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Ep 50. Mary Ellen Iskenderian, President and CEO Women’s World Banking: There’s nothing micro about a billion women!
384 Plays7 months ago
"Empowerment is the ability to make choices... and... having economic tools, economic resources is a way of providing the means for those choices."
The world has come a long way since 1974 when women in America could not have their own bank account or checking account without their husband’s signature. The 1st United Nations World Conference on Women in 1975 and the subsequent creation of Women’s World Banking in 1979, have played a massive part in enabling women today to achieve financial independence and be economically empowered.
Mary Ellen Iskenderian has been at the helm of Women’s World Banking for 18 years. She joins us today to talk about how far we have come with respect to women’s financial inclusion, her organisation’s work in this area, particularly in low-income settings, and how far we have yet still to go.
We talk about her book, ‘There’s Nothing Micro About a Billion Women’ - a reference to the nearly one billion women who until a couple of years ago, were outside of formal financial systems - and how women’s financial inclusion is not just good for women and their families, but also, good for business, good for the resilience of the global economy, and essential to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Recorded May 2024.
Guest Biography
Mary Ellen Iskenderian is President and CEO of Women’s World Banking, the global nonprofit devoted to giving low-income women in the developing world access to the financial tools and resources they require to achieve security and prosperity. She joined Women’s World Banking in 2006 and leads the Women’s World Banking global team, based in New York, and also serves as a member of the Investment Committee of its two impact investment funds.
Mary Ellen is a passionate advocate for women’s economic empowerment through greater access to finance. She is a leading voice for the world’s one billion women not actively engaged with the financial sector, urging the banking industry to view this community as a powerful new market of small business owners, heads of households, and consumers of financial products and services.
Prior to Women’s World Banking, Mary Ellen worked for 17 years at the International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank. She had previously worked for the investment bank Lehman Brothers. Mary Ellen is a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations, as well as a member of the Women’s Forum of New York. She serves as a Director on the Board of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
A 2017 Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Fellow, Mary Ellen holds an MBA from the Yale School of Management and a Bachelor of Science in International Economics from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. She was recently recognized in the Forbes 50 over 50: Investment list, which highlights female investors and financial leaders. Her first book, There’s Nothing Micro About a Billion Women: Making Finance Work for Women, was published by MIT Press in April 2022.
Links
https://www.womensworldbanking.org
The world has come a long way since 1974 when women in America could not have their own bank account or checking account without their husband’s signature. The 1st United Nations World Conference on Women in 1975 and the subsequent creation of Women’s World Banking in 1979, have played a massive part in enabling women today to achieve financial independence and be economically empowered.
Mary Ellen Iskenderian has been at the helm of Women’s World Banking for 18 years. She joins us today to talk about how far we have come with respect to women’s financial inclusion, her organisation’s work in this area, particularly in low-income settings, and how far we have yet still to go.
We talk about her book, ‘There’s Nothing Micro About a Billion Women’ - a reference to the nearly one billion women who until a couple of years ago, were outside of formal financial systems - and how women’s financial inclusion is not just good for women and their families, but also, good for business, good for the resilience of the global economy, and essential to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Recorded May 2024.
Guest Biography
Mary Ellen Iskenderian is President and CEO of Women’s World Banking, the global nonprofit devoted to giving low-income women in the developing world access to the financial tools and resources they require to achieve security and prosperity. She joined Women’s World Banking in 2006 and leads the Women’s World Banking global team, based in New York, and also serves as a member of the Investment Committee of its two impact investment funds.
Mary Ellen is a passionate advocate for women’s economic empowerment through greater access to finance. She is a leading voice for the world’s one billion women not actively engaged with the financial sector, urging the banking industry to view this community as a powerful new market of small business owners, heads of households, and consumers of financial products and services.
Prior to Women’s World Banking, Mary Ellen worked for 17 years at the International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank. She had previously worked for the investment bank Lehman Brothers. Mary Ellen is a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations, as well as a member of the Women’s Forum of New York. She serves as a Director on the Board of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
A 2017 Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Fellow, Mary Ellen holds an MBA from the Yale School of Management and a Bachelor of Science in International Economics from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. She was recently recognized in the Forbes 50 over 50: Investment list, which highlights female investors and financial leaders. Her first book, There’s Nothing Micro About a Billion Women: Making Finance Work for Women, was published by MIT Press in April 2022.
Links
https://www.womensworldbanking.org
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Transcript
Financial Inclusion and SDGs
00:00:00
Speaker
When the SDGs were created in 2015, there were seven SDGs that had financial inclusion as an enabler. So you needed financial inclusion for better health. You needed it to achieve better education. Certainly goal five, you needed women's financial inclusion for gender equality. Today, in large part, because of the sort of omnipresence of digital technology,
00:00:28
Speaker
Financial inclusion is now an enabler of 13 of the 17 SDGs. I think financial inclusion now, even more so than before, is maybe not an end in itself, but a means to accomplish so many other of our development ends.
Introduction to Charity CEO Podcast
00:00:55
Speaker
Welcome to an exciting new season of the Charity CEO podcast, where we bring you the stories and insights of remarkable charity leaders who are changing the world for the better. We talk to the people who run nonprofits, the movers and shakers who are driving positive change in this space, inspiring you to take bold action and make a difference.
00:01:14
Speaker
To all our listeners across the globe, I am thrilled to have you with us. We've received amazing feedback from listeners in over 42 countries, including the UK, US, Australia, Canada, and India. Your support and engagement is what makes this community so special. To all of you who pour your hearts and souls into making the world a better place through your work in the charity and nonprofit sectors, thank you. I'm Divya O'Connor, and here's the show.
History and Impact of Women's Banking
00:01:44
Speaker
The world has come a long way since 1974, when women in America could not have their own bank account or checking account without their husband's signature. The first United Nations World Conference on Women in 1975 and the subsequent creation of Women's World Banking in 1979 have played a massive part in enabling women today to achieve financial independence and be economically empowered.
00:02:08
Speaker
Mary Ellen Iskanderian has been at the helm of Women's World Banking for 18 years. She joins us today to talk about how far we have come with respect to women's financial inclusion, how organisations work in this area, particularly in low-income settings, and how far we have yet still to go. We talk about her book, There's Nothing Micro About a Billion Women.
00:02:30
Speaker
a reference to the 1 billion women who are still outside of formal financial systems, and how women's financial inclusion is not just good for women and their families, but also good for business and good for the resilience of the global economy.
Interview with Mary Ellen Iskenderian
00:02:44
Speaker
I hope you enjoyed the conversation.
00:02:48
Speaker
Hi, Mary Ellen. Welcome to the Charity CEO podcast. It's such a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much for inviting me, Divya. Great to be with you. Well, thank you. So Mary Ellen, I always start the show with some icebreaker questions and I have five for you. So if you're ready, we can get going. OK, I didn't know about the icebreakers. Question one, what was your first job? I was a foreign exchange trader for the Bank of America.
00:03:15
Speaker
Oh, and question two, how old were you when you opened your first bank account or savings account? Oh, I love that question. I was seven. Wow, it started early. Well done. My parents were big believers in little past books. Excellent. Question three, what would you say is your professional superpower?
00:03:37
Speaker
seeing connections between ideas and people and bringing them together. Excellent. Question four, what book are you currently reading or have recently read that you really enjoyed and why? I'm listening to, I don't know if that counts. Yes, absolutely. I'm listening to David Sanger's new book, The New Cold Wars.
00:04:04
Speaker
as the title implies, about are we fighting Cold Wars with Russia and China right now and sort of all of the, quite frankly, missed opportunities we've had since the end of the last Cold War that might have averted some of the tensions that we're living through now. And it's just, it's really gripping. I worked in the Eastern Bloc countries and the former Soviet Union at the time of the
00:04:34
Speaker
collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union. So just sort of understanding just how we let opportunities split through our fingers is very real. Sounds fascinating. And the final icebreaker question, if you had the opportunity to interview anyone in the world dead or alive, who would it be and what one question would you like to ask them? Well, I definitely know who it is. It's Eleanor Roosevelt. I just have
00:05:02
Speaker
an enormous admiration for her and her leadership and the way she balanced leading from the front and leading from behind the scenes. So I think the question would be something about that, that sort of in today's day and age, with a much greater presence of women in the political sphere,
00:05:25
Speaker
Would she have run for office in her own right? Would she have been a leader from the front only if she were living today?
00:05:34
Speaker
Wow, so topical considering what's going on in terms of elections across the world right now. Exactly, exactly.
Founding and Evolution of Women's World Banking
00:05:41
Speaker
Mary Ellen, you are the president and CEO of the global nonprofit Women's World Banking, and I know that you've been in that role for nearly 18 years. But take us back to the beginning, right back to 1975 and the first UN World Conference on Women.
00:05:58
Speaker
Tell us how Women's World Banking was formed subsequent to that conference and what its vision and mission was. I wish I were an actual fly on the wall at that time, but I've talked to people who were there and who have all described it very similarly.
00:06:18
Speaker
Many of the women there, in fact, I don't know if you know the great Judith Bruce, but she said she felt like she saw light bulbs literally light up in front of our founders' heads, that the idea that we were at a conference for human rights on women, but the recognition that if they didn't have economic rights, if they weren't full economic citizens,
00:06:44
Speaker
So many of those human rights would be beyond their realization. And so over the course of sort of 76 to 79, four people in particular, Michaela Walsh, who was a Wall Street banker, first woman partner at Merrill Lynch, she opened up the Beirut office of Merrill Lynch, no shrinking violet herself.
00:07:08
Speaker
Esther Oklu, who was also a banker, opened the organization that would eventually become Women's Role Banking Ghana. Mary Okelo, who was the first African woman named a senior executive in the Barclays bank organization. So again, No Drinking Violet, really accomplished banker. And then Ila Bat, the founder of the SEWA organization, came together
00:07:34
Speaker
and put together actually an idea that's a little different from where we ended up going. Their initial concept was to provide sort of a backstop or a guarantee facility for any woman entrepreneur in a country that had a woman's world banking outlet or franchise, if you will. And the intention was to set them up all over the world, both developed and developing countries.
00:08:04
Speaker
And, you know, if you look back, 76 to 79 were really some of the early formative days of microfinance organizations. And sort of the two kind of met in the middle. I gather that Ela Bhatt was quite instrumental in saying, well, wait a minute, maybe we don't need to be supporting
00:08:25
Speaker
Individual women entrepreneurs, maybe we should be supporting the financial service providers who are willing to offer them credit and other financial services and so the mission kind of morphed a little bit right around the time of our formal founding in 1979 in the Netherlands, so we were actually created as a Dutch foundation and
00:08:47
Speaker
with the initial funding of the Dutch government. The Dutch were wonderful advocates, have always been wonderful advocates for women's economic empowerment. And they sort of advocated to the Swiss, the Norwegians, Canadians to join the party. And as we were seeing microfinance really become much more of a movement around the world,
00:09:12
Speaker
many of the organizations founded by women. But right from the earliest days, it became so clear that women were great clients for microfinance, great repairs. Even from the earliest days, you were seeing quite a distinct difference between repayment rates between men and women. And so I think that kicked us off to this business model of supporting financial service providers that in turn are supporting women.
00:09:40
Speaker
So it's now been 45 years since Women's World Banking was set up. Yes, it's our anniversary year. Yes, congratulations. But talk to us, Mary Ellen, about the global context of where we are today and how far things have come with respect to financial inclusion for women. So I think it's a little bit of a good news, bad news story or a good news, equivocal story in the sense that
00:10:06
Speaker
We've seen hundreds of millions of women brought into the formal financial system.
Digital Financial Inclusion and Challenges
00:10:11
Speaker
The COVID-19 pandemic was a bad news story on many fronts. It did accelerate
00:10:20
Speaker
financial inclusion and digital financial inclusion in particular for many women. I think the numbers now are something like 270 million women were brought into the formal financial system during that period, in large part driven by the digitization of global relief payments, many of them in response to the pandemic. But I think the context, you know, I think that's such a smart way of framing your question is
00:10:46
Speaker
Just having access to the financial service really isn't sufficient to entirely empowering women, making sure that they are full economic citizens in an increasingly digital age to still have
00:11:02
Speaker
something like three quarters of a billion women with no identification, let alone a digital identification, is hobbling them right at the start. We see when this is something that you're working closely on and your work, Divya, that
00:11:18
Speaker
access to technology and not just access but real confidence in using digital technology mobile technology we've seen some really great numbers recently out of the gsm a that the gap in ownership of a smartphone has.
00:11:34
Speaker
It's almost appalling to have to say shrunk to 15%, 15% is still too high that there's that gender gap. But we still don't see women using the internet to its fullest capacity to the same level that men are. We still hear all too often if there is a smartphone owned in a family, the husband has it and uses it for that fuller range of services.
00:11:59
Speaker
So the mechanisms of inclusion unfortunately hold the potential to be exclusionary, but I think the world has kind of caught on to the need for inclusion. I think it's quite interesting that when the SDGs were created in 2015, there were seven SDGs that had
00:12:22
Speaker
financial inclusion as an enabler. So you needed financial inclusion for better health. You needed it to achieve better education. Certainly goal five, you needed women's financial inclusion for gender equality. Today, in large part, because of the sort of omnipresence of digital technology, financial inclusion is now an enabler of 13 of the 17.
Empowerment Through Financial Services
00:12:48
Speaker
SDGs. And so I think financial inclusion now, even more so than before, is maybe not an end in itself, but a means to accomplish so many other of our development ends. I think this word empowerment is really interesting. So what does it really mean for a woman to be economically empowered? And how do you measure that empowerment? That's such a great question. And I have
00:13:14
Speaker
Lots of conversations including with Michaela Walsh our founder who feels very strongly that one person cannot empower another and so it's a tricky word and there can be a lot read into it, but I always felt like the way Nyla Kabir talks about Empowerment very moving very resonant for me because she talks about it in a way that frankly I've experienced Empowerment in my own life as the ability to make choices you can choose
00:13:44
Speaker
where to live, when to marry, whether to marry, when to have children, whether to have children, how many children, those sets of choices that a woman often does not control, often has imposed on her are at the essence of empowerment. And to the extent that having economic tools, economic resources is
00:14:12
Speaker
a way of providing the means for those choices. It's such an important ingredient. Maybe I could just say a word about a model that we use at Women's World Banking, and it very much looks at choices and changes in the woman's behavior that as a sum total, capture whether she may have been empowered by virtue of having access to finance.
00:14:39
Speaker
The first one is probably the easiest to imagine to measure is there material change does she have more money coming into her household does her family have more assets is there more in the savings account so. Counting up the numbers counting up the currency the second one is and i think that speaks very directly to the technology issue that we were talking about earlier is cognitive change.
00:15:04
Speaker
Has she learned something new by virtue of having access to finance? Is she more confident in that skill? Is she more numerate? Is she able to navigate that finger pad or the number pad of a cell phone in a way that she may not have before? But it's the two other changes that, while they often are harder to measure, I think really get at the heart of when we think about empowerment, as we think about agency and choice.
00:15:30
Speaker
The first is relational and does the woman have more decision making power in her family in the dynamic between you know her spouse her mother-in-law her other family members are the decisions that she. What's to make about the way money is spent about economic choices that the financial choices that the family makes is she prevailing.
00:15:53
Speaker
We also have seen it's still very early stage and it's not nearly as universal as we'd like, but we've seen some literature that indicates that when a woman really feels fully economic empowered, she is more likely to vote. And we have definitely seen in some really interesting work, again, quoting Nyla Kabir in Bangladesh, where when women have economic choices, they not only vote more, but they are more likely to stand for office, say in the village council.
00:16:22
Speaker
And so that sense of influence and asserting a will to influence the way money is spent, the way decisions are made, is that relational change. And then the final one is that most personal perceptual change. Does she have more self-confidence? Does she, and so much so hard to measure, but do you see her still
00:16:48
Speaker
putting the needs of everyone else in the family before her own needs? Do you see her just building from day to day? Or is she able to aspire and articulate an aspiration and articulate what that future holds and how she is driving herself toward it? And when those things come together, I mean, it brings tears to your eyes, but it is incredibly inspiring. And that's
00:17:12
Speaker
a more holistic way, I think, to look at whether someone has been empowered.
00:17:19
Speaker
I love how you articulate that, Mary Ellen, in terms of the ability to make choices. And your model is really interesting looking at all of those dimensions, material change, cognitive, relational and perceptual change. And I know that you have an ambitious goal at Women's World Banking to reach 100 million women by 2027 and essentially give them the ability to make those choices for themselves. What is your current strategy to deliver that? Tell us a little bit about that.
00:17:49
Speaker
So women's world banking has always been blessed by having some of these early funders I may mentioned who were very supportive of our entire strategy that they weren't necessarily limiting their support to us to a specific program, but they wanted a strategy and they wanted strategic objectives that we would hold ourselves to. And so we've been very rigorous over the years in creating strategies. We tended to tie them to funding periods, so they often were
00:18:18
Speaker
three year plans, but with a three year plan, it's over before it got started and you're measuring things before you've actually even finished the projects or even had a time to have a full rollout in some cases. So in 2017, with the full support and blessing of some of our greatest supporters, we identified a 10 year strategy and felt like we were really going to go for scale.
00:18:47
Speaker
and deep into impact. And at that time, it was a big number, but it was a round number. There were really pretty much a solid billion women who are outside of the formal financial system.
Strategies and Impacts of Women's World Banking
00:19:00
Speaker
And so we kind of played around with like, what's a number that really sounds like you're having a, you're making a dent in that number. And we felt that we had to say at least that 10%. So a hundred million women
00:19:14
Speaker
I'm thrilled to tell you that at our fifth anniversary, our midway point at the end of 2023, we were at 37 million women and we've already in the first quarter over 40 and well on our way to 52 million, which is our goal for this year. And I'm feeling quite confident and I'm feeling confident for two reasons. One, our traditional typical way of working has been to work directly with a financial service provider, help them design
00:19:44
Speaker
a product, a rollout. One thing we've been really engaged in in the last couple of years that's yielded some great results is training women banking agents because we're seeing women having amazing business outcomes, both with male and female customers. They're just really trusted
00:20:04
Speaker
good salespeople for financial service providers. And we're very excited about that work. But where we're also engaged, and this was very much a hallmark of this new strategy, is on the policy advocacy side. And we are working both at the global level, we're the only global NGO that has a flag and a seat at the table for the financial inclusion work stream at the G20.
00:20:31
Speaker
But, and again, this is work that you're quite familiar with. We're working at the country level with individual country regulators, policymakers on driving inclusive policies, driving achievement of financial inclusion planning goals that many countries have created. And we're starting to now pick up numbers that we can directly attribute to policy changes that we've been responsible for.
00:21:01
Speaker
Small wins, but last year was our first clearly identifiable cohort of women, 640,000 women entrepreneurs in Indonesia, where the Indonesian government said, if you had not helped us revise this, in Indonesia they call them ultra micro entrepreneurs, so our UMI program, in order to be more women-centric,
00:21:26
Speaker
have the products that were designed to really meet women entrepreneurs' needs, we wouldn't have made those additional 640,000 loans. So we felt confident in adding those to our total. So I'd say it's that combined advisory work with the financial service providers and then the policy advocacy work is at the heart of this strategy. And then the third pillar of our strategy I'd be remiss in not mentioning
00:21:51
Speaker
is our gender lens investing strategy. So far, in terms of the numbers that we can attribute to the investment strategy, we've touched 15 million women with a financial product or service that they did not previously have access to through our two gender lens investment funds, 153 million assets under management through 21 portfolio companies.
00:22:14
Speaker
And so that combination of those three strategic pillars is where we're moving towards that hundred million. Well, congratulations. It sounds like you're very much on track to achieve that number, but Mary Ellen, I'm curious to know what do you see as some of the challenges to achieving that scale and also talk about perhaps in the same vein, some of the biggest barriers to women's economic empowerment, because they're obviously very much tied together.
00:22:44
Speaker
They're taking the words right out of your mouth they're very tight together when we first launched on this strategy we did something women's world banking and never done we picked target markets and there's a lot of discussion around the market and whether we were leaving countries behind and i think part of why we were initially so concerned as we thought the barriers were gonna be so different.
00:23:08
Speaker
in Latin America, from Sub-Saharan Africa, Muslim majority countries, South Asian markets.
Barriers to Women's Financial Empowerment
00:23:15
Speaker
We thought they'd be very different.
00:23:17
Speaker
And to our amazement, we found a real continuity of barriers, if you will, that kind of bucketed in three groups. The first was around the barriers that the woman herself faces. And we've talked about one already, is really that access to and comfort and confidence with technology, that that was going to be so critical.
00:23:41
Speaker
Financial literacy gaps that women tended to have now been compounded by digital literacy gaps we've already talked about the idea that's really quite an issue again as we move towards the digital realm to not have. That digital idea is really being shut out of the future we're not even talking digitally there are still seven countries.
00:24:07
Speaker
where a woman is not permitted to have an identification in her own name. So we're still working on some very, very discriminatory laws that hold back some of these fundamental elements of empowerment. The second one, and I'd say the second barrier
00:24:26
Speaker
still represents the biggest challenge for the strategy that we're trying to achieve. And that's because financial service providers still don't think that women and low income women in particular are a viable market segment to be serving. And what I think gets my team down the most and we have to really ramp up our pep talks is when we've gone in, we've designed a program, we've got a
00:24:54
Speaker
product, we've designed the marketing, we have the channel strategy. We always do what's called a customer lifetime value calculation to prove to the organization that the lifetime earnings from that woman customer, if they roll this product out and are able to provide a longer term service, given what we know about women's loyalty as customers, is always positive.
00:25:22
Speaker
And we've proven all those things and the bank or insurance company or FinTech says, no, we're not going to roll it out. We're going to keep it at the pilot. Thank you very much. And it's like a gut punch. And I think that's one reason why we've been so inspired by our investment work because at least there.
00:25:44
Speaker
of a seven or eight year holding period, wherever possible, we take a seat on the board. We have, particularly with our second fund, we've led many capital rounds. And so it's not just women's world banking coming in, but all of the investors that come in and say, you know, a series B all agreeing on certain gender targets for the company. And that's really powerful. And so we're finding a much better sort of hit rate
00:26:12
Speaker
or greater understanding of women as a viable segment where we've been able to put capital into the company. And then the third set of barriers that I'm happy to say seem to be falling at a faster pace are the regulatory barriers. So one of the areas, again, that I know you know quite well in your work
00:26:34
Speaker
I don't think there's a woman entrepreneur in the world who hasn't said that collateral and often ridiculous rates of collateral that are required by lenders.
00:26:46
Speaker
is one of the biggest barriers, and that still remains a big, big problem. Women are much less likely to own land in many countries, still some very progressive countries in many ways, even property that a woman brings into a marriage she's not permitted to dispose of without
00:27:06
Speaker
her husband's permission so there's a lot of issues around the kinds of collateral that can be used to support entrepreneurship so we're very vocal supporters of a moveable collateral registry so that you can. If you're going to buy a piece of equipment for your business that piece of equipment can be used as collateral for the loan it doesn't have to be only real estate or property.
00:27:33
Speaker
Mary Ellen, I'd like to delve a bit more into one of the areas that you were talking about there, which is around digital financial inclusion. Research by McKinsey on digital financial inclusion has shown how the adoption of digital tools like mobile money has significantly increased women's financial inclusion, particularly in low-income countries. And in your experience,
00:27:57
Speaker
How does women's world banking overcome challenges around digital literacy and overcoming the digital divide for women in these contexts? And what role does innovation play in addressing some of these challenges? Great question. As I mentioned, it's really right up there in that first set of barriers. So we never
00:28:18
Speaker
engage with the financial service provider on the development of a product without including both digital and financial literacy. Whether it be stealthy involvement through the marketing campaign itself, through SMS techs, or the way we are training, particularly these women agents that I mentioned, we're finding
00:28:42
Speaker
Interestingly, both men and women saying they're more comfortable asking the so-called stupid question or the question that they think they should know the answer to about their phone of a woman agent. And so just making sure that the agent herself can be a conduit for digital literacy is super important. But in addition to that, for example, one of our most successful
00:29:08
Speaker
projects and it's turning into a business line for us is digital wage payment for factory workers. We've got very successful programs in Cambodia now. Cambodia passed a law right before the pandemic that foreign garment and other manufacturers couldn't open factories in Cambodia if they didn't have digital wage payment. So just taking that moment, that payment of the salary,
00:29:37
Speaker
as a learning opportunity. And it's been really interesting. Almost everywhere in the world, we've seen peer-to-peer learning as being one of the most effective ways of communicating. And women, I think even more so than men, want to learn from other women, want to learn from people who look like them, have shared experience with them, want to ask those questions. In Cambodia, we found kind of another layer though that
00:30:06
Speaker
When they were taking on, to your point about innovation, when they were taking on this new fangled way of receiving their salary, and we were making such a point about, don't just cash it out. Keep it within the digital system. It was really important to them that their floor captain or their immediate supervisor
00:30:28
Speaker
was endorsing doing this and was part of the digital literacy process. Yes, they wanted to be in a class with peers, but they wanted that authority figure and maybe not the CEO of the company, but one step above saying, yes, this is safe. Yes, you should keep your money in the system. Yes, I've been doing this successfully. We've had some really extraordinary results in terms of
00:30:57
Speaker
When the women keep the money in the system, we're seeing savings rates increase. We've seen many women tell us that it's allowed them to think about starting their own businesses at a later stage in their careers. But it's been really, I think, listening to what works with the individual woman, how does she need to learn, who does she need to learn from, is so
Gender, Climate, and Financial Inclusion
00:31:23
Speaker
essential. My assuming
00:31:25
Speaker
that I know the best way to deliver these messages is really a guarantee for failure. It's really interesting, Mary Ellen, you were saying earlier that financial inclusion is an enabler now of 13 of the 17 SDGs, and you and I were both at the 68th convening of the Commission on the Status of Women in New York in March, and two really overriding themes that emerged, I felt, from all of those discussions.
00:31:53
Speaker
were number one, the real power of partnerships and the need to collaborate across all sectors in order to make real progress against the sustainable development goals. Number two was the importance of engaging with the nexus of gender, climate, and finance. In that context, tell us about the work that Women's World Banking is doing in the area of gender, climate, and finance. You've articulated it so well because I think for me,
00:32:23
Speaker
the light bulb really went off when I realized climate is what makes financial inclusion not just a means to an end, but an essential means to an end. If we want women to be resilient in the face of climate challenges, and yes, lots of literature that's finally getting the attention it deserves about women being on the front lines of
00:32:49
Speaker
the climate emergency. If we want them to be resilient in the face of those emergencies, there's no way we can have that expectation if they can't make and receive payments, particularly the receiving part, because while we know that the displacement from climate is going to be an enormous challenge for the rest of this century, probably, we're seeing, at least at the moment, typically, if
00:33:18
Speaker
drought or flood has made a rural area unworkable for a farmer. It tends to be the husband or the male of the household who will leave in search of work and is sending money home. If she doesn't have a safe way, quick way, affordable way to receive that payment, you're tying one hand behind the back.
00:33:41
Speaker
if she doesn't have a safe place to save her money, if she doesn't have the access to the technology that allows her to adapt to the climate emergency. She's been left behind in the much more difficult area to farm. If she can't get a loan to buy a solar irrigation pump, then again, you're just harming her chances for survival and thriving.
00:34:07
Speaker
in the face of climate and then never forget. And I think we often in the financial inclusion world tend to forget about insurance because there's so much of the gains that a family might be able to make from those other financial services can get washed away quite literally in the case of the flood. Whereas that all important protection and risk mitigation that insurance can provide. I really see climate as kind of bumping our work
00:34:36
Speaker
to the next level. Just one quick story. It was something that we never embarked on as, oh, this is our work at the Nexus of Gender and Climate, but it emerged so clearly. We've been working with one of the largest state-owned banks, Bank of Baroda in India, to help them activate these no-frills jandana accounts that
00:35:00
Speaker
were opened by hundreds of millions of indians but then left dormant and in fact you saw higher dormancy rates by women 55% of the accounts opened by women were dormant two or three years after opening and that's expensive for a bank to have to open an account and then not have it used so we designed a product that if
00:35:22
Speaker
the man or woman could commit to a certain level of savings over a certain period of time, and they determined the amount. We didn't. They would be eligible for an emergency line of credit at the end of those six payments.
00:35:37
Speaker
And that combination of, oh, if I save, I get access to credit was a very powerful marketing story. But we didn't appreciate that in one of the quite remote areas in Uttar Pradesh that we were working in, they were very severe floods last April, April 2023. And we saw very stark differences between the families that had that emergency credit.
00:36:03
Speaker
and their ability to, no pun intended, weather the storm. They had more members of the family eating three meals a day. More of the families were able to keep their kids in school through the storm period. They were without question able to replant and go back to their field after the storm because they had that combination of savings and emergency credit. And the word of mouth from those people to other people in that same community that were not
00:36:32
Speaker
as fortunate was through the roof, we had a huge demand for the product.
Mary Ellen's Book and Insights
00:36:37
Speaker
So I think in some ways just being even more diligent about getting those basic products into women's hands is one of the best things you can do to prepare them for the climate emergency.
00:36:52
Speaker
This feels like a good moment to talk about your book, Mary Ellen. There's nothing micro about a billion women, which is, of course, a reference to what you were talking about earlier, a billion women who are outside of formal financial systems. And I'm going to read a short excerpt from the preface of your book. Oh, I love having my book read to me. That's so exciting.
00:37:15
Speaker
Yes, so where are you right? Ensuring that women are full partners in the financial system has benefits that go beyond any individual women's circumstances. Women's financial inclusion improves the lives of women and the lives of all those around them while strengthening communities, financial institutions, and national economies.
00:37:38
Speaker
I completely agree, and that really speaks to everything that you have been talking about thus far. Mary Ellen, I'd really love to hear your personal reflections on writing the book, why you wrote it, and also give us some of the calls to action that you talk about in the book on making finance work for women. Thank you for this opportunity. I just had this in my head for a really long time that I wanted to
00:38:07
Speaker
put down all of my thoughts, all of my observations.
00:38:11
Speaker
What I was seeing when I traveled around the world and met the customers of the financial service providers that were so privileged to work with and the ones that don't say, nah, we're not going to roll out the product, the ones that really stick with it and do see their businesses thrive, do have these loyal women customers who are sticking, you know, it's not just them, but then their kids become customers as well. And it's so wonderful to observe this.
00:38:38
Speaker
But I wanted to situate all of this observation that I had over the last nearly 18 years now in the wider research community. I wanted to see whether were there rigorous RCTs and other research being done that was pointing to what I was seeing.
00:38:57
Speaker
on the ground, what our clients were experiencing on the ground. And so it was very much a chance for me to read very widely, but also I think just to put some meat on the bones of the anecdotes and what I was so clearly observing through the work of Thomas World Banking.
00:39:16
Speaker
I think from my perspective, I have achieved that and I've really been excited about it. I've already have one of my board members who's pestering me that I have to start writing a second book. So what have you done for me lately seems to be the question of the day in the book biz, but this was a huge labor of love, but one that I had been carrying around and wanting to accomplish for a very long time.
Challenges and Progress in Financial Inclusion
00:39:40
Speaker
What have you learnt being at the helm of Women's World Banking for 18 years in the sense of what have you found most challenging doing this work and what has surprised you? I'd say the challenge is much the same as the challenge the sector faces is that
00:39:58
Speaker
There's a part of me that says we should have been obsolete. Years ago, we've been making effectively the same argument for 45 years now. I frankly don't think we're doing anything wrong. We are continuing to make the business case. I see in my investment portfolio a literally 1-4-1 correlation. Those companies that have at least 50 percent women customers,
00:40:27
Speaker
have higher ROEs, have faster portfolio growth, have better NPLs. If you add to the mix more women in staff and management throughout the organization, you see a direct correlation to more women customers. So I know that the things that we've been talking about work.
00:40:48
Speaker
Why are we still talking about them? Why are they not just an article of faith? I think we're certainly making progress today. We have 74 banks, fintechs, neobanks, microfinance institutions, insurance companies that have bought on to our mantra and are actively
00:41:06
Speaker
serving 185 million women customers now that we're up to. So I know things are getting better, but you really have to wonder why is this taking so long? And that can be a bit frustrating. The surprise, I think it's slightly different. And I've just been very gratified over the years, but when I feel like I've hit a brick wall or I've got a problem or I'm not clear how to move forward,
00:41:34
Speaker
There's an enormous amount of goodwill and there's just a lot of people out there who want us to succeed, who believe in what we're doing. I can count on hands and toes and feet the number of times that I've just gone out to somebody and said, could you help us with this? And they come back in ways that you'd never expect. So it's a,
Asset Management and Women's World Banking
00:41:58
Speaker
It's incredibly gratifying to know how strong the community of supporters is for the work that we're trying to do. And do you have a favorite anecdote or story that you could share with us now? Yeah, so I'd say it gets back to the founding of our asset management business. When I joined Women's World Banking, some of the really just incredibly talented people who were working on our capital markets team
00:42:27
Speaker
had shown me some work that they'd been doing sort of on the side of the desk. And they had looked at a sample of 39 microfinance institutions that had made the transition from nonprofit entity to a regulated financial institution that had taken on outside shareholders. And at the time that they decided to make that shift, on average, they served 86% women customers.
00:42:55
Speaker
And within four years of having become regulated, taken on shareholders, that number had fallen to an average of 59% women customers. And if there had been a woman in a leadership position as CEO or board chair, she was long gone. And it was as if, oh, well, now that we're a bank, we have to have a man lead the organization.
00:43:20
Speaker
And I just felt so strongly and was so grateful that my board agreed that we needed to be the provider of capital. We needed to be that external shareholder that said, no, your original model of women's leadership supporting women customers is a valuable investment thesis.
00:43:41
Speaker
But me sitting around a table with my board of a nonprofit, we didn't have any capital. We didn't have anything. And so I was so grateful when I spoke with Marlou van Goghstein-Brawers, who at the time was the founder and leader of Triotis' asset management business. And Triotis of the Netherlands
00:44:03
Speaker
was literally founded by many of the same people that founded Women's World Banking just a few years after our founding in 1979. They were very successful, several billion assets under management at the time. I said, would you help us? Would you co-manage this with us? Could we try to do this together and that she didn't
00:44:28
Speaker
blink an eye that she was as gracious as she was and I had been an investor at the IFC before but I never run a fund before.
Reflections and Conclusion
00:44:37
Speaker
There was a lot we had to learn and just to have that partnership and that support and getting us off the ground so that then our second fund we were able to do on our own but that was incredible generosity of support.
00:44:51
Speaker
Brilliant. Looking back, Mary Ellen, on day one of when you first became president and CEO of Women's World Banking, is there anything that you would say to your younger self back then that you now know? The organization was in a pretty precarious financial position.
00:45:10
Speaker
And i remember so well someone i had brought in to help me sort of build a more formalized development and fundraising team said to me do you have any idea how rocky the finances might have been you haven't had any departures.
00:45:28
Speaker
And so there is such a core belief in the mission and vision of this organization. So I think I would remind myself of that, that this mission and vision is so powerful and so strong and inspires so many people. Don't lose sight of that. Never forget that.
00:45:50
Speaker
Mary Ellen, this has been such a rich and inspiring conversation. And as we come to a close, what is one thing you would like listeners to take away from this conversation? Give us one final thought or reflection. Well, I think it gets back to a part of an answer I didn't give you, which is a call to action. I think one of the reasons I love working in financial inclusion, it is like every single one of us has something we can do.
00:46:14
Speaker
We all have bank accounts. We all have car insurance. Do you even know the gender makeup of the leadership of your bank, of your insurance company, who's managing your retirement savings? Look that up because
00:46:30
Speaker
If it is a more gender diverse team, they're going to be getting you better returns. They are going to be paying much more attention to your business, certainly as a woman. And so be a really conscientious consumer of financial services.
00:46:46
Speaker
that financial and digital education into the minds of your kids, including your girls, as early as possible. There's some research that the age of five is the best time to start. So opening my bank account at seven, I was a late bloomer. So getting that financial education into whatever children are in our lives as early as possible is critical and really all is in support.
00:47:15
Speaker
of this bigger mission of women's economic independence. Mary Ellen, thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure having you on the show, and thank you for taking the time to have this important conversation. Thank you, Divya, and congratulations on your many, many, many followers and listeners, and the depth and authenticity of our conversation was really lovely. Thank you.
00:47:38
Speaker
And friends, that brings us to the end of Season 5 of the Charity CEO Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, we'd be thrilled if you could share the joy by leaving us a review on your favourite podcast platform. Tag us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram. We'd love hearing from our listeners.
00:47:55
Speaker
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