 Great. Well, good afternoon. Thanks to you all for being here. I know we're going to have a few folks trickling in after they've had a beverage and a chance to catch perhaps some caffeine after what might have already been a long day for you all. So given the hour and given the very busy week and the heavy demands and all your time, we're very grateful that you're here. I'm Nicole Golden. I've been leading the Youth Prosperity and Security Initiative here at CSIS. And as some of you may know, I was quite involved in the inaugural Young African Leaders Forum. I think we called it back in 2010 and then as well with the First Ladies Forum and other activities when I was then with the State Department and USAID. So I am particularly excited to be reunited, so to speak, with Yali and just very honored to be here, to have our fellows with us as well, of course, our other distinguished speakers that you're going to hear from and to see so many friends and new faces in the room with us tonight. I think the robust crowd and the interest that we've seen building up to this conversation just really confirms how important Africa and sort of youth and development, youth development. Africa and its 350 million youth actually are to those of us that are working towards thinking about seeking prosperity and security, not only in Africa but really all over the world. I think the two folk I have our conversation today, higher education and entrepreneurship among youth are really no doubt critical to promoting economic growth and stability. And I think we really will have a great conversation with you all about the different column dynamics or elements of those two forces. Whether it's thinking about education from a content delivery and financing perspective, thinking about enabling environments and what it means to be successful and knowledge and networks and entrepreneurship. So we've got a number of things to cover today and I'm sure with your help and with our distinguished speakers we will. So with no further ado I'm very delighted and grateful that Peter Wojcicki is with us today to help us kick things off. He is a senior advisor to us here at CSIS and among his other accomplishments and accolades and distinguished positions as you can read in his bio he was a former managing director of the IFC. So with no further ado I'll ask Peter to help kick us off and then I'll see you again in a few minutes. Thank you again. Thank you, Nicole. And I have to say I'm terribly delighted that CSIS has organized this forum, the value of higher education in development. And I'm thrilled that we have such a fascinating panel here today to discuss this subject. Let me start with the ladies. Araba Hammond and Regina Aguiar are both graduates of Ashesi University in Accra Ghana. They're just coming, as Nicole said, from the Yali program. Ashesi is a private non-for-profit institution, still small, but is already making a lot of waves in Ghana. With Duffy, one of the most experienced educators in the U.S. does not need much introduction. He was president of the University of Massachusetts and the American University. He served as assistant secretary of state for education and he was responsible and he is responsible now for the quality of academics at Laureate Education. Laureate is the largest for-profit university organization in the world. And last but not least, Mohamed Khan. He is right now the educational specialist at the IFC. He has experience in colleges in Canada as well as in Pakistan. And the IFC has now a total of about a billion dollars in commitments to educational facilities in developing countries. The reason why I'm so excited about this discussion is that it appears that tertiary education is finally, and I do emphasize finally getting the attention from donors and governments in developing countries, attention which it truly deserves. When I started the World Bank in 1999, I read the mission of the World Bank Group and the mission has not changed very much. Today it says it's calls to reduce extreme, to abolish extreme poverty within a generation and to boost shared prosperity. I remember when I started the World Bank Group, I expressed some doubts whether the IFC's aim should be to reduce poverty. I felt the IFC should rather help building and supporting a strong middle class instead in developing countries. Needless to say, that did not make me a popular person among the traditionalists. After a few trips to poor countries, however, I did not need to be a genius to recognize that World Bank experts on their own would not make a dent in poverty rates, unless well educated, passionate and ethical local leaders would take things eventually into their own hands. The problem was glaringly obvious. There were too few of those locals and too often when they existed, they had decided or were deciding to look for more welcoming pastures in Europe or the US. So who was to blame for this misery? The donor community had assigned in the 80s and 90s a very low priority to higher education. Since there was a belief that primary and to a certain extent secondary education had a much higher return on investment. The World Bank between 1995 and 1999 had devoted a mere 7% of its whole educational lending to higher education. And the IFC was discouraged from financing private education which was seen as benefitting only the elites in the poor countries. Universities hence were underfunded, enrollment rates in Africa hovered around 5% until 2005. Many faculties were badly qualified and underpaid and most of the curricula focused little on what industry, commerce, civil society and governments really needed. I was told in 1999 that 80% of all university graduates in Senegal ended up with a degree in French literature. Although studies like higher education and economic development in Africa by Bloom, Canning and Chan, which was published in 2006, clearly showed that economic growth is dependent on higher education successes. Donors and unfortunately many poor countries except for China and India were very slow to adjust to the new reality. But things are finally changing. Innovative social entrepreneurs are starting to invest in education. Even governments and donors recognize that only graduates of local universities trained and educated to ethical leadership taught to think critically and to be entrepreneurial and innovative will have the courage to transform their societies. I'm sure you will agree with me on this one once you have witnessed the discussion among the panelists today. Thank you very much. Thank you Peter as always. Again not only for being here but for offering such wise insights to help get our conversation going. I'm going to ask each of our panelists to just start off by giving their initial thoughts on our overall theme, the value of higher education in development and youth entrepreneurship and I'm going to ask Joe to kick us off. My own background, I look around this room and realize I'm perhaps one of the few people who remembers when this society was deeply segregated and we had what's been called slaves after slavery. I grew up in that kind of a world and got very curious about it. And then got deeply involved thanks to Martin Luther King and Carina and others and the civil rights movement. But I discovered Africa when I went to Paris on an assignment at Yale University and Wally Soinka was on my board and then later when I was at the University of Massachusetts, Cheneva Chibi, I met and brought Cheneva with this family. And I've traveled there now many times. I think education is in a kind of a swirl now. We're struggling to really define the next era and it isn't just the issues we talk about today. I've had a long experience with China and I have many Chinese families who contact me now because there's one child and they want to get them into Harvard and Preston and they're a little stunned when I say, I wouldn't go to Harvard. It's an undergraduate and they say, where would you go? I would go to Arizona State. Fortunately, I've gotten four or five in there because that's a school that cares, that understands that the essence of what happens in higher education is learning to learn and that you have to be in a situation where students interact themselves as well as with a professor. The Harvard Alumni Association had a meeting here recently and the president of Harvard was telling us would they design a classroom now? They take the auditorium and all the seats they make to pivot so the students can turn and have four-way conversations after they listen to a professor for a while and then come back. There's a new pedagogy that we have a lot of faculty who don't understand this, I think. Because it's changed, it's a dramatic, dramatic change. Well, let me just stop at that point because I think it is that change in higher education and what it means, what it's about, I would describe it more now as learning to learn than being stuffed full of some vision of the world. And I'll go on about the Florida later. Great, thank you. But a quick follow-up, because you have, as you just said, been an observer and an active sort of, played an active observer, so to speak, in the higher education scene in Africa, in particular for so long. I'm just curious if you can just tell us some, you know, sort of your initial thoughts on what's been some of the biggest changes you've seen in terms of the environment, if you will, for higher education in Africa, whether it's what's being taught. I mean, you mentioned the learning to learn, but whether it's, you know, accessibility, if you're seeing movement there, affordability. I hope that all of you will spend a little time on the Internet looking at the incredible explosion of ideas and exchanges that are taking place because of this meeting and this summit going on here. It's incredible, people debating back and forth and expressing their views. Let's just begin by looking at the digital, the cell phones are not that less present among young people in Africa than they are in this country, and asking of questions. And going into the, those who, frankly, go into the Internet and look at what they're doing, that's all changing the nature of how we think. Great, I'm sure we're going to come back to you or hear a little bit more on technology and its impact on higher education in Africa. Ereba, if you wouldn't mind sort of giving us some initial thoughts from your perspective on the value of higher education. It's you. Thank you. So I grew up in a family where going on to higher education was expected, it was a given. So there was no question about whether I would make a choice when I got to that point. The only question was where I would go. Now the thing about higher education from the Ghanaian context is that many people also believe that it's the way to go. It's the only thing that will get you a job. However, once you get there, it's the quality of education that determines what happens in the end. Now I had the opportunity to go to a high school where we were encouraged to think about development, think about serving the community. So after high school, I felt that the natural course was to go to a college that would continue to build on that. But I couldn't find a college in Ghana that was ready to do that at the time. So I actually took time off to study something else for a while until I heard about Sashasih University. And I had a cousin who had started and transferred to Germany and that's where I ended up going. And you find that the culture and the engagement of students, they were totally different. There was actually a preparation that was leading people on to the current work environments. And for me, that's what was the most important and that's what I find missing currently all across the continent. During the summit, there are quite a number of people from other African countries who are working in organizations or coming up with non-profit ideas to address the mismatch between what's being taught in schools and what the job market actually needs. And the sheer number of such projects, ideas makes one realize that it's a big issue that we need to deal with. And so that's basically the context that we're in right now. Just to follow up on that, can you maybe tell us for those of us in the room who may not be as familiar with what is so unique about the Sashasih curriculum and the Sashasih program on what you think is most unique about it and particular aspects that you think you bring from your education experience into your career and into your success? Generally, in Ghana, when you go to college, you're expecting that you will be given notes. Your professor will either give you handouts or dictate notes and you take them away with you and prepare for an exam. We rely a lot on exam grades, so the general focus is I need to pass this exam. That was not the case at Sashasih. The focus is really on critical thinking and on analyzing issues, questioning concepts, and thinking outside the box, coming out with ideas that may not fit into the norm, but at least create room for a discussion. And that kind of relationship between faculty and students does not cut across board in Ghana. To add to that, there was also a lot of encouragement for civic engagement, being involved in your society, finding solutions to problems that exist. Again, it's something that's unique that doesn't cut across board. Most college students in Ghana are thinking about getting that paper and putting in applications for jobs and hoping that they'll be employed. Sashasih graduates are looking at solving problems with their degrees and they don't care about branching off into other areas because they feel prepared to handle whatever areas that they end up in. Thank you. I want to come back to this idea about citizenship learning and where that happens. But for now, I'm going to ask Mohamed comes from a different perspective from the IFC. So I'm going to ask him to sort of give some of his opening thoughts and in particular reactions to some of Peter's opening comments and how the donor environment around higher education has changed. Thank you, Nicole. I think the conversation has changed in the donor community, particularly in view of the global employment scenario. As we know that the unemployment statistics for underdeveloped or for emerging markets are really staggering. I mean, just look at the MENA region and all the implications in the Arab Spring. If we look at the data from South Asia or from Africa, the huge youth populations that are either underemployed or unemployed. And that has changed the conversation in the donor community. My own organization IFC came out with a landmark publication about a year and a half ago on jobs. The World Development Report has focused on it in a very central way. So the focus has shifted to maybe just beyond higher education to higher education that's linked to positive employment outcomes. And I think that today's discussion we need to factor that in because both education and entrepreneurship drive growth in different ways. And I think what we are doing, IFC being the largest multilateral that invests in the private sector globally is very centrally focused on expanding our investment footprint in higher education but in a more strategic way. That is to look for investable opportunities in emerging markets in quality affordable education but that lead to employment. And happy to expand on that conversation as we go along. Thanks. Great. Thank you. I remember from the jobs report I think is where it first saw the statistic that a million jobs a month are needed in Africa. Subterran Africa I believe to absorb new entrants into the labor force. So when you add that on to the numbers of currently unemployed or underemployed it points to the issue. And the point about the sort of skills match as we call it or education to employment is certainly something we'll come back to. Quickly though, what are some of the more innovative instruments that the IFC is looking at and thinking about financing, in particular financing higher education? Just to complete your earlier comments on the statistics there are about 300 million people unemployed globally. Almost 12% of global youth are unemployed and according to one study 600 million new jobs have to be created by 2020 which by any description is a real stretch. So we have a challenge on our hands. So to come back to your question about IFC. So we invest typically in two ways. We are like an investment bank with a development agenda and we invest through debt instruments. So traditional bank loans that will help institutions to expand their capacity, expand their program offerings, help them to maybe go into a region, in another region in the same country, expand access. So that's one way. The second way is when we take ownership or partial ownership of a company or an education provider and that's called equity where we become shareholders. And then we have a much bigger, if you like, stake in the future direction and the strategy of the company. In some cases we might take a position on the board and try to be active shareholders. The third way is to do it through a mixture of debt and equity that we call quasi-equity which is a longer term commitment with an option to convert our loan into a shareholding structure. We also do sometimes, and we've done it in Africa actually, is when we do guarantees where we might set up a student financing scheme through a local commercial bank, but then we will partially guarantee any losses that may occur as a result of that. And we've done that in Kenya. We've done that in Nigeria as well, I believe. And also in parts of the Middle East. A third way is that in addition to what we do in investment, we provide advisory services. So we will work with government, quasi-government, industry association, civil society to help and improve the policy environment, the regulations, just to act as a forum to bring together different stakeholder groups. We work to advise governments on public-private partnerships. We work on access to finance initiatives which are a particular challenge in emerging markets, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises. So there's a variety of ways in which we try and provide, not just financing but also advisory services which are part of an integrated package. Great, thank you. I think we'll come back to the financing aspect in a bit. But with that, Regina, I'm going to turn the floor over to you and ask you to offer some opening thoughts and we'll carry on from there. Okay. So in my experience, I'm quite satisfied with how primary education in Ghana is conducted. So Ghana is really focused on achieving the Millennium Development Goals for Education. So we've increased our literacy rates, but there's a huge focus on quantity as opposed to quality. And in high school, I was very fascinated with science and technology. And I remember in my school, I wanted to ask more questions, but there was no room for that because the whole educational curricula was based on root memorization. And I had the opportunity to go on an exchange program in Norway. And I remember in the physics class, I got a question in a formula book. That's when I realized there was a big problem. I simply could not apply. So I can draw an advanced electrical circuit because I'd memorized the diagram. But if you gave me two wires and a light bulb, I didn't even know where F was. So when I came back, I would question a lot. I would say, okay, why is this that? Why is that that? And I was met with, oh, we have to finish the curricula. You are holding the class back. Why are you asking all these questions? And so for me, in looking for higher education, I wanted something better. Because I'd gone through this experience where I felt I had been restricted in how creative I could be or how critically I could think. And the other challenge I had was, I had heard of this thing called the brain drain, where the best and the brightest from Africa were leaving to pursue higher education outside and staying. And I thought, wow, so if the best and the brightest leave, who will be left? I mean, and so I wanted to stay in Ghana. And it was difficult because I wanted the best education and I wanted to stay in Ghana. And Ashesi came. So Ashesi was like my saving grace. I was in the first class in Ashesi when it started. Ashesi has a liberal arts program, which I loved, because before you delve into what you will major, you get the opportunity to sort of try your hands on different things. Ashesi focused on ethical leadership, critical thinking and problem solving, something which I was craving. And so it was like an instant match. As soon as I walked into the campus and I saw the vision and the mission, I was sold. And for the four years, I felt like I got an education way beyond what I imagined. You know, I would look at things deeper than what was on the face value. I would think critically, I would look around at how I could problem solve as opposed to just joining the masses of people that were complaining. So the way I thought was different, the way I executed was different. I mean, when we were, I studied computer science, when we were using computers, my colleagues were writing code on paper. So there was a lot of difference and we had a lot of visiting lectures. So we got sort of like the African perspective and the international perspective, which was really great because it gave me a lot of exposure. So luckily having Ashesi sort of bridged that gap from having an experience where I wasn't allowed to really explore my full potential. So you were a member of the first class of Ashesi and it was just a few years ago. But perhaps enough time to see, has there been any change in the curriculum? Have you seen any differences in your former classmates that have come out or students that have come behind you, like Araba, that you could share with us? Well, I think Ashesi is like a German machinery, as in like it produces the same quality product over and over again. So I thought maybe, okay, so the first class had like really remarkable individuals and when we graduated they were doing like really remarkable things and I thought okay, I'm sure like the next class would be able to do the same. And Ashesi doesn't disappoint. If you go into the workplace, I mean the narrative that you'll get is, okay, this person is really brilliant, they're good at their job, they go to Ashesi. And ten out of ten times they did go to Ashesi. So Ashesi students have a mark, like you can just tell. So they are high in demand in the job market. Everybody wants an student from Ashesi because you know you're getting a certain type of quality student and across different classes they're producing the same quality. So I am quite impressed. So Joe, I'm going to bring the conversation back to you and ask you to put on one of your many hats and your laureate hat. Laureate is newer in its movement into Africa. And what are your thoughts on how that will evolve, how Laureate's presence will evolve, why you think it was important to expand into Africa? About Laureate and its background as well. Peter used a couple of words that people went said in this country now for profit because we've had some for-profit universities have become something of a disaster. Some of that has to do with the bad way we've handled the loan situation here. It was 15 years ago I was serving President Clinton. A young man from Baltimore who had built a worldwide tutoring business came to me, took me to lunch and across the table said I've been traveling around the world and I've sensed that governments, if they're going to develop, have got to invest more in education. And I don't think the universities are now responding to that. And I believe if we could build a company that went in and helped universities expand and managed and did them with a kind of transparency we could build a very successful business. Today I would have turned my back and said you know that's fine, I'm glad to hear what you're saying. And then he said one more thing. He said we're not going to carry American universities overseas. Each university is going to be in its own culture, in its own identity. I had been writing at that point about the question of identity. We were talking about how the world was becoming globalized. You know the meaning, the way we talk about that. But my feeling was there is no such thing as a global identity. That is that happens more and more young people and others are going to search back for their own identity. I had became quite convinced about that and that was the thing that I think drew me first into Laureate. He also said that we were going to measure and make public and transparent the satisfaction of the parents, the number of students who got jobs, really bring all these things to the surface. Then we started. It's been an amazing kind of story. Laureate's institutions are focused primarily, to a very large extent on training young people for entrepreneurship. We have recognition and awards for those students who come up with ideas thinking about entrepreneurship and that's got to be at the heart of part of what's happening in terms of our economies in the developing world growing. But I think that Laureate's success is primarily due more to the push. I went to the World Bank 15 years ago into the IFC and said we're putting this company together and we're going to Latin America as a place that needs universities. I was really turned away by many of my friends initially and then we began to talk about the idea and then slowly they began to recognize and to make loans for us and of course now the IFC has become involved in our effort in Africa. We've gotten one university started in South Africa. Laureate is simply a different kind of approach to education. It recognizes and grants dignity to the students. It focuses very much upon preparation for participation in entrepreneurship but also to a very large extent on the identity of the country. I see this, well I've spent a good bit of time in the Middle East and I remember sitting in conferences particularly in Turkey with Arabic women who were saying we're going to put on our fails. We've been told we have to be secular in this country but that's not who we are. That's a very important principle that has to be recognized and that's part of what has helped Laureate get started but the main thing has been the effort to have with students and parents a kind of transparency about what we were doing. That requires the education and the continuing education of the faculty. It requires a faculty that understands they have to go on learning. Right now in the era we are in education that's nothing more important than that in terms of the changes that have to take place. I'm proud of what Laureate has done. It's been a very successful business in some ways but its main purpose has been to put a different approach on the way we approach education in terms of the quality of what happens and the transparency and the recognition of the students and their parents who are making investments. Thanks, I know that along with entrepreneurship, citizenship is a key part of Laureate's approach and program and Ereba, both you and Regina mentioned how citizenship ethical leadership was such a strong piece of the program at Ashessi. So when we think about our overall question here driving this conversation of the value of higher education in development, how important is that? Where do you think that that sort of citizenship and ethical leadership part of the higher education learning experience comes in when thinking about the value that brings to you personally, to your community and to your role as a fellow? Ereba, we'll start with you. So I'll go back again to my background. So what I studied at Ashessi was computer science. So I graduated with a BSE in computer science, graduated top of my class and everybody was expecting me to go into software development and I actually had a couple of job offers. However, during my stay at Ashessi we were required to do community service as part of building us into people with a holistic approach to education and to work in general. So I ended up at Village of Hope in a village in Ghana called Gomuafete. I stayed there for a couple of weeks to help work on a fundraising project. All I had was my skills from school at Ashessi. I hadn't had any training in development, any technical training. However, I managed to do that well enough so that Village of Hope wanted me to come and work for them full time after graduation. It took a year for me to say yes, but eventually I took the job I applied for it and that's where I've been for the past six and half years. My point is if educators and educational institutions prepare students adequately, make students understand the need to respond to the needs of their communities. It's easy to get students to think about going outside of what would typically be their comfort zones or what would typically be their areas of focus because there's the need to respond to a situation. Sometimes getting involved in civic leadership and thinking about what is ethical is what separates two people, creates the distinction. It's what makes students realize that there's more to education than just having a degree. It's important to have your education count for something. Those things that lead to development, if a nation is going to be built, it has to start with people who are generally civic-minded, people who are interested in contributing to the community. When the high school that I went to, that made me want to go to Chelsea in the first place. At the time, most people who graduated from there went to college in the United States after. I have many friends who came to school here simply because they couldn't find the quality that they needed. That meant that the brain drain had begun and these are really smart people, people who want to contribute to society but they end up in another country. All their skills are used in another country. They contribute to the economy of that country and their country still remains as it is. So in order to reverse that process, then we need systems that teach how to be civic-minded and how to be ethical in your education and in the application of your skills. That's the only way that we can move forward. Funding of communities giving money to alleviate poverty will only take us so far. But if the citizenry and the young people are empowered, then the potential to grow becomes larger. Well, you're here on that. Regina, do you want to add on to that? Yes, I was going to say so having the opportunity to be part of the Yali Fellowship gave me a very interesting perspective because I got the chance to meet 19 countries out of the 49 countries from sub-Saharan Africa. And what was interesting is, and as much as we were diverse and in some countries similar, there was a common problem and that was corruption and bad leaders. So across the board, if you looked at the genesis of the problem in most of the country, you could find that it was either due to corruption or bad leaders. And we went into this interesting discussion of if leaders are born or made, but that's a different discussion. But talking about ethics, it's something that you have to instill early on and it has to be a culture that is lived and practiced. You can't expect that you will get leaders together, give them a workshop on ethics and then they'll be ethical. And that's one of the things that Ashessi started from day one. So in Ashessi there's an honor code, plagiarism is frowned upon. And it sort of sows that seed. So when I entered the work market, there were several opportunities for me to sort of bend and go contrary to what is the best practice. I got several proposals or people would come and try. So I worked in a bank and I worked in the IT department. And sometimes some people would come to me with proposals. And what is the norm is that you inflate the figures because you have to give some money to all the staff. So a vendor would come to me and say, okay, I'm going to inflate this figure and so that you get your cuts. And I was like, what? Just put the actual figure there. And the vendor would look at me, shocked, like, where are you from? No, no, no, I have to. And it was very interesting because projects would run at huge costs and very little would be done because at the end of the day, you know, there was a whole lot of corruption. But from day one, you know, I would say no. And people didn't make me very popular, but it was important to be ethical because it was something that was ingrained for the four years I was an assessor. So I didn't just wake up and hear about ethics and then just decide to be ethical or not. It's something that I had lived. It's something that we went through all the four years. It's very important because without that, no matter what happens, you have leaders that will start and then at the end of the day, go the road that's most traveled. I mean, that's what is one of our biggest problems. You know, take the shortcuts, take the easy way out. You know, think about self. How does this benefit me as an individual and not about the community and how can I sort of enrich myself? What is the fastest and quickest way to make money for myself? So we need to have like leaders that are thinking and it needs to start with young leaders that are thinking about being ethical, thinking about community and thinking about giving back. Thank you. So our conversation has been a bit macro, a bit micro, talking systems level and individual. So I'm going to take it back up a notch. Mohamed, Joe mentioned this a bit too, the sort of the role that's played by the different, whether it's the government, the donors, the public sector, the private sector. You've obviously been in a position and seen a lot of partnerships and public-private partnerships coming together and seeing the role that different stakeholders can play. We've heard about the role of individuals from our fellows. Can you tell us what you've seen change, if anything, what some of the top trends that you see in terms of the role of the private sector, the role of government in sort of bridging the higher education, not just the financing gap, but the broader kind of higher education systems? Sure, thanks. So the landscape's changing because traditionally, as Peter also pointed out in his opening remarks, multilateral development agencies were kind of focused more on primary and secondary education and if they were at all focused on higher education, it was mostly in the public space. So it was through governments that they wanted change, either in the policy environment, in regulation or in building capacity. That has changed a lot in the developing world and the reasons are that many developing country governments just don't have the financial resources to be able to build capacity in the higher education sector. So let's take Africa as an example. Continent-wide, if you look at gross enrollment rates in higher education, which is one of the ways we measure access, it's 5%. There may be countries that are higher or lower, but on average the continent is 5%, which means out of every 100 people that are eligible for higher education, only 5 actually get there. If you compare it to a country like Brazil, which has made a huge effort in this, they moved from being to about 10% 20 years ago to being 30%. And if you compare that to the most advanced country, which is where we are here, in the US it's probably 70% plus. So this is one of the big challenges for governments, how to increase access to higher education. And because they don't have the fiscal space or the resources, they said, well, the next option is to deregulate it and to open it up to the private sector. And that has been a big development of the last two decades, led by countries like Brazil, but then quickly picked up by countries like Peru, Chile, Colombia, South Africa is opening up, other countries in Asia, Philippines has done a lot in private education. But that comes with a certain set of requirements, and one of them is how do you ensure that quality is not impacted and the public interest is protected? And that's a really tough question. And that's a tough question in this market, as Joe was alluding to. And it's an even more challenging and tough question in the emerging markets because of the lack of the regulatory cover, the lack of expertise available in monitoring and enforcing quality. So that's been one of the big changes in global higher education, is this shift from being public dominated to being largely private provision. So in Brazil, for example, I keep coming back to that because it's a market I know about, 75% of higher education is in the private hands. And the public part is very high end research intensive universities. And the paradox in countries like this is the best students from the elite private fee paying schools end up in the best public universities because only they have the ability to meet those thresholds and entrance requirements. Whereas the bulk of the students who go through public secondary school end up in the private universities, which are obviously second tier or maybe third tier in terms of quality. So that's one of the big changes. The other big change is that because of the emphasis on employment is how universities, how technical vocational institutes, how colleges are shifting their focus to being more market oriented or to being more demand led. In other words, to offer programs that employers actually need with skill sets that they actually need and value. Research shows that around the world if you look, one third of employers are dissatisfied with the type of graduates they get because they feel that they're not job ready. And even in this country you see now a shifting emphasis with community colleges being kind of encouraged to be more market relevant and to be more aligned with what employers want. So I would say these are the two big changes. The other is that there's a great deal of activity and interest now in public and private partnerships emerging. So that the government might fund provision, but they might outsource operations and delivery to the private sector. And that's happening both in health as well as in social services as well as in education. Thank you. It's interesting. I'm sure many in the room are familiar or may have seen the McKinsey survey that was done. And I don't remember the exact statistics, but there was quite a dramatic difference between the percentage of students who came out of education saying that they felt ready to work versus the percentage among the educators who felt that they had prepared their students for work and then even more of a distinction with employers who felt that employees were getting ready to work. We're going to go to you all in the audience shortly so get your questions on your brains. But Mohamed, you raised a point about enrollment and equality, and I want to pick up on that because within enrollment in general, I think it bears note that some of the most recent data I could find, there's still quite a gender distinction in terms of enrollment rates. I think we're moving towards and we've seen more parity between girls and boys in primary but in secondary and even more so in tertiary. The last rates I saw were for Sub-Saharan Africa. We're about 5% enrollment for just under 5% for young women and upwards of 7.5%. So it's a 50% if you will difference. So Joe, I'm actually going to come to you on that in terms of, not only your sort of long-term experience, you opened your comments of saying how different the room looks and how the world has changed. So thinking about the Africa context, but even just your broader experience with Laureate and otherwise, how have you seen the opportunities and the challenges for young women in higher education changing? And then of course I'm going to pose the same question to the rest of our panel for the different perspectives that they bring to that. Well, I think there's a surge around the world among women of seeing possibilities in their lives. The question is, are their institutions ready to respond to them? And that's one of the dramatic changes taking place. But I think that what it takes more than anything else is the ability to respond. And because it's happening all over the world, it's a phenomenon that we need to recognize. And some of our more traditional governments and institutions don't understand it. There's no other way to put it. And what do you think is in that ability? What makes an institution able to respond? Well, once they have the experience of an encounter and encounters with women in terms of young women, there's no question that we really have, at that level, a kind of competition. So it's more a question of seeing the opportunity and responding. And that's going to change. I mean, it's already changing, but I think it's a surge. Ereba, how is a chassis ready to respond? Well, a chassis didn't have a problem with that. There's usually about 50-50. And as a matter of fact, in my class, there were more women than men for a subject that is generally considered as a male-dominated area. But generally, as you go higher, what you find is that the environment tends not to support girls. Some of the things are as basic as having a clean environment or having bathrooms that are decent enough so that when girls are in their menstrual cycle, they will have somewhere to go. And for places where they are even enrolled, for those days every month, they are away from school. And it was actually surprising to me when I found out, and it cuts across many places in Africa. So if you are living in a rural area, the chances of you dropping out of school as a female as you grow older becomes higher. Again, it's something that's caught up in a cycle that we need to break out of. So if you have a mother or some sort of role model who has had higher education, the chances of you staying in school are higher because you have somebody to look up to or there's someone that is encouraging you or urging you on. So the lack of role models, again, it's in the rural areas mostly because the mothers have not gone to school and they are conditioned to train their girls to go into a certain role, being a wife, being a mother. And for those who don't need, obviously, well, not obviously, they think you don't need a college degree to do that. So those are some of the issues that we are grappling with. The accessibility is often tied in with your geographical location. Mohamed, obviously there's a connection between when we think about labor force participation, going back to the jobs report and the importance of women in the economy. And where do you see that link and how does the IFC think about that link on the education side in terms of getting women into the workplace in general? So it's definitely one of the criteria that we would look at when evaluating an investment is that is there a positive gender outcome of the investment? In addition to other criteria that we would look at, but maybe let me just add to that by a couple of anecdotes. So I just came back from Trinidad where we are appraising an investment in a private university and we were, you know, meeting with the senior management team and what struck me was that over 60% of the people around the table were women in senior management positions but beyond that I think about half of them were alumni of that institution which to me was a really positive sign that this institution not only does it have a proactive policy towards encouraging women but they're actually, you know, practicing what they are preaching. So that was one. The second was I used to work at another private university in Pakistan and we had a partnership with McGill University and one of the success indicators of the partnership was how both institutions were doing on gender. This was just one business school to another, not the whole university and it turned out because we were in the developing country context we really had a proactive policy because we were trying to achieve these outcomes. We ended up having more favorable indicators than McGill's business school at the time. This is quite a few years ago. Finally I would say that I think things are changing because you talked about positive role models, there's that. Women are aspirational because they are trying to play catch-up I think and their high school outcomes for women are higher so that naturally drives higher entry into post-secondary and into higher education while they are there. Lots of institutions are beginning to develop very proactive, robust policies to encourage their involvement and participation in university life. They tend to do better when they leave university. I have worked a lot in Latin America and a lot of our clients, A, the student body is majority women. The completion rates for women are higher. The placement rates are not necessarily higher but getting close to men. Certainly the attainment is higher in terms of many more women graduate with honors and on the dean's list and so on. I think the landscape is changing and there's the Sandberg effect, more women are leaning in. Overall I would say yes, we definitely factor that into our investments and we see a very positive change. Thank you. Speaking of leaning in, Brigitte I'm going to come to you first or the last thoughts before we take some questions on this particular challenges and opportunities for women but also while you have the mic. As an entrepreneur, as a social entrepreneur, maybe you can just give us a couple quick thoughts as well before we go to the group on some of the issues and challenges because we do want to hit on that entrepreneurship aspect of well of getting, sort of go up and running and being so successful. I'll start with the girls' education. As a social entrepreneur I run this project called Tech Needs Girls and it's a mentorship program where we teach young girls how to code, how to build mobile applications, websites, as a skill that they can use to economically empower themselves. Currently we have 455 mentees and we have 20 mentors who are all females who are either computer scientists or engineers. What is interesting is our biggest group, we work in the urban slum in Accra and when I went into that community the problem there was early child marriage and I was very amazed because this is 2014 and I thought Ghana had done a lot of campaigning against send your girl child to school and right in the heart of Accra in this urban slum the girls were being forced to marry and by 12, 13 a girl would be married so she's not going to make it to university. In fact there's only one girl from that community that has made it into university so there are no role models. There's nothing to look up to. When I would talk about universities or high schools the girls had no idea what I was talking about because their whole world is centered around the community. They don't have any other women that they can reach out to. So when we started the program what was interesting was first demonstrating to the community, their parents that there's more value in the girl getting a skill in education than her bride price. So you have girls in the community that are able to code. Once they are done with the coding they go to an internship program and then start getting paid and what is interesting also is that they learn confidence so they can tell their parents, no I want to go to school. If their parents say no they won't give them money they can pay to go to school and we have our girls speaking up but the ripple effect is that the community is beginning to see that okay so there is value in educating the girls these girls can actually do something speaking up, they are building great applications and women think about community and family so the solutions that they are proposing is not just for them but it's there are solutions that are going to help their families that are going to help their communities and there's a lot of like self-learning where they go out and get a lot of information so we're scaling our model to five other regions but it's really the model of women reaching out to the next generation, you know so from one generation to the next where you have organizations or movements where women reach out to other women create safe spaces where they can talk where they can share and where they can grow on the other point of entrepreneurship it's very difficult so you have a lot of people saying oh start a business, you know entrepreneurs create opportunities they grow the economy it's really nice on paper but when you're being practical it's very difficult to access to capital like you have a great idea how do you finance this idea in my experience I used my life savings which was a huge risk, it could have gone in any direction I could have ended up penniless and poor because I had to rely on the money that had saved up to a certain point having access to great networks and mentors people that can sort of steer you can also be a little bit challenging and also being taken serious especially in the African context so as a young entrepreneur when I walk into the room I have what is called a five second shock reaction people are not expecting me to be female number one in the tech space and young so I always have to come recommend it I always have to make sure that I'm doing as much networking as I can to make sure that I'm introduced so it makes it easier to go into the room without being introduced it's a little bit difficult so it can be challenging and it sort of will put off other young people wanting to start businesses because you see that the support is not there enough so there are several projects that the government could engage young local entrepreneurs to start doing but will give it to other organizations out there and the spaces and agriculture where young people could come in and think of innovative ways of using that space and there's really not that support so it can be challenging we would have gone way faster and much further if we got more support yeah thank you well with that I could go on but I'd like to have some time for you so we're going to take as we say World Bank style and under our friends and guests the gentleman here in the front if you just give us a second we have a mic coming to remind us who you are and if you can keep the questions under a comment brief so we can get in as many as we can thanks very brief but thank CSIS for this wonderful forum on the importance of higher education in development and for actually all the things that CSIS does it's extraordinary institution doing so much on a lot of critical issues if I might a very brief question IFC is the largest equity investment ever in education and I congratulate Peter and the IFC and the World Bank and what they've done for education but the largest equity investment ever just what happens Joe Duffy or it $150 million you've made $150 million equity investment what did you see in that to make your biggest investment in education and on the other side Joe if you could chat on how do you like IFC as a shareholder what do they bring to the table and why did you agree to bring them into your enterprise and we will go to the woman right there with the glasses under her head for now hi there my name is Julia Haatz and I'm a reporter with IPS News Agency thank you again this is a wonderful presentation my question is primarily for Aravart and Regina so I'm asking this question because you may be aware that in the U.S. we're having this horrible problem with student debt and return on investment and there's in Congress there's some measures being passed about loan refinancing but I'm wondering particularly your phrase life savings is something that a college student like myself is not that familiar with so I'm wondering if you have any comments on this debate we have here do you have any friends who have student debt or do you have any comments on the culture of savings the importance of that for college students so thank you thank you very much my name is Hubert Charles and I'm with the Embassy of Dominica I want to thank CSIS for a really wonderful and balanced panel I came here with a little bit of intimidation expecting to see more focus on elements other than development but I think there is a reason why development is there because it is not just entrepreneurship it is not just in the expansion of higher education but as the young ladies showed it is almost a revolution in terms of what we expect from higher education and my question really has to do with the likelihood that within the next 10 years we see a revolution in higher education that speaks not just expansion of access but the type of quality curriculum development changes that are being spoken to and I like Joe's definition of higher education learning to learn but I would want to suggest that you say you give consideration to the idea of learning to learn in the interest of the community or in the interest of the society I think if you have that variant then you are not just interested in what IFC is interested in which is the expansion all of us are interested in that but it is the quality that we are interested in the returns to the society thank you very much we will start with those Muhammad and Joseph Joe do you want to speak first to our question about the IFC and its investment in Lauriet and Muhammad will go to you first sure so thank you for your question so I think it would be good if I could frame the investment in terms of the general criteria that IFC looks at and I had alluded earlier to the fact that we like to invest in affordable quality education that leads to employment in that sense Lauriet was a good fit the other thing that we like to see and this is because we are a development agency as well as being an investment bank is scale because we believe that with scale comes impact and when you increase the reach more people benefit from higher education which leads to better opportunities for them in terms of employment and the second thing we want to see is innovation so what is innovative here may not be easily or quickly transferable to an emerging market but if there is an opportunity for us to aid and facilitate that process then we want to take a serious look at that so in that sense Lauriet was a good fit as well because it's a large institution it's one of the largest university higher education networks in the world it's private it's global and local because it embeds within itself the culture the practices the traditions the regulatory environments of the countries that it operates in and the terms of the investment were specific that we would work with them and that we would invest in them to help them expand into emerging markets none of the investments that we have the investment that the proceeds will not be used in developed markets so for example Lauriet has a footprint in Europe they have hotel management school in Switzerland in Greece etc our investments will not go there our investments will help Lauriet to expand in emerging markets whether it's in the MENA region in Africa in South Asia Latin America etc so that was the rationale and by the way it was kind of internal I would say scrutiny before this investment was finally approved by the board for probably the same reasons that motivated the question so that was the intention we are extremely happy with the investment we are now working actively with Lauriet management across the world and in the US to identify investable opportunities in emerging markets which will drive up scale which will be innovative which will not compromise on quality which will be affordable and which will lead to employment opportunities in addition to that I might add that IFC brings money to the table but that's not the reason Lauriet wanted us and Joe can disagree with me if he likes because for organizations like Lauriet the capital is not really a constraint they are publicly listed $4 billion plus company what they really wanted us for is what we like to think of partly as the seal of approval and partly the additionality that we bring to the table maybe I'll just explain with an example so we are working with Lauriet one of the things they are trying to understand is what is the value add of a Lauriet education him or her to get a better job does it help them to be more socioeconomically mobile does it lead to maybe a higher degree etc and how do you measure that so we are working with them now on a joint research project which is located in Mexico we are looking at all of these factors and hopefully in the next few months we'll be able to share some of the findings and by the way our interest is that we also want to demonstrate the effectiveness of investment in private education because we get a lot of pushback from governments when we try and go into countries because remember our parent the World Bank deals with governments and they typically deal with public policy regulation, public funding etc we on the other hand deal at the enterprise level with helping to promote private investment so our interest in this study is also that if we are able to come up with positive findings then we use it to replicate amongst our other clients and amongst the other emerging markets that we operate in to say look here there is demonstrable evidence that private education is effective and here are the indicators that show it I hope I answered your question Joe to get used to the fact that I'm the oldest person in the room this is no no this is not your father's world I mean in the last 15 years the world has dramatically changed in demography in power it's a great problem for the United States to recognize now that they with all our triumphalism that we are this is a by our tripolar world that's it just changes we have to get used to them now the biggest danger we have is complacency and taking things for granted but it is in terms of demography and population a different world we can become and that's a very human trait complacent and not understand what's ahead of us but I think that's the central thing that has occurred it literally is a new era and not in every way I mean I still value history and many traditional things but and I think it also is a commentary perhaps I should say on the Old Testament that traditional organizations get complacent that's the danger we all have to watch and we have seen some of that the sense of complacency it's not your father's world thank you ladies I'm going to turn it over to you and thank you for that question it was something that was on my mind particularly when Mohammed was talking about different innovative financing and brought up the role of some of the work that they're doing around student financing and securing guarantees for student loans so a great question and I'll leave it to you so the concept of student loans at least the model that exists here is not really familiar back at home so the cost of education I should say I think now would probably be the most expensive private institution in Ghana private education institution but it's also the most affordable for most people points being that there are a lot of scholarships available because of all the funding that the institution gets a couple of the children that I work with in Village of Hope have actually got scholarships to go to HSC recently one just graduated but what I'm driving at is that in the time that if the student went to a public school as a citizen it is pretty heavily subsidized so they wouldn't graduate with the kind of debts that students here would graduate with and if they went to a private school then they would have to fund the money they would have to pay upfront they wouldn't have to take out a loan to do it but whoever is funding it would have to afford it so you wouldn't graduate with that kind of debts that people have to pay there are some loans that the government gives but the amounts are really minimal so I don't know if Regina asks Mohammad and then Regina Regina and then Mohammad Yes just to add to what Araba said about the scholarships in HSC there's actually a very interesting story of a young boy who graduated from senior high school with a lot of A's but his father couldn't pay for him to go to university and a kind benefactor put up the story on Facebook got social media hype and went on Twitter and HSC actually found the boy and gave him a scholarship to go on to university so it's different you have to like Araba said either pay for your education I know in some of the public schools there are some student loans but they are very small and once you go into the workplace they start deducting you and I know in America that is a big challenge just to speak a little to savings culture to engage in internships and stuff like in Dartmouth College the two students that are I think in their second or third year and came up with this innovative trade so in their design thinking class they were asked to think about ways around I think the service industry and they came up with this really cool innovative trade and they did a patent and they started a business and they are actually making money I think university is also a good time to try out new ideas if you would like to go into the entrepreneurial space it's a good place for resources so yes you may have like huge debt but maybe you can start a business that could be a million dollar business you never know so maybe to give you an analogy to the U.S one of the examples I can think of is Brazil which is a huge country 196 million people there are about 7 million students in higher education and the government is trying to push that number up to 11 million in the next 6 to 8 years and they have come up with a student financing initiative it's called FES it's a bit like Title IV here and so students will have their graduation time which is like 4 years or 5 years plus 1 year of grace and then they have to start repaying so that could end up like the U.S. story at some point because if the default rate begins to grow and jobs are not as easily available as they are today because right now they have very low unemployment so that could be in about 10 to 15 years Brazil could begin to have an issue with rising student debt but right now they are just giving out the money to thousands and thousands of students because they want to expand access and if they have learned anything from the United States it would be not to privatize that's the mistake made in the United States we did it with mortgages in Fannie Mae and then we did it with loans so history teaches us lessons I think one of the lessons I learned tonight is if you can have a Yali Washington fellow on any of your panels whatever beyond you'll be set up well for success unfortunately we are out of time a particularly long day for our fellows as well as everyone besides I'm just going to ask them to have the last word and just let us know besides obviously being here with all of us what has been the biggest highlight so far of their Yali experience and what are they most looking forward to bringing back home Regina we'll start with you so I want to give a shout out to Dartmouth College it's the best university that's where we spent six weeks we had design thinking and business and entrepreneurship class one of the biggest highlights first was just the engagement with the other African fellows also the amount of learning that we had in the classrooms and outside the classrooms the site visits getting the opportunity to study other industries and how they are doing it and also getting the opportunity to talk to top level executives we had the opportunity to pitch a business to investors and venture capitalists who gave us real valuable feedback to help us go back because I was in the business and entrepreneurship track and also we had I got the unique opportunities to have that cultural exchange so every time I would come to America and visit my Ghanaian friends and do Ghanaian things and eat Ghanaian food I always used to complain like I came all the way here and everything was still Ghanaian so I never really had that cultural exchange so this was also a great way to share about my culture and then about the American culture and have that exchange so those were some of the highlights and the best one was getting to meet Obama and meet Michelle on Wednesday so Michelle Obama they're on a first name basis now apparently Ereba well I would say the highlights for me was going to see Le Miserable on Broadway but that's something but more importantly I spend my Wagner College on Staten Island and so I'm a New Yorker now Wagner had what they call the Wagner plan it's ensuring that students no matter what they are studying they respond to the community that they are in and so it tied in totally with what's my focus area is like Regina said lots of interesting discussions in the classroom covering various thematic areas side visits see what's most remarkable about Yali is that there are people from all over Africa when you're back at home you know what you're doing, you know the few people in your network like you know she's in my network but you don't realize that some of the issues that you're dealing with across the continent and it helps to actually meet other people who are doing things in other contexts to exchange ideas so that opportunity has been great for me and going back home I look forward to using this network that I have now to build on all the different projects that I'm working with and also offer my expertise if I have any to these other people to help them develop the different projects that they are working on in the area and then generally to be a mentor and a role model to other young people who are looking to develop the continent the way that we are. Thank you, well as a native New Yorker club and I hope that I and our colleagues will be part of your network so if everyone can please join me in thanking Regina, Mohammed, Araba, Joe and of course Peter and hopefully we'll see you all again soon. Thank you very much, have a good night.