Iva

yeah, it's interesting. And, I mean, I've been in this line of work for many years, and I hear you, it's a very legitimate concern about, you know, the road between intention, advocacy, and actually doing an implementing and having impact. It's very difficult. And I feel like most efforts now are focused on the intention and advocacy, because it's easy. And it's much more difficult to identify actionable. initiatives and financing, partly financing, but also broadly more initiatives that have impact and that can be designed, justified and implemented and tracked, in a way that makes sense to everybody. I think some organisations overdo it, and some organisations sort of under do it. And now explain what I mean by this. So I'm in the space of reform. So I've worked a lot on policy, right? Both in the business regulation space, and in the women empowerment space. And you can imagine, especially in women empowerment, there's so much talk. There's so much advocacy, which is great. We want, we want there to be advocacy, in this space, especially in a region like the Middle East where you know, only 20% of women work. However, what I have found that works, I'll just jump the gun. Okay, I'll just talk about what I have found that works and what doesn't work. What I have found works is a few things one is, is data, it is very hard to convince governments or anybody else to do anything. If you don't have the data. We have found that in areas where the World Bank or other entities produce actionable data, it helps a lot with the convincing with the bringing it to the table, and also how you present this data. Like I said, there's a lot of conversation about advocacy about the need for equity, for example, for women, and so on. The way we presented data was actually from an economic standpoint, we basically came in and said, This is not about equity. This is about smart economics, if you don't have 50% of your population in the workforce, you're losing X amount of dollars, depending on the country that you could be generating for your population. Also, other studies show, okay, if women are not working, then you have an impact on other countries, you have impact on the health of children, you have impact on Child school enrollment, and so on and so forth. So it trickles down. So you don't present it as women should be equal to men, because we think that's a Western value. And it's a great idea. We present it as, look, it's good for your economy if you have your women working. Okay. And how do we then move from there? The next step is okay, what can you do? So? Oh, is it a good idea to have women and men being employed in the same way or to have women and men getting the same wage for the same value of work? Yes, that's a good idea. But how do you do that? Right? So then you look at the things that determine that the first step is regulation, it's the laws. How are your laws? Do you have, for example, a legal mandate in your regulation that mandates equal pay for work of equal value? No, you don't. I mean, that's probably not a bad place to start. And if you look at the data globally, you see, oh, my gosh, there's 80 economies around the world that don't mandate equal pay for work of equal value. So that's not a bad place to start. Because if you have it in the law to start with, then you can start to talk about implementation, and actually push it on both to the government and private sector. So bottom line, start with the data, then look at regulations and see what's in there. That's the starting point. Then what do you need? Do you need the government to collaborate? I mean, you need entities to collaborate. Honestly, in this part of the world, Leadership from the top is critical. I know you're talking about, you know, working with bottom up approaches we tried there, you know, in the Middle East, there are plenty of entities, non governmental, there's entities dedicated to women equity, like gender councils and even Ministries for gender and so on. I'm zooming in on gender, because this is fresh in my mind. But this is true for other things as well. What I am seeing is that, unfortunately, it is very difficult to get things done from bottom up. That's the reality that we have, I have experienced, we have experienced, it takes political champions, it takes people in leadership positions who are convinced that this is the right thing to do, then it happens. Okay, maybe that's not what you want to hear. This is the reality that we have experienced the same in the space of business regulation, it's very, very difficult to get things done bottom up. What we find is that once you have a certain level of buy in, at the top, then they open up the doors. And they say, Okay, we are on board with revising our regulations. Okay, let's open up the Labour Law. Then, at that stage, they're open, they say, Okay, fine. Let's bring in the private sector, let's bring in NGOs, whatever, whatever. But it's not from the beginning. I don't see it, I don't see it as Oh, NGO x comes and says, We have to reform the labour law. And suddenly the government says, Okay. I haven't seen that level of effectiveness, I have not seen that, I don't find that NGOs have this kind of sway, they carry this kind of sway. I think for better or worse, multilateral development organisations still have this credibility of the right access, I think, to get to top leadership, and have them listen. And, and I think the way things are approached, makes a big difference is they said, you know, in the past, things were approached from an equity perspective on women on business regulation, it was all you know, it was about or your neighbour is doing better, or something like this, they couldn't care less. Once you bring in the data and say, This is good for your economy. This is good for the health of your population, this is good for the education of your population, then they have a real interest in saying, Ah, okay, this makes sense to me. And this is good for us. We were not so concerned, you know about the social norms and things. Okay, we'll deal with that.. How do I put it, it's quite straightforward in a way. It's quite self centred. At the end of the day, you know, the government wants their population to do well, they want their economy to do well. That's their driving interest. Right? So this is what works. I'm just summarising some of the things that I have experienced. This may not be true across the board. This may be just true. In my experience, I don't know. But this is what has worked. And I have to say, like here in the Middle East. Using this approach, we really were able to introduce some pretty historic changes in UAE, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco. We've been working quite extensively on I would say very impactful programmes on women's empowerment. So massive changes in regulations in labour law provisions in the personal status law in banking regulations, mandating non discrimination in access to credit I mean, these are things that matter you know, these are things that women experience every day.

The way they get divorced, the way they can be head of households can they be the ones signing up their children for school? Can they be the ones making decisions on behalf of their children? Can they be employed in the same way as men? Can their maternity leave count towards their pension contributions? And I can go on? I mean, the list is very long, like mobility provisions, can they leave the house? Can they leave the country without their husband's permission, and so on? I mean, the reality here is very different from what I have experienced from what you're experiencing, right? So these are things that, first you have to understand the context very, very well, you have to understand what drives the interest of those who make the decisions and work with that. Otherwise, you're gonna hit a wall? And I guess the other thing I must say is that around the private sector mobilisation the private sector has a huge role to play. And I will give you a couple of examples. So for instance, here in UAE, UAE, there is no there was no mandate for women on boards, for instance, here, all the company boards are male dominated, okay. Then the World Bank, and the gender balance council said, Okay, let's talk to the private sector because this horrible means to send such a negative signal, right. So the private sector, we started this consortium with them, the private sector themselves said, Yes, this is horrible. Let's fix it. So they were the first country here, who, pushed by the private sector, together with us passed the first law in the Middle East, mandating at least one female on every company board. And when you say in this country, what do you mean? UAE? Okay, then they said, Okay, look at our middle management, we have between two and 5% of middle management females, I said, Okay, so what do you want to do about it? Okay, let's come up with an ambitious target. So now, they said 30% of middle management is going to be female by 2020 2025. This is not a lot. This is a commitment by private sector. In writing, using this consortium that we founded, saying, Okay, we Company X Aldar, whatever, committing to this target. It's not as good as regulation. And you cannot put this in regulation. But they are playing a big role, because they're pushing each other. There is now this competition between the private sector employers to hit this target, many of them have signed on to this pledge to 30%. The thing is, it's very difficult, I think, to come up with these ideas, and push the right people to get them there, right. But in some contexts, like here, it's working very well. So they have a big role to play. And especially the big companies, you know, they set the tone, they're the leaders, they're the big companies, they're the ones that everybody looks up to, in this context, you know. So, I'm sorry, I'm talking way too much. But I just want to share my experience, part of the world.