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The electronic version of this document has been prepared at the Fourth
World Conference on Women by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
in collaboration with the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women
Secretariat.
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AS WRITTEN


INTER-AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT BANK
WASHINGTON, D.C. 20577

Sharing Prosperity and Power:
A New Partnership for the New Millennium

Remarks by Nancy Birdsall
Executive Vice President

The Fourth World Conference on Women
Action for Equality, Development and Peace
Beijing, China, September 4 -  15, 1995


 On behalf of the President of the Inter-American Development Bank, Mr.
Enrique Iglesias, who is here with me today, and the forty-six member
countries of the Inter-American Development Bank, I am honored to
address this distinguished gathering.   I am speaking to you today not
only as a development banker, but as a woman.  It is a special pleasure
for me, as the first woman with the rank of executive vice-president in
any of the multilateral development banks, to address this world
conference.  I doubt I would be standing here today if there had not
been an international women's movement, if there had not been world
conferences in Mexico City, in Copenhagen, in Nairobi and in thousands
of other fora between and since.  My presence here today shows there has
been progress; it is possible for women to rise to positions of power.
But it also reminds me that there are still too few women at high levels
in international organizations; I have over the years had too few female
colleagues at any level, given there are so many women with the
necessary skills, commitment and experience.

 The presence here today of both President Iglesias and myself, the
Bank's two highest-ranking officials, signals the full commitment of our
member countries and of our institution to gender equality in our own
institution and in the Latin America and Caribbean region.  With a loan
portfolio of over 20 billion dollars, and annual commitments of six
billion dollars to our borrowing members, the IDB is the largest of the
regional development banks and one of the premier international
development institutions working in Latin America and the Caribbean.
But as President Iglesias has said so well, the IDB is more than a bank
with financial resources.  It is a bank with a soul.  We are committed
to using our resources to support and catalyze the development process
in all its dimensions, including social, intellectual and cultural as
well as economic development.  A central aspect of our broad vision of
development is our dedication to support equal partnership between women
and men as participants in the process of development.   World
conferences such as this are easy to criticize.  But they can be a
useful vehicle, through discussion, debate, even through disagreement,
for informing and educating and convincing ourselves, of what should and
can be done.  I am convinced that this world conference will make a
difference.  I assure you that this conference and all the events
surrounding it are already inspiring us at the IDB to a renewed and
expanded commitment to the agenda contained in the Platform for Action.
I want to spend the next few minutes sharing with you our vision in the
IDB of how men and women, as full partners in the development challenge,
can share equally in prosperity and power in the Latin America and
Caribbean region.  I will speak about three Ps:  partnership, prosperity
and power.

Partnership Means Putting Men Back in the Family Let me begin with
partnership.  This is a conference about women.  But a full partnership
of women and men requires a rethinking of men's as well as women's roles
in society.    Women in the Latin America and Caribbean region have
always been productive workers on farms and in informal urban
businesses.  Now, in addition, women make up 30 percent of the formal
labor force, double the rate of one generation ago. But the roles of men
have not changed commensurately.  Fathers in Latin America contribute
only about one-fifth as much time as mothers to the care of their
children -- one of the lowest ratios of any region in the world.  Too
many fathers, feeling restricted to a narrow family role as breadwinner,
see themselves as failures if even temporarily they cannot provide
adequately for their family's economic needs. In parts of Latin America
and the Caribbean region, during the economic decline of the 1980s, many
fathers tragically abandoned their pregnant partners and their children,
adding to the numbers and poverty of female-headed households. The
development challenge is all about making better lives for our children.
We as women cannot do it alone.  Children benefit from the emotional as
well as financial support of their fathers; behind every mother truly
liberated to contribute to development outside the home is likely to be
a father, uncle or male colleague who has been liberated to contribute
inside the home.  In such countries as Colombia and Guatemala, studies
of how men and women use their time suggest women have systematically
more work and less leisure than men.  The same is true all over the
developed world.  The problem is not that women are entering the paid
labor force, nor that women have more apparent choices; it is that men
are not encouraged to engage in the real work of raising children, and
thus seem to have too few choices. Worst of all, public policy, except
in a few countries of Scandinavia, fails to support an expanded role for
men in the family.  Government programs and policies that affect
employment, child care, and pensions, are still largely shaped by gender
stereotypes that fail to support the emotional responsibility of men to
their families, exacting a heavy toll not only on men and women but on
their children.   To address this problem in Latin America, the Inter-
American Development Bank is working with member governments to develop
and support programs and policies, in education, health, training,
social insurance, child care and employment, that explicitly support an
expanded role for men in the family.  We hope that the Platform of
Action coming out of this conference will provide ample reinforcement
for this direction in our region.

Prosperity in the Region Means Reducing Barriers to Women's Economic
Equality The second P is prosperity.  After a long period of stagnation
and decline, our region is experiencing renewed economic growth.
Government leaders have sponsored courageous economic reforms.  They
have reduced inflation dramatically with heavy doses of fiscal and
monetary discipline.  They have carried out fundamental structural
reforms, including trade liberalization, tax reform, and privatizations
that have reduced the fiscal burden of subsidizing inefficient state-
owned enterprises.  Investments and exports are increasing, and private
capital is flowing into the region.  The structural reforms have enabled
the countries of the region to weather the financial storm set off by
last December's devaluation of its currency by Mexico.   These economic
reforms and the growth they are bringing are absolutely necessary for
the reduction of widespread poverty and deep inequality in the region.
But they are far from sufficient.  Our member countries of Latin America
are now making substantial commitments to policies and programs to more
directly reduce poverty and attack inequality.  They are, with the
support of the Inter-American Development Bank, committed to ensuring
that structural reforms are designed to minimize negative effects on the
poor, and including programs to explicitly protect the poor when
necessary.  They are committed to maximizing the productivity-enhancing
effects for the poor of credit programs for small entrepreneurs and of
investments in education, health, and infrastructure.   Obviously a
concern with reducing poverty requires attention to women.  Poverty in
Latin America and the Caribbean, indeed throughout the Americas, has
emerged as a markedly feminine phenomenon.   Most of the poor in our
region are women and children.  A quarter of households are headed by
women (in some countries almost half of households) and of these, most
are poor.  Because women are poor and so many are household heads, in
some countries more than 50 percent of children are growing up poor.
This is not primarily a problem of education.  With the worrisome
exception of women in the indigenous communities of Latin America, where
female illiteracy still far exceeds male illiteracy, women in our region
now have virtually equal access to basic education.  It is a problem of
equal access to jobs and to credit, and equal pay for equal work.  Women
are more likely to be unemployed than men in Latin America.  They are
systematically less likely to have the contacts, the collateral and in
some countries, the legal standing, to get access to commercial bank
credits.  When employed they earn just 75 percent of what men earn.
Ironically, even as women are the principal victims of poverty, they are
also the great multipliers of prosperity.  We know from careful research
that women spend more of their personal income on their children than
men, and that a mother's education has a more powerful influence on
children's education than a father's.  Improving women's access to jobs,
to credit and to equal pay is not only just and fair, a legitimate
objective of development in itself.  It also makes perfectly good
economic sense -- because the benefits will spread beyond the family to
all of society and to the next generation.  I want to mention three
types of programs the IDB is supporting to address the constraints to
women's prosperity, and thus to prosperity for all, in our borrowing
member countries.   One is microenterprise development.  The IDB has for
two decades provided support for microenterprise credit programs of non-
governmental organizations.  More than half the beneficiaries of these
programs, of which there are now several million people, have been
women; many are managed by women and women's organizations.  Thousands
of these groups are now receiving support from the IDB, including
through a special facility to finance our equity participation in these
ventures, to become full-fledged financial institutions in their
countries, able to raise as well as lend resources. A second is
vocational training.  Recent loans to Argentina and Chile have included
components to ensure that women are encouraged to take training in
skills that are highly marketable but have traditionally been confined
to men, such as plumbing, carpentry, and electrical work.  These
programs also include day care and other promotional activities targeted
to women. In Chile 45 percent of the participants in this program to
date have been women. The third area is child development.  We are
expanding our efforts to develop and support comprehensive child care
programs, which benefit not only children, but help women balance their
responsibilities for raising children with their need to work and their
efforts to participate in political and civic life.  New programs are
being designed and executed in Nicaragua, Bolivia and Peru. Over the
last four years we have made special efforts to ensure that gender
concerns are an integral part of all the programs we support and all the
policies we recommend -- through our dialogue with borrowing members on
economic policy, and in the context of our lending for agriculture,
infrastructure and urban development as well as for education, health
and family planning.  In 1991, the first year for which such statistics
were kept, only 6 percent of our mainstream loan projects included
specific actions to address gender differences and strengthen women's
participation in projects.  By 1994 that share has risen to 31 percent.
We are committed to pushing that share to 50 percent by the year 2000.

Power for Women is Key to Real Development The third P is power -- power
for women in Latin America and the Caribbean.  Development in our region
cannot happen unless women have more power over their own lives and more
influence in shaping the policies and programs that affect everyone's
lives.  Too many women compared with men are poor and on their own to
continue to rely on trickle-down within families to ensure prosperity
for all.  Women are too central as mothers and multipliers of
development for development to occur in the absence of their fullest
possible contribution.   Women's full contribution to development can
only be tapped when they can participate as equally powerful partners,
with men, in all aspects of economic and political life.  Participation
without equal access to leadership and power will not bring development
progress. I am not among those women who say that powerful women will
become mere mirrors of powerful men.  Women with power in Latin America
are already making a distinct contribution to political and civic life,
and to the shaping of economic and social policies.  The strengthening
of democracy throughout the region and the increasing reliance of
democratic governments on institutions of civil society are rapidly
creating new leadership opportunities for women.  But women have a long
way to go.  Women participate in significant numbers in political
parties and labor unions, but rarely as leaders.  Only a few women have
achieved top political positions, and a few others stand out as social
activists and business leaders.  Women occupy only 5 to 8 percent of
positions in the region's legislative assemblies, and women in the
executive branch of government are concentrated in the social
ministries, and largely excluded from the political, economic, judicial,
and defense spheres. Encouragingly for the future, women's influence is
greater through nontraditional channels, such as the fast growing
movement of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).  In our region women
also increased their representation among managers and administrators
from 18 percent in 1980 to 25 percent in 1990.    To support the
movement for greater leadership of women in political and civic life,
the IDB in collaboration with other donors, is launching a Fund for
Women's Leadership and Representation.  The Fund will finance programs
of nongovernmental organizations leadership training and capacity
building for nongovernmental organizations.  The IDB also supports legal
reform and civic education to reduce gender inequity through programs
such as the Technical Cooperation Program for Governance, now being
prepared in Bolivia.   And within the IDB itself in this year of the
Beijing conference, the President has asked for new actions to increase
the participation of women in our own management ranks.  Eight percent
of our sector managers are now women, compared to 2 percent 10 years
ago.  We know we cannot be a truly effective development institution
until we have more women in our own senior decision-making positions.
Finally, the Bank is seeking to address one of the most intractable
forms of unequal power -- the threat of physical violence against women.
Together with the Pan American Health Organization, we are designing a
regional program to treat and prevent violence against women through
legal reform to punish offenders, training of medical personnel, public
education campaigns, and programs to assist victims to rebuild their
lives.

Development is About Our Children I want to end on a personal note.
Development is about the future, and thus about our children and our
young people.  Today's youth are the ones who will determine what the
tomorrow of the 21st century will look like.  With that in mind, the IDB
has sponsored a youth delegation to this world conference on women, made
up of one young woman from each of our borrowing member countries.  Over
the last few days, I have had the chance to interact with these
remarkable young people and to take inspiration from their energy,
creativity and commitment.  They have reminded me that I am not only a
development banker and a woman.  I am also a mother, deeply concerned
with the future of my own children, and the shape of the future world in
which they will live most of their lives.  Many of us in this room will
not live to see the changes we have been speaking about here and working
for in each of our home settings.  But the young members of the IDB's
youth delegation, and all of our own children, can live to see those
changes  -- if we commit ourselves now to a full partnership between
equally powerful men and women that will endure into the next
millennium.  I feel fortunate, as a woman and a mother, to work in an
institution and in a region of the world dedicated to that mission and
that partnership, and to know that I and the institution I work for can
be part of this historic process.