Economic Empowerment
The message of women gathered here to women throughout the world is that 2011 is the year for their economic empowerment.
With dozens of corporations, NGOs, governments and international financial organizations representing or serving literally millions and millions of women through the world, there certainly is a good shot at achieving the La Pietra Coalition's first goal, moving the G- 20 into putting women on the agenda.
But the initial session of this year's meeting was all about strategy, targeting, marketing and an embrace of the Internet as the way to both spread the message and mobilize women everywhere.
"The G20 should lead on girls' and women's economic empowerment because that is the most effective way to increase global prosperity," was how Catherine Geanuracos of Ten X Ten summed it up. She was part of the Working Group on Education and Training, one of the five action teams -- the others are Access to Finance, Labor Policy and Practice, Legal and Social Status and Entrepreneurship -- divisions that show the practiced and targeted approach to social change that defines this coalition.
And how do all these areas fit under the umbrella of financial inclusion? Education, for example? Why place everything under the rubric of financial inclusion?
"Why?" answers Penny Abeywardena of the Clinton Global Initiative. "Because will not have tomorrow's economically empowered women without focusing on quality, sustained education for girls."
And that is what they plan to do -- rewrite the future of women with a long-term goal of giving them equality on all those areas, via financial inclusion, by the year 2020.
But first -- onto the G20 and the groups that will make it happen.
Convened in this city that once invented the future is a powerful array of organizations, each with huge individual successes in the business of social justice for women: among them Vital Voices Global Partnership; Women for Women; Ernst & Young; The Clinton Global Alliance; the World Bank; U.N. Women and the Paul Singer Foundation (which for the third year underwrites the meeting). Two women candidates for President -- from the Cameroon and Egypt -- are here, as well as the head of the Businesswomen's Association of South Africa and the Chief Editor of the Yemen Times.
Sarah Brown, who sparked the massive international movement to realize the U.N. Millennium Goal of reducing maternal mortality and who is the global patron of the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood, was clear that the economic approach to equality advanced all the diverse programmatic approaches represented here., she said. "The glaring inequities around the world for girls and women are why the participants in the G20 summer need to put gender on the agenda -- from access to affordable healthcare and education through to protection from the extreme violence and lack of freedoms that girls are women suffer."
Anyone who has even dabbled in local politics over the past century knows the fragility and complexity of any coalition effort. But this one seems robust and resilient. Over and over, participants agreed that "this is the time for financial inclusion for women."
And they have some expert advice from within their ranks on how to pull this off.
Beth Brooke, the Global Vice Chair of Public Police at Ernst & Young with public policy responsibility for the firm's operations in 140 countries as well as global responsibility for the firm's Diversity and Inclusiveness efforts, was clear about the reason for "collective impact." Agreeing that everyone in the room was engaged in generating individual "impact" on social justice problems, Brooke pointed to the reality that a diverse perspective generates better outcome: "All of you here are driving your agenda as far as you can and the people who fund you are hopeful that you will have a bigger and bigger impact."
Ellyn Toscano, who directs the Italian campus of NYU, here at the Villa La Pietra, said that this meeting, the third, was "the most difficult and challenging moment of our work: take the goals from aspiration to articulation to an operational work plan."
Zainab Salbi, the founder and CEO of Women for Women International, a grassroots aiding women survivors of wars rebuild their lives, summed up the challenge and the hope: "If this is a mountain we are on the mountain. We are halfway up that mountain. We are not at the top."