World Bank creates job-skills ladder for girls in poor nations

By Philip Rucker, Washington Post

For years, global development experts have believed that if young women received the same schooling as young men, their families would have a path out of poverty. Now, with countries across the developing world documenting rapid progress toward gender equality in education, experts are focusing on the next step: increasing economic opportunities for women and girls.

The World Bank, Nike Foundation and several European governments yesterday launched the Adolescent Girls Initiative to teach job skills to young women in post-conflict developing countries in order to improve their access to credit and help them find stable employment. Officials said the initiative is crucial to efforts in sub-Saharan Africa to generate economic growth and cut the rates of AIDS and child and maternal mortality.

One of the first such public-private partnerships, the $20 million program will begin in six countries in Africa and the Middle East. Leaders said they hope to expand it elsewhere with future funding.

"Investing in young women is one way to break the intergenerational pattern of poverty," World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick said at the bank's D.C. headquarters. "It's the right thing to do, and it's also going to be smart economics."
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U.S. corporations are beginning to invest in the initiative and similar ones to empower young women, believing that they can stimulate economic growth in their families and their communities.

"This is a movement. It's taken off," said Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a managing director at the World Bank and a former foreign affairs minister of Nigeria. "There's now a realization worldwide that really, if we are to make progress on our longer-term economic goals, it's got to be with investments in women."

In announcing Nike's $3 million commitment to fund the Adolescent Girls Initiative, Mark Parker, the company's president and chief executive, said it is a smart investment.

"Our greatest resource overall in breaking the cycle of poverty is the adolescent girl," he said. "We're building a bridge between relevant training and real jobs that helps accelerate the economy."

This year, Goldman Sachs, the investment banking giant, said it would spend $100 million over five years to provide business education to 10,000 young women in developing nations.

Dina Powell, a managing director at Goldman, said the program can create "stable and prosperous economies." She recently visited Nigeria, where hundreds of women applied for the program. "What you saw immediately were these women were highly motivated, extremely talented, but they just didn't have the basics to grow their businesses," Powell said. "They didn't have business plans, didn't understand marketing, didn't have access to capital."

Powell said the financial crisis would not cause Goldman to back off its commitment.

In most poor nations over the past decade, women's education levels have improved, with more than two-thirds of the countries reporting gender parity in school enrollment, according to research provided by the World Bank. But that progress has not led to improved economic and employment opportunities for women, who consistently trail men in their participation in the labor force, access to credit, income levels and ownership rights.

In low-income countries, half of women are employed while the men's employment rate is about 86 percent, according to World Bank data. In Africa, women make up a majority of agricultural workers but receive just 10 percent of credit in agriculture, said Danny M. Leipziger, the World Bank's vice president for poverty reduction.

Leipziger said women spend more wisely than men, save more and are more likely to control household budgets. "If you want to make progress on development, you have to invest in women," he said.

At yesterday's launch, several young women from around the world who spent the week in Washington learning business and leadership skills delivered emotional speeches about the hardships in their communities.

Ana Luisa Cholotio, 17, the daughter of a fisherman and weaver in Guatemala, said she attends a crowded school each day and is hungry to acquire the skills to improve her family's economic status.

"I have always dreamed of major changes in my family and my society," Cholotio said through a translator. "In this way, my country will achieve equality, will achieve peace and tranquility."

Joyce Kollie, 15, of Liberia said she lives in a single room with her extended family and wakes up each day at 4 a.m. for school. She then goes to the market with her younger siblings before cooking dinner each night. After her speech, Kollie broke down in tears.

"Be strong. Be confident," Cherie Blair, the wife of former British prime minister Tony Blair, told Kollie and the other young women. "This is your right. You are entitled to be treated as equals."

Other speakers at yesterday's event included senior officials from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the city of Milan, whose governments committed millions to the initiative.

The event also drew celebrities whose charitable work focuses on gender equality. Ethiopian supermodel Liya Kebede said improving conditions for girls is "monumental, but it is not impossible."

Angelique Kidjo, a Grammy-award winning singer, related that growing up in the African republic of Benin her parents taught her that the world "is my home and I can stand tall in the world because I am a human being."

"If we don't change the course of the world by educating the girls of the world, then we fail," Kidjo said.