To Change the World, Invest in One Woman
by Carly Fiorina
A fact I might have suspected before hit me with full force when I participated in the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ effort to outline “a vision for global prosperity.” After reviewing extensive research, a group of us made recommendations on how the United States could improve the outcomes of its development efforts and bring greater prosperity and stability to the world. We all agreed on one of them: Invest more in female entrepreneurs.
I’m talking about women like Alice Cyanzayire, who runs a small but thriving agribusiness in Rwanda; Christina Guatemala, who started a tiny general store known as a pulpería in Nicaragua; and Ana Serrano, who survived as a street child in the Philippines on scraps from the local dump but now owns a store.
Supporting enterprises like theirs is a huge opportunity, because, as the World Economic Forum has consistently found, the correlation between gender equality and national competitiveness is strong. The WEF annually measures the degree to which women experience less economic participation, remuneration, and advancement than men in various countries of the world. Even in the most developed economies, gross domestic product could be increased by as much as 16% if the gender gap were closed.
Why more has not been done to close this gap is a mystery to me. And here’s another puzzle: Where is the outrage? Of the estimated 2.5 billion people worldwide who live on less than $2 a day, 70% are women. How is it tolerated that the weight of poverty, trauma, and subjugation still falls hardest on them?
People often avoid looking squarely at a problem that is so immense that the appropriate action isn’t obvious. It is tempting to simply leave global issues to the aid community. But if you reviewed the numbers, or met some of the women behind them, you would be outraged—and you’d take the first chance you saw to make a difference.
To me, the imperative to take action is clear. The businesspeople I know have the scale and resources to support women entrepreneurs, and many of their companies have a good business case for doing so. For example, when Coca-Cola invests in training thousands of women entrepreneurs in Africa, it directly benefits from a stronger base of distributors and marketers. While I was the CEO of HP, we made corporate commitments using similar logic.
Meanwhile, as individual citizens, none of us should shrink from what we are capable of. In 2008, while working as an adviser to the State Department, I entered into a public-private partnership with USAID and helped found the One Woman Initiative. Condoleezza Rice, then the secretary of state, worked with us to support grassroots organizations that focused on women’s need for leadership training, job opportunities, and justice. The three women I mentioned above all benefited from an organization that OWI partners with today: Opportunity International, which works within the public-policy frameworks of some 20 countries to provide loans, training, technical expertise, and insurance.
Those three strong, successful women are a reminder that even with government, business, and philanthropy all contributing, progress often boils down to the initiative of one woman. With a small starter loan—just $136 for Alice, $330 for Christina, and $94 for Ana—she can invest in a fledgling business, go on to repay her loan, and lift herself, her family, and a part of her community out of poverty. The single greatest point of untapped leverage in the world today is a woman who could be an entrepreneur. So get outraged—and then get down to the work of supporting and partnering with her.
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