Mastercard and the US government-backed Women’s Global Development and Prosperity (W-GDP) institute have teamed up to further women’s empowerment along the lines of financial inclusion, access to capital, and ability to work, Mastercard CEO Ajaypal Singh Banga said.
“I think the business case for including and empowering women has been made up from so many different studies that it puzzles me why the conversation still runs on,” Mr. Banga said while speaking at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit 2019 in The Hague.
“You can add to world GDP, there's the fact that women make up 80% of purchasing decisions, the fact that women will be controlling $70 trillion of global wealth, which is 32% of global wealth by 2025,” Mr Banga added. “There's the fact that you can add $28 trillion to the system by empowering women to the same extent in the workforce as men are today.”
Against this background, Mastercard and the W-GDP have entered into an agreement to work on three pillars to do with women’s empowerment.
“The first one being, we are going to try to ensure financial inclusion, financial literacy, and the comprehension of how to be better prepared if an opportunity to use credit and financial facilities comes your way,” he said.
The second pillar, he said, was the access to capital for women entrepreneurs and the micro-enterprises run by them.
“The third has to do with finding ways in which women are not allowed to progress, mostly because of either laws or norms that don't make sense,” Mr Banga said. “There are more than 100 countries in the world where women don't get a chance to have the same kind of jobs as men do. There are 10-15 countries where men can actually insist that their women don't get a chance to work. That's stuff that needed to go out with the last century.”
Senior advisor to the US President, Ivanka Trump, said that the first issue was to identify the barriers facing women in different parts of the world since each region had different challenges.
“In the developed world, we have our own barriers such as the challenge of accessing affordable high quality child care,” Ms Trump said, also speaking at GES 2019. “The developing world has its own challenges. Can a woman open a bank account without the consent of a husband or a father or a male relative? Can a woman inherit or acquire property? Unfortunately, in parts of the world, they cannot.”
There are 2.7 billion women worldwide who are excluded from working in certain industries because it is deemed man’s work because of the nature of the industry, or the timings.
“If you are the CEO of a company that relies on middle-class growth, and on people consuming, so that if they consume, I can get the benefits as they come to me, it is in my own self-interest to try and spread the 'peanut butter' in a way that more people get a chance to get the peanut butter,” Mr Banga said, highlighting the financial imperatives for empowering women.
(The correspondent was in The Hague at the invitation of Foreign Press Center, U.S. Department of State)