a little bit more about just some of the land tenure issues, because I think this is obviously something of great importance. AID's worked on this in a variety of ways for a long period of time, so I think it'd be useful for them to just share a little bit more about that. Okay, yes, and many of the Feed the Future countries, land tenure has been identified as a key issue to work on. And of course, this is something that we can support we don't do alone. There are many actors that are needed to make that come through. So in terms of, so in many of the countries, there's specific technical assistance on how to improve the land tenure situation, how to work, you know, the differences between, you know, formal land tenure and also the community and traditional land tenure systems to make sure that those are working together. In the, in regards to promotion of investment, for example, and through the new Alliance for Food Security Nutrition, one of the things that we've been trying to advance are some principles in terms of how to approach the land tenure issue. If you're, what are questions that need to be looked at, things that need to be examined in the countries as they are contemplating both on the private sector investing, but also what does the public sector need to do in terms of protection of land rights and clarification of land rights so that everyone is clear and it's mutually beneficial. So that's a key thing. There have been, there are a couple of pilots on different areas looking at land tenure observatories. And one of the things that we're also trying to develop now is looking at opportunities for a public-private partnership related to land tenure and investment to help to kind of accompany that and see how that works to help develop some, some good practices for that that can be useful in the future for both governments and private sector. Thank you. Deirdre. My comments, I think touch both on how you scale up and on the, how you change mindsets. And a few of us had, had dinner last night. It's supposed to be not for attribution, but I'm going to attribute something to Michael Levitt and trust that he will allow that attribution. And one of the things he said at dinner last night is, look, one of the problems we're facing here is that we have these shining examples of Nestle which has gone all in on their shared value model. There's other companies, Coca-Cola knows doing a lot with Technosur, but we're still just at a handful of companies that have invested in any kind of deep way. Lots of companies dabbling. But if we're still talking about, and this is what Michael said yesterday, if we're still talking about the same 80 companies, then we haven't really made any progress here. So we need to be talking about 500 companies and 1,000 companies that have really gotten this bought in and have made the kind of investments that Nestle has. And that is for us as an organization, it's absolutely part of our mission, this influence agenda and how do you get this story out there and how do you quantify return of investment so that you can get more companies interested in doing it, it's why we're partnered with the shared value initiative because that influence agenda is so important and expanding this field. Just like we need many more companies doing this, we need many more NGOs that have the mindset to be able to partner in the way that a Technosurve does. And unfortunately, there's really far too few of them that are ready to walk down the street hand in hand with a business partner. Lots of us are ready to take a check, but when it involves co-creating something and coming up with some commonalities and feeling good about the fact that your partner's making money, there's far too many people in civil society that are prepared to do that. And the third leg of the stool, the public sector, every public sector institution now has a partnerships office and that's great. And as Secretary Glickman said, certainly the needle has moved, but it has not moved far enough. And the public sector talks a lot about partnership, does a handful of very good partnerships, but inherently doesn't have the flexibility and the tolerance for risk to be all in in the way that we would need them to in order to scale up. So we've got all, there's a lot of good that's been done the last decade, but we got a whole lot more ahead of us across all three sectors. McCroney. So TechnoServe does a lot of public private partnerships and corporate partnerships are a key part of our model for impact. One of the issues that we're addressing, not necessarily in the consumer goods sector, but in other sectors are around procurement policies. So sometimes a corporation's own procurement policies aren't flexible enough to accommodate engaging smallholder farmers or other businesses that don't have, that may have quality concerns or risk concerns. And so being able to establish what kind of procurement processes are best in class for different sectors will support corporations to more effectively engage with businesses comprised of people at the bottom of the pyramid. So procurement is a key model. And we're also in the process of evaluating effective outgrow systems that link to corporate supply chain. So on our side as well, we're doing this analysis and trying to evaluate with the goal of being able to present that publicly and see what other corporations would, which model they would wanna be interested in to say, look, here are the models, here's how they're working, here's how they're working well to try to get greater interest from corporations and greater transparency around what it takes to make these things work. So there's still a bit of the business case evolving on the business case and elements of the process that are coming into place. But I think getting clear on those models and those systems and processes and sharing that with businesses will encourage more businesses to be part of the shared value approach. Okay, we've got time for one or two more questions. My friend over here and this woman over here, these two. So if you keep it, just keep them brief. Thank you very much. My name is Yahya Fenusi with the United State of Africa 2017 project. Over the last 25 years, when I meet people who are doing what you're doing, you're doing a good job, but this is what I tell them. You're just threading water or spinning your wheels. And the fact is you're working within a constraint and the earlier panel, the gentleman once talked about it, that you cannot scale, that you cannot exchange what is produced in one country to another country so that you could have organic growth. So that's where are we going to establish in Africa major and acquisition. We're gonna forge some of these countries into a federation like United States and then you will have movement in what you're doing. Thank you very much. Hello, my name is Sarah Manthi. I'm from the World Food Program, USA. I think to all of your points, shared value has to be in the interest of the business community. And we've highlighted, I just jotted down a few of the areas where women are becoming, are touching on issues of importance to the business community. Becoming wage earners, access to finance, involvement in decision making. Can you highlight any others that would give a roadmap to nonprofits for where there's areas for more alignment? Okay, so issues of trade barriers and infrastructure barriers. I think that was touched on by Secretary Glickman and my friend in the audience. And also the issue of how to think about, more fully think through the role of women in the supply chain. Any comments, responses to that? Yes, trade barriers are a key factor in terms of success in this area. And one of the things that, one of the aims of Feed the Future is also to reduce the intra-regional trade barriers. So barriers within Africa, within Latin America, within Asia, because that also helps to facilitate food security in terms of getting larger markets, in terms of facilitating access to food when it's needed and where it's needed. And that's really key. In terms of how trade barriers also particularly affect women, in terms of we're helping women traders formalize through greater security, greater mobility and better service delivery. First step in improving the participation of women traders in cross-border agriculture activity is strengthening the legal frameworks for equal treatment so that women who are trying to trade cross-borders receive the same respectful treatment as men there. And in terms of prioritizing gender inclusivity in terms of the policy reforms in environment, a lot of the policy work that was mentioned earlier is also aimed at helping to facilitate cross-border trade, including with sanitary and phytosanitary standards, which was something I didn't mention earlier, but is in addition to trade policies or actual tariffs and trade facilitation issues at the border is also a key barrier to the cross-border ability to trade in agriculture in particular. Okay, Doudra? Just taking it down to a very micro level from the policy level to a very micro level on the infrastructure question, one of the things that we learned working in the villages in Rajasthan was that we had gone in with an assumption that girls were dropping out of school at puberty because they were moving to the, they were married very young and then moving to their husband's households as soon as they hit puberty. When we dug into that question, we actually found out that the reason that most of them were dropping out of school was because there were no private toilets in the school. And so they had no privacy and therefore they were simply not gonna go to school. And so real simple, really inexpensive solution there was just to build some simple segregated toilets that gave privacy to the girls. And I think we overlook some of the simple solutions sometimes looking at some of the bigger questions or because we're coming in with these presumptions that it simply was about the marriage issue. So just digging a little deeper to what the particular infrastructure challenges may be. Makani, do you wanna comment on it? Okay. Jen, I'm gonna give you the last word if you wanna comment either on these or if you wanna make just some broader reflections on what the conversation was today. Let me respond just to some of the latest questions. One of the questions is how do we align our efforts in the area of women's empowerment? How do we get better alignment between the public, the private sector, civil society? I do think as Oxfam encouraged Nestle, so I would encourage others to sign up to the women's empowerment principles. Actually it creates a structure. It's a very structured approach. There's seven principles. And I think the most important of those goes back to what Makani said before, number seven, which is about measure and publicly report on progress to achieve gender equality. And it is in that very measurement and getting the measurement right, both at a macro level, but also at a community and an intervention level that we'll be able to better align our efforts. So I do think that the women's empowerment principles are both sufficiently broad but they have enough meat on them, particularly in the measurement space to encourage better alignment for all of us. And then, so that's very specific to the women's empowerment agenda. What I'd like to do just in closing this panel is take a step back and reflect on what we heard in the first panel and then in this one about the need for working in partnership because these are challenging issues, challenging issues for businesses, challenging issues for the public sector and how do we do that? And I think there are a few things that stand in our way and there's a way to get beyond it. So one of the things that stands in the way of partnerships is the old school mindset of name and shame. So I work in civil society. I can tell the company you're a bad company, you're not doing this right and then basically tell the company go fix it. But that doesn't really recognize the fact that the societal problems are difficult to solve. You can't just fix it through name and shame. And in fact this comes from the human rights expert John Rugge. We need to shift to know and show. And know and show means you're going to measure what the problem is. You're gonna collectively across sectors look at what the problem is and then decide who can best address it. So I think in order to move forward and work collectively on some of these issues, we have to draw on the Rugge framework that comes from the human rights tradition and go out of name and shame and into know and show and that again underlines the critical importance of measurement of doing the diagnostic, doing the measurement and measuring progress. Great. Okay, you all have been a very excellent audience. There's coffee in the back and please join me in thanking our panelists.