 On behalf of the United States Institute of Peace and in partnership with US Agency for International Development, USAID, I want to welcome you to the public event Women Entrepreneurship and Rebuilding War-Torn Communities. My name is Kathleen Kienist. I'm the Gender Director here at the Institute and I'm looking forward to being a moderator of this event over the next 90 minutes. In addition to the participants we have in this room, we are webcasting live today. So I'm going to ask all of you, if you wouldn't mind, turning off your blackberries or your phones, certainly turning off the calling speaker. We would most appreciate that. Also if you are joining us by webcast today, we would love it if you want to join in on the Q&A session by emailing any questions to our speakers and discussants today at gender at usip.org. And we will certainly be able to collect those and during our Q&A session today, we will hopefully be able to read those. We are focused today on the understudied yet notable role that women's entrepreneurial activities can and do play in conflict and post-conflict societies. Although we know that violent wars disrupt the social fabric of communities, our policies and practices are only beginning now to grasp what it means when social, political and economic roles for women and men are suspended. It's just temporarily, sometimes for a long time. Much of the literature to date has correctly identified the severe limitations for women's economic access during and after conflict. But today we want to focus in on this window of opportunity when gender roles are shuffled, turned upside down or not adhered to at all, a period of time in which in order to survive innovations take place. Take place during this loosening of social structures of traditional gender roles. We have several decades now of experience in defining the microfinance world for women. But I'd like to suggest to you today what we are on the threshold of is really a new era of policy development where we are reframing women's economic potential, especially after war or disaster, and focusing on women's agency to see the unanticipated and to bring this innovation to a broader scope even in war-torn societies. Just last Wednesday President Obama asserted that countries where women are empowered are more likely to be peaceful and prosperous. Today we have further evidence to underline the President's statement on the correlation between women's empowerment and peaceful and prosperous societies. We are very fortunate to have with us two experts today who have focused in on this important niche of women entrepreneurs in war-torn societies. These women who are reshaping business as we know it, a landscape that stretches far beyond the micro-landing niche. In order of presentation I'm happy to introduce today Paddy Padish who will discuss her new U.S. aid report, Women's Empowerment Arising from Violent Conflict. It is available on the table out beyond the doors here as well as it will be on the website. This study draws upon 125 women's lives stories to examine factors shaping women's agency and local recovery processes in four conflict-affected countries. I also want to introduce Gail Tezmuk Limon who will present her findings from the widely acclaimed New York Times bestselling book that she authored, The Dressmaker of Kair Kanan, Five Sisters, One Remarkable Family, and the Women Who Risked Everything to Keep Them Safe. I've asked both of them to speak for about 15 minutes and then we'll ask my colleagues here today from USA to weigh in on the issues raised. Barani Pan is the Senior Economic Advisor in the Office of Afghanistan and Pakistan Affairs. She has been a real partner with USIP in bringing the panelists you see in front of you together so I want to say a special thank you to Barani. And Stacey Young who is USA's Senior Knowledge Management Advisor for Micro- Enterprise Development. She comes to us today. We thank her at the last minute because Karen Gron was ill today and we really appreciate your effort in being here. So without any further delay and really getting us into this conversation and I want to emphasize we have purposefully allowed a lot of time for Q&A because I know within this room and abroad there are so many experts who can weigh in on this and so we expect at the end of the presentations and the end of the discussions for you all to take the mics with comments and questions as well. So first of all I would like to welcome Paddy Paddish. Paddy, I think I'm going to take away my take away. Excuse me. There we go. Good afternoon everybody. I am delighted to be here and very delighted to speak before Gail, the New York Times Prize-winning journalist. I have to say thank you very much to Barani Penn and Stacey Young for making it possible for me to undertake this study. I want to thank Kathleen and USIP for cosponsoring. Mercy Corps hosted me for the research and QED provided very valuable coordination support. Due to time constraints I cannot present my entire presentation that I have in the slides but they'll give you a broad overview of my study and I hope you'll take a look at them. The origins come from the World Bank for my study. It's a very large data set of 15 countries. I am going to be talking particularly about the set of countries affected by conflict and those findings were written up in volume four moving out of poverty rising from the ashes of conflict. My study on women's roles in recovery processes just draws from four countries and the largest data set of life stories that was available in those countries. It focuses on a period from 1995 to 2005. I want to start the presentation by giving you two take away messages that I hope you'll bring with you from the presentation. The first is that the women who are living in communities that were directly affected by violent conflict rated more highly on empowerment measures than the women who are living in communities that were not affected by conflict in these countries. The life stories reveal that conflict and recovery while bringing great suffering were also periods of opportunity for women and this is as Kathleen alluded to in her introduction. Gender norms were disrupted, livelihoods were disrupted, local institutions were disrupted and I'll be talking about some of the other sources of change that allowed women to play more active roles in their economy and also in their communities. The second take away message just focuses on the set of communities in my study that were affected by conflict and what I found is that the communities that recovered more quickly, the communities that experienced more rapid poverty reduction in the period of time after conflict ended or the worst forms of conflict ended were also the communities that featured more empowered women. Where women had the opportunity, they made a real difference in their own lives, in the recovery of their families and in the recovery of their communities. To understand the analytic approach that I used, it's all framed by empowerment and I define empowerment as a product of the interaction between women's agency and their local opportunity structures. Agency, I define as women's capacities to mobilize their assets and resources, their assets and capabilities to pursue their own interests. To receive a rating of substantially empowered, a woman had to have indicated during the course of telling her life story that she made independent decisions about her education, about her occupation, about her marriage and child bearing decisions, about her friendships, about joining a local group and about political engagement. So in three of those six areas, she had to specify her role and her decisions. Now, the life stories were not designed for this analysis. I had to develop this retroactively, but it provided an amazing data set for me to do this. Under the second half of my report, I look at local community opportunity structures that support women's agency and empowerment and I focused on three factors, security, markets and local democracy and governance. And looking at the final factor, I also looked at how communities made use of the post-conflict aid that was coming down. So here is a snapshot of my sample. Due to time constraints, I need to refer you to the report to get the details on how the study approached the sampling, the data collection tools that were used, the subjective measures of mobility or poverty reduction, and also the war context. Very quickly, though, I want to say the data set is very large, very rich, offered many opportunities for me to triangulate findings and solve puzzles. Nevertheless, the sample design is uneven. So I hope this study encourages more quantitative and qualitative work in the future on these set of issues. So this slide compares the women's empowerment ratings across, whoops, I'm sorry, I just found out today that I would have PowerPoint capability. So you're going to have to hang with me. I don't have time to present on all the slides. So this slide compares the women's empowerment ratings across the four countries. Or more specifically, the share of women in each country data set that received a rating of substantially empowered. What emerges are important commonalities and differences between the countries. Most women have little education, significant numbers work during childhood. As adults, a large majority of these women were economically active prior to the war, as well as after, mainly moving in and out of farm and on farm work. Generally, they described their family life as harmonious, although there were important exceptions, and quite a few mentioned participating in at least one group. However, the women from the Philippines, and there the study is set in Mindanao, the autonomous region of Muslim Mindanao. And they were the most educated, controlled the most assets, they enjoyed the most respect and support in their family, they displayed the most advantageous social capital. This surprised me. And I hope you'll dig into the paper to find out what's behind this very strong agency in Mindanao. When I look across the assets and capabilities of the women, four big messages stand out. And today I'm going to give you two. I can give you the other two in the Q&A, if you'd like. One very important finding for me was that the dowry practices in Mindanao and the inheritance practices also in Mindanao and in Indonesia gave women control of substantial assets, physical assets, land and houses, and sometimes businesses that were passed down to them that they controlled and they intend to pass on to their daughters. These assets were very important to understanding their recovery and their resilience and also their important economic roles and their status in the household. The second big dimension is on women's economic initiatives and their coping mechanisms during conflict. They were compelled to do this. But in the wake of conflict, they often pushed this further in many communities. Sets of forces contributed to this. One that was very important is that in post-conflict aid, a lot of new infrastructure, electricity, water, and roads came into communities that did not have these services. Women not only found their household burdens becoming much lighter as a consequence of the infrastructure, but it freed up time and it made it easier for them to grow their livelihoods. For the first time, women were selling prepared foods and cold drinks from their refrigerators and therefore could earn much higher profits. And there were examples like this across the communities, how infrastructure made a real difference in their lives. Part, I have to skip. And maybe I just leave the slides, because my time is limited. The fourth part of the report examines local opportunity structures. It looks in particular at a subset of communities that I call the superstars. And to be labeled a superstar, you had to get out of it. You had to get your community to recover fast. And lots of poverty reduction happened in my superstars. Secondly, almost all the women who were interviewed for their life stories received very high ratings of empowerment. And when I looked across these superstars, three sets of factors were present in them. And the first was, after the war, a modicum of local security was established. And this is really fundamental to understanding women's economic opportunities. They really need local security. And I provided a case study where this wasn't present. And you can see how their initiative unraveled because of it. The second really key factor is that these communities, for all sorts of reasons, had access in one way or another to an active market, either a road or transport. Women's effective labor markets are much smaller than men's because of their household responsibilities. And so they need physical proximity or infrastructure that eases their access to active markets. And then the third factor is, very often in these communities, they had effective local leaders who could tamp down a lot of crime and violence that surrounds conflict regions. They also attracted a lot of post-conflict aid and they made sure that all the social groups in their community could benefit from this aid. I think the period after conflict, these leaders need to reestablish legitimacy and they're working very hard to do so. And there's a great drive to recover in these communities. And so you see 100 houses go up in six months' time. There's all of this energy and drive and thirst to get life back to normal as fast as possible. And in communities that had the local structures to get the aid in, widely distributed, you saw very fast recovery. And women clearly benefited from this. There was one superstar region and this was North Maluku. In this region, all five of the conflict communities in the sample experienced very rapid poverty reduction. All five of the communities had very empowered women. And this was a special context of a short conflict, 11 months, and then full peace. It's a special context of strong economic growth. It was a very diversified economy on North Maluku, including in agriculture. They were exporting spices on international markets. And then finally, you had strong local governance, which is a tall order in many contexts, I know. But they also had very effective, decentralized, participatory, community-driven, post-conflict aid. And women, substantial resources were decentralized down to women's groups. They used it for their economic initiatives. They could participate in and benefit from the post-conflict period because of this. And I think North Maluku is a lesson for other conflict contexts to learn from, even though it had a very good set of conditions supporting the outcomes there. So the report outlines a set of entry points for policies and programs. Some of the interventions are also needed in non-conflict communities because gender inequalities and other barriers to women's economic, political, social participation are widely present. But the post-conflict period offers a rare window of opportunity that should not be ignored because local institutions and gender norms are in flux. There's a lot of aid coming down. And it's a very wonderful opportunity to take advantage of four women on the ground and supporting them. Thank you very much. Thank you, Patty. I think that set up a very good framework, even though we don't have the entire report in front of us. I think you've added to some new ideas to contemplate and certainly controlled physical assets, access to technology and infrastructure. We rarely think about that. And of course, the transport, the vicinity, the prospect of how actually you can make a market happen. And now I think with Gail to follow up here, Gail can bring a story that will illustrate a lot of the points that I think Patty has laid out here in the work with Camila Cumula. Please, Gail. Thank you. It's lovely to be here. Thank you all for coming out on a warm afternoon. At least it's nice and cool in here. I want to sort of, you talked about reframing at the beginning, Kathleen. So I think I want to pick up on that on three areas. First of all, I think when we think of war stories, we don't think of women. So if I say, tell me a war story, it will almost never involve a woman. And that is part of why I wrote The Dressmaker of which tells the true story of a young woman whose business created jobs for women all around her community during the Taliban years. And I'll tell you a little bit about how I backed into writing this story. I went to, and I talk about this in the beginning of the book, I went to Kabul from Boston. I was in my second year. I'd been at ABC News and then went to business school, quit journalism as my day job and went to business school. And I was really befuddled at the beginning of business school because people were using nouns that were verbs and verbs that were nouns. I had no idea what in the world I'd gotten myself into. But I went to business school because exactly as how he was just talking about, and as Kathleen mentioned, to be in economics is where the action is. That is what makes the difference in women's lives and in family's lives. And so I went to Kabul to write a story for the Financial Times about women entrepreneurs. And the guy at Dulles Airport said to me, I have no idea why you're going for a couple of weeks because that will take you about half a day to interview women entrepreneurs. And I think that's what everybody thought. And so I ended up actually at the offices of Mercy Corps on a very cold December afternoon meeting this young woman who was telling me about how she had given up the opportunity of a job with the international community that would have paid her about $2,000 a month because she was going to start her next business. And she said to me, money is power for women. And earning an income earns respect. And that is incredibly true in a traditional society like Afghanistan. And she said that honestly, I really believe that why I'm starting this next business, which is a business consultancy that's going to go all around Afghanistan and teach entrepreneurship skills to men and women, is because nothing will get our society out of all of the decades of conflict, like economic stability. And it's business that will make the difference long after the set of international's leaves Afghanistan. So I looked at her at that point. And I said, well, you know, I'm barely 30. And I'm pretty certain you're not 30. So why in the world and how in the world do you know this much? Why are you so passionate about entrepreneurship? And she looked at me as if it were the most natural thing in the world and said, well, Gail, I had this great business under the Taliban. And it was actually the Taliban years that made me an entrepreneur, to your point, about the opening of opportunities for women because I was supposed to be a professor. And I had just finished two years of teacher training. And I was planning to go to work and go to university and then go to work. And everything went away. And I had absolutely no ability to do anything I'd ever been trained for. So I did the one thing I still could. I became an entrepreneur. And it turned out that this business, that she started. And I talk about in the book a lot of how there were so many obstacles to overcome. First of all, she didn't know how to sew. Because I think like so many educated people, she had never bothered to learn the skills her mother had been trying to teach her. You should learn to sew. You should learn a marketable skill. Oh, I'm going to class. I'm going to university. I don't have time for that. And then came the Taliban years. And everything else was closed. So that was a big obstacle, obviously, to get around. But she did it because I think like all good entrepreneurs, she looked around and saw the set of circumstances she faced, which is, OK, I have five brothers and sisters at home who are counting on me to survive. And there are a couple market opportunities, to your point about market linkages. First of all, male tailors cannot sew for women anymore under the Taliban rules. Second of all, women can't be in offices that can't work, they can't go to school, they can't do anything outside, but we can work at home. So there's an opportunity. And the third thing is there is still a market for dresses. And it's even better market for people like us, because all the wealthy people have left Kabul. So everybody who had money, who used to be buying fancy dresses imported from China and Pakistan and Iran were no longer there. So the market for dresses was for kind of cheap, handmade goods. And at gailaman.com, my website, you'll see the book trailer, has some pictures of those dresses in case you're interested. And the reason why there was still a market was because no matter how bad things are, women still want to look good. And that is as true in Taliban-era Afghanistan as it is in Washington, DC. So these young women, they found a market opportunity. And so she started this dressmaking business under the Taliban that ended up creating work for women all around her neighborhood. And it created jobs at a time when there were none, and hope in a city that was really starved for it. And I honestly was shocked when she started telling me that it was the Taliban that made her an entrepreneur in many ways. She said, war brings us terrible things, but it also uncovers opportunity. And the five years I spent bringing the dressmaker of Karkinah to life, I think really taught me so much about the fact that even I had seen war stories as men's stories. And here was a story about women who had made sure there was a community to go back to when the conflict was over. And I think that that ability to find opportunity and even the most grim circumstances is what entrepreneurship is about. And women do it every day in communities all around the world, and almost no one pays attention. Which brings me to the second thing I want to talk about, which is that I think we see women as victims of war to be pitied rather than survivors of war to be respected. And this has real economic ramifications because you don't invest in victims. Now, I went to Harvard Business School. I never saw a class about investing in victims. I mean, you see a class about investing in assets, investing in survivors, investing in resilient economies, but nothing about investing in victims. And the narrative about women are sort of helpless and don't have agency is absolutely divorced from the reality you see on the ground. Because when you spend time as so many of you have in tough parts of the world, you see that women just get on with it because they have to. For the same reason that single parents here, often single moms, work two or three jobs or whatever it takes to make sure that their kids are fed, women in conflict, because they're the population you have left, because they're the people who are not all fighting, maintain the economy. And they make sure that kids are fed and kids survive. And yet we almost never think about their work. And I think even as a reporter working in a place like Afghanistan, you almost apologize for writing stories about women, because that's not the hard stuff. It's sort of the side show. The real story is what's going on with either men with guns or men in suits. I mean, it just has nothing to do with women. And so I think that what I wanted this book to show, and what I really think the Kamala story is so powerful in my own doing, is to show the fact that it is women who are pulling communities through. And when a brick goes through a window, it is women who get out the broom, sweep up the pieces, and put up a tarp where the window used to be. And somehow it's those women who pick up the pieces every single day, whose work we see is soft, when it is really, really hard. If you want to talk about hard environments for business, think about the Taliban era. First of all, you couldn't be out without wearing a burqa. That actually, in Kamala's case, she turned it into an advantage because it meant no shopkeeper would ever see her. So if the Taliban rule said you couldn't do business with women, you could never identify her, because there were a lot of women with burqas running around Kabul. The second circumstance you faced was vice and virtue. So the Anurban Maruf, which is in Dari, which is the vice and virtue forces, which were entirely new to Afghanistan, entirely new to Kabul, these guys were the Taliban's foot soldiers. And they would drive around in Toyota Hilux pickup trucks, sometimes with Quranic verses on their side, looking for rule breakers. And they would sweep down with either a wooden baton or a television antenna, or an AK-47, whichever happened to be the most readily available, to bring people into line who were breaking the Taliban's rules. And so it was with great trepidation that Kamala's sister actually taught her how to sew, because she was terrified about her sister being out in the market or in the wrong place at the wrong time. And Kamala said, look, we'll do everything we can to stay within the rules. And so what they did was I think what you see, there's women in your study and the women we talk about in this book is they turned the disadvantage to an advantage, which is, OK, I will follow the rules to a tee. I will always take my younger brother out with me. He will be my chaperone or maharam, because women could not go out by themselves during the Taliban years. I will stay out of the market during the time of prayer. These are all the things Kamala promised her sister. So I will not be there during the time of prayer, although, as you'll see in the book occasionally, she does, because it's really hard to avoid. And third of all, I won't use my real name, because because the tailors can't see my face, they'll never know who I really am. And so if anybody ever comes looking, they won't see me. But there was a market, and this goes back to the point. There was a market because people wanted the goods and shopkeepers needed inventory, because all the stuff to import was too difficult. It was too difficult to get to Pakistan. It was too difficult to get to Iraq. So that is why there was a market for these dresses. And I think one of the things that I was so struck by was that as much as Kamala's business created a living room lifeline in terms of the economics, right? Because I think one of the stories people don't think of when they think of the Taliban years is the economics piece. People were desperate. They were selling baby dolls and shoelaces and doors and windows, and some people were selling their children in some ways. They would get money to send their kid to go work in Pakistan because they would at least feel like their kid would be fed. They had no ability to support it. And that's why a business like this, this dress making business that started with one dress and grew into a lifeline for a whole neighborhood, really did make the difference between survival and starvation for so many. And I think that as much as that economics piece was so interesting, it was also the fact that these women created communities for themselves. No foreign savior came in to give them jobs or to help them. These women did it on their own by themselves. And their story was largely overlooked for years. And so when I started to work on this and I would do research, and I would go to reporting trips in Kabul in 2008 and 2009, sometimes coming to visit Kathleen during those trips, I got a lot of criticism from journalists. I'm sorry to say it, but I will. Mostly European, mostly men, who would say to me, you know, Gail, you're really writing about the exceptions. And I had a couple of answers for that. And the first one is that these girls are as Afghan as the young women you think of when you think of Afghan women huddled in a burqa who never leave the house in Kandahar. These young women were in their country through the Russian years, through the civil war, through the Taliban, and now. And they have every right to have their story told in the same way. Second of all, look at your own history. In the 1970s in Switzerland, women couldn't vote. And the first group of women to graduate from West Point was 1980. In the 1970s, women in the Foreign Service who got married had to quit in the United States. So before everybody feels so superior about how far and advanced we are, this is recent history we're talking about. And the third thing I say is there's no society anywhere in the world that is not changed except by its exceptions. And these young women are homegrown role models and there are plenty of them. And so before people dismiss them out of hand because they are the exceptions, because, and I will say I think that in part that's because they're women. Because if they're men, they're on the vanguard and if they're women, they're exceptions. And I say this as somebody who has a lot of fondness for my profession of journalism, but I do have to poke fun at it because if somebody like me goes to pitch a story about women entrepreneurs to a notable newspaper record, oftentimes they'll hear, well, I think somebody else did that a couple months back. Yeah, but you run entrepreneurship stories every day, they just happen to be about men. Somehow women entrepreneurs get an asterisk next to them when they're creating the same exact kind of economic growth. And that brings me to my third point and another reason why I wrote The Dressmaker. And I wrote it as a story because I wanted people who didn't care about women's stuff, who don't care about Afghanistan to pick it up and read it. And what has been so moving to me honestly is the entrepreneurs who've written me who've said that this book helped them with their own business obstacles, because at least they didn't have the Taliban to contend with. When they were out trying to think about how to raise capital or how to be out there every day. We don't often think of Afghanistan as a place people find inspiration. And yet it is these stories of women who are going around the obstacles and exploiting every single opportunity, not just for themselves, but for the whole community that I think shows the power of the human spirit to overcome almost anything you put in front of it. And if it happens to be women who are doing it so much, the better. But I think that my third point it is that we aim low and small dollar when it comes to women. If I say microfinance, you think of women. And if I say entrepreneurship, you think of men. And yet women are capable of so much more than micro. And in fact, we get them to the point where they understand power of business and then how do you grow out of micro? It's really, really difficult to grow from micro to small, medium, larger enterprise. And that's honestly and truly why I purposely did not write about microfinance. Because it is a wonderful tool. I have interviewed a lot of micro entrepreneurs who really are alive and thriving and economic contributors only because of microfinance. It is a powerful tool. But we have somehow confused a solution with the solution when it comes to women. And we don't do that for men. So when I first went to a couple of these countries to write stories for the Herald Tribune or for the FTE about women entrepreneurs, I cannot tell you how many international officials said to me, well, Gail, we don't have women doing small business. We do have a couple women selling cheese by the side of the road. So maybe you could go interview them. I swear, I could not make that up. I mean, that's a true story. And so when the story ran, it was a weekend business cover in the International Herald Tribune. And I said, oh, just in case you're looking for women for your next investment conference, here are a couple, one of whom is running the country's largest advertising agency. Another of whom is creating jobs in a textile business that has received almost no support from anyone outside a woman that she cleaned homes for who sent her a 20,000-year-old loan. And that's how she got started because she couldn't get capital at the beginning. So I think the story of Kamala and the power of business to create hope even at a time that was really drained of it, even during the Taliban years when every obstacle was against these young women, shows that this is a powerful example of the power of entrepreneurship to change lives and the power of women in business to create change on the ground. And the fact that women could be breadwinners during years in which they couldn't even be on the street shows you that if you can give women just a little bit of support and investment, it will go a long, long way because women are not just collateral damage when it comes to war, they are contributors when it comes to peace. And I hope that the dressmaker and the conversations we have go a little bit away to changing the discussion. So thank you so much. Thank you, Gail, for not only bringing these points home but in an entertaining way and reminding us of our own frameworks that we have to break through. And in doing that, Baroni, I'm gonna ask you as a discussant if you could help look at this confusion that Gail is talking about a solution with the solution and help give us some policy guidance on moving forward. Good afternoon. I'm pleased to be here and thank you, Kathleen, for joining us in this event and hosting us here at USIP's beautiful facilities. On the Mall, I think it's just wonderful to sort of capture the kind of work that you're doing in physical form. And I'd like to thank Patty and Gail for their comments too. They have different styles and they're presenting different cases, but I think there are many common threads that we wanna push on. Patty's work I'm very familiar with because she came to us, Stacy and I, and said I've got all this data from the World Bank and we wanna do a gender analysis on it. Could you help us? And so we agreed to it and it's been a year, I think, in the making and since I was partly responsible for it, I don't have any other comments but besides to say it's a great study, read it. But that's a bit biased and I would go into more detail about that. The event, I think, is very timely also because we have at the World Bank, they do these annual reports called the World Development Report and this current year is on conflict and the next year is on gender so I feel that we are sort of at the very intersection of those topics and it's so very important to really understand at many different levels analytically, programmatically, getting those issues to be very well understood by the international community. I wanted to acknowledge Gail's comment about economics is where it is. I find that very refreshing since most people think that economics is a very dismal science and then to say this is where it is and this is where we should be moving on and as an economist, a program economist, I find that very refreshing since where we are sometimes relegated to the very technical level where it's not so exciting. The cases that you've heard this morning shouldn't shock you. There are many cases that have been presented in other countries where women have played such a pivotal role in their nation's recovery and I cite here Rwanda, Liberia, so it shouldn't be a surprise but I would agree with Gail that there's certain ideas of women in economics, women in these post-conflict environments where people may automatically think about certain solutions such as microfinance. Stacy is from that office and I used to be in that office and all I can say for now and I think Stacy will follow up on this is that that's very much true. There is a role for microfinance and it has been very central to helping women survive and have vital economic lives in very poor conditions and in conflict conditions that can be also very useful but what we are looking at in terms of research is to find out the factors that prevent them from coming from microfinance to small and medium enterprises. Is it a matter of household responsibilities? Is it a matter of risk taking? Because there are risks in scaling up a business from micro to small and medium enterprises so we have to be very realistic about that. If you put that expectation out there you also need to be dealing with both the risk and the reward. In terms of some of the comments that Patty has made on the importance of different types of assets I think we know very well that assets play a major role in whether a person can prosper or not but I think that something very important in these kind of environments is the non-economic factors such as the norms, the behaviors and the attitudes of community leaders, the role of social capital and networks. Those things are very intangible but you cannot underestimate their importance in environments where the formal structures are not there, the formal institutions are not there so I think that's also worthy of more study. Let me skip again on back to Afghanistan. I've recently joined the Office of Afghanistan and Pakistan Affairs at USAID so I'm still coming to speed on many things but we do know, I think if you're very familiar with the country that's the statistics for women in that country have been very dismal when we first arrived in Afghanistan in the early 2000s. Those statistics have improved in terms of health and education and even in terms of economic and poverty but there is much more to do and I won't go through all the things that USAID is doing in that country. You can check it out for yourself on the USA.gov website. I also have some handouts that I put on the table that you can access but we are supporting women in business training, entrepreneurship and education so many of those things we are looking at and we are trying to help with. But as we become more engaged in those kind of activities it's my personal view that we need to go beyond as Gail was saying, beyond microfinance. We need to look at small and medium enterprises. We need to see the potential women's leadership in the business community and other means. What is it that we can do to make this more of a market economy that is driven by supply and demand rather than subsidies and just one-off kind of interactions? What can we do to move the economy towards regional integration, international markets? That's the medium term, long term objective and there are many things that have to be done in the meantime and I again would think about the non-economic factors, the political factors, the political economy factors that would either accelerate or dampen that kind of progress. Those kind of questions are very complicated as you know Afghanistan is but that is the reality. Lastly I think that we would as a community benefit for more research of this type both quantitative and qualitative. Patty's study I think draws out some very important observations but what we don't know are the causality factors. What exactly caused this or was there a relationship of causality or was it some correlation that was fortuitous? Another question that I would have is can these kind of gender roles be sustained beyond on the post-conflict recovery? Would they revert back to previous status before the conflict or even worse were they be further regressed than they were before? And then finally can we open this kind of space for changes and improvements and gender roles without having to rely on conflict or war? What is the problem here? Is it a matter of having some dramatic revolution and thinking or information? What is that? It's that's the question for social scientists and I think again I urge more research on this and I think that today though we've gone as you can see from these two very potent presentations we've gone pretty far in looking at those issues but I hope in the future that we can even look even more in depth with more research. Thank you. Thank you Barani. I'm now going to turn to Stacy Young, Senior Knowledge Management Advisor at USAID in Micro Enterprise. Help us bring this into focus a little further in terms of the policy question. Sure, yeah and thanks for identifying that as a key issue because that is I think for those of us at USAID where the questions emerge. What of these findings of these two really interesting studies? What are the implications for what donors can influence and what are the things that donors can influence? So looking for example at the lists that both of you generated of conditions that need to be in place in order for openings to occur and then for women to be able to achieve different and better outcomes for themselves than were the case before. You know when I'm thinking of this from a donor perspective I'm thinking okay well we can't really go out and catalyze conflict, right? That's not really our job as donors and I don't think anybody would say that that is the best or most efficient or effective path to the kinds of changes that you're both highlighting but I think that there are some implications for what donors can influence that both of you have identified. Both of you talked about for example the importance of active markets and certainly donors can play a role in facilitating the development of dynamic markets. This is work that we know how to do even if we don't always do it as effectively as possible but that is something that we know how to do but I think what you identified as an area that really does need more attention is how to do that in a way that benefits women and I think that there are some real keys here to why in international development we haven't gotten more traction on women's empowerment and breaking down gender divisions than we have. Patty you know because of our conversation over the past week about your study that when I see the policy recommendations that you've made for donors there's a lot there that's familiar. There are things that we've been saying for a long time about what we need to do in order to produce better outcomes for women in a variety of contexts whether they be post-conflict or not but I think what is critical here and something that you've identified that's extremely valuable for donors is that window of opportunity and that specific context in which changes is possible more than it has been before because of the shifts in gender roles and the shifts in local structures so when I think from a donor perspective I think the reason that we haven't made more of that is because of this failure that both of you identified and Gail you were talking about this in terms of changing the way that donors approach markets for example so rather than coming in post-conflict and saying okay how can we restore things to the status that they were prior to the conflict really looking at the implications of what you've highlighted Patty and saying there is a window of opportunity here to make things different so maybe the goal shouldn't be getting back to where things were before but maybe really what we should be focusing on here is this brief window of opportunity understanding it better understanding that in this moment using the approaches that we've identified as being the ones that would be helpful on the gender front using those can gain us more traction at this particular moment in understanding the temporal nature of that opportunity and the urgency with which we need to seize that opportunity at that particular moment so really that requires us to look differently at I think what our role is in those particular moments again looking forward and seeing a window of opportunity vis-a-vis gender outcomes as opposed to saying what's needed here is to restore things to the way that they were prior to the conflict so I think that's one really important implication for donors. I wanted also to just circle back around as Barani suggested to this question about micro-enterprise and micro-finance and its relationship to small and medium enterprise and I really appreciate the thinking that has been done now in the comments that all three of you offered regarding women's role in small and medium entrepreneurship I think it has for too long been the case that micro-finance and micro-enterprise development have really been used as kind of a gender ghetto that sort of women's thing as long as we've got micro-enterprise development covered we've got women covered and we don't really have to think about women's role in other parts of markets and I think that it's exciting to hear you talking about women having an active role in small and medium enterprise in ways that we can help to expand that role for women. At the same time I think that it's useful to see that in a dynamic relationship with micro-enterprise development precisely because small and medium enterprises rely on micro-entrepreneurs to supply inputs for their enterprises so understanding that that the two are not separate and isolated parts of a market continuum but rather are dynamically linked and mutually reliant I think that also might produce some important insights into how we can recognize and facilitate the strengthening of micro-enterprise opportunities for women who may be juggling multiple responsibilities and needing to maintain multiple income streams but then also looking at how emphasizing small and medium entrepreneurship and women's role in that can yield multiple results not just for those women but as Gail makes the point for the many women and others in the community who might become their employees so I think investigating that dynamic relationship is also fruitful for donors. I think I'll leave it now because I'm sure that other people have exciting things to say. Thank you. Thank you.