INTRO
Global Partners for Development proudly presents: What do you understand? A deep dive into the many facets of philanthropy and development. Experts in their field will discuss an aspect of their work that they understand particularly well. Let’s talk about big bets, innovation, social enterprises, large scale humanitarian aid, and the fixation on ending things or solving human’s greatest problems and the issues that arise while tackling it all.
I am your host Ria Pullin, and my co-host is the executive director of Global Partners for Development, Daniel Casanova.
RIA
Our guest today is Mary Ellen Iskenderian. Mary Ellen is the 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. Her book, There’s Nothing Micro About A Billion Women: Making Finance Work For Women was recently published by MIT Press.
Mary Ellen, thank you so much for joining us!
MARY ELLEN
Thanks for inviting me.
DANIEL
Your, your smile is, um, is, is contagious. I wanted to smile cuz you smiled.
MARY ELLEN
It’s working!
RIA
Was I saying things that just was ticking him a little bit?
DANIEL
Well, why don’t we do get into, I mean, so do you want, what, what I mean was, was the motivation to write the book, like your board had been bugging you to write a book for a really long time and they were like,
RIA
They were like, put it down.
MARY ELLEN
That’s funny. That’s really funny. Well, well, it was more that, that was a lot of motivation for me, cause I felt like there was so much that I, I was seeing my colleagues were seeing. That I could talk anecdotally about, and you know, like that story, I just told you so many women told me about educating their kids, but I wanted to see whether what we were seeing really held up, you know, in the, in the research, whether it held a bigger story about the work that we were seeing with the individual women. There’s also a bit of a pet peeve, to be honest with you, and it, it kind of shows up in the slightly snarky title.
It just really, always bugged me about micro finance for, you know, half of the world’s population, you know, and that it somehow has to be small and precious. And I, I just felt that there was so much power in the people that I was meeting that was just untapped.
And being able to, um, you know, to capture some of that, not only the, the, you know, the really tremendous commercial opportunity, um, Oliver Wyman estimates that there’s a 700 billion annual revenue opportunity being left on the table, just because we’re not at parity. Not saying even all of those women being served just as many women as men.
Um, yeah, you know, 700 billion, that’s like total revenue of the world’s eight largest banks. I mean, it’s a lot.
RIA
Wow.
MARY ELLEN
It’s a lot of money. It’s twice Elon Musk’s network. Um, the other thing that was really exciting to me recently was the IMF has really started talking about financial inclusion as, you know, a word they they’ve made up, but I’ll use it “macro.”
It’s an absolutely critical driver of growth, but if you don’t include women, if you don’t include the least, you know, the least included, then you’re only going to exacerbate inequality. So, including growth literally is impossible without including women.
RIA
Yeah
MARY ELLEN
But then at the end of the day, I think it’s one of the things that really distinguishes us as an organization, and I wanted to bring home is this idea of, of empowerment and what interacting with finance, how that can change a woman’s life in, you know, myriad ways. We tend to use a framework that we developed with Harvard’s, Marty Chen and she had had developed this. She looked at the different kinds of changes that women went through when they engaged with finance.
First would be, you know, just simply material changes. Is there more money in the house? Does the household have more assets? You know, that’s the easy one. Then there were sort of cognitive changes. Did she learn anything? Was she more aware of options that were available to her by virtue of interacting?
But then I think that the other two are really, really interesting. The third bar relational changes. How is she received in her household? Does she have greater say in household decision making? There’s some research showing that women are more likely to vote and more likely to stand for office if they are financially included.
One of the things that I—I was disappointed by is that there really isn’t a piece of kind of definitive research that says more access to finance makes women less vulnerable to gender-based violence. There’s, it’s still kind of equivocal, at least in the research. I know what I’ve seen anecdotally.
RIA
Yeah.
MARY ELLEN
But I really, you know, would urge researchers look at this, and then I think the last one, the last set of changes is all about, you know, your self-esteem and your sense of yourself, your sense of for future. And there’s been some really powerful examples of that when a woman engages with, with finance.
And so, I just feel like on those three levels, you know, the macro economy, the business opportunity, and then with the woman herself, it’s—it’s a great story. So, I’m really pleased that my board gave me the time to, to do it.
DANIEL
Yeah. Good, good. Yeah. I mean, I like, you know, one of the things that was—that stood out for me is like in our, in my work and it made similar, like empowerment is used so flippantly and so many ways.
So, I really like that you are actually like, you didn’t just like narratively talk about it. You, you actually had a metric for like the, this is what we’re talking about when we talk about empowerment. I thought mm-hmm, and that’s super useful just because otherwise it just gets bogged down and it’s like, yeah, obviously we should empower people.
But like, what does that really mean? You know, how are we going to do that? So,
MARY ELLEN
I agree, like really, and it’s almost to the point of cliche, so I, thank you for noting that.
RIA
Yeah. Cuz there’s semantics and there’s like actually, you know, hard, like hard-line things that you can do to get things done. And what does that actually look like?
MARY ELLEN
Right, right. Yeah.
DANIEL
That’s good. Cool. Well, I was, I, I have some questions for you in terms of your book, if that’s okay. Just cause yeah. And then, then we’re gonna give you our, like our, our buzz thing for what we do on our interview. But like, I, you know, my, my first, my thought is I, in your end, I think you had a really clear call to action.
Um, that was concise. And also, throughout the book, I kept thinking in my mind with my thought was more like, you know, banking has continued to fail the poorest to people in the planet and even in, and including women is admirable, but I kept being like, oh, you know, is it enough? And I think you addressed that really well at the end of your book in saying like, it’s not, but you also list like here, we don’t know about all the possibilities that are gonna happen if, if this, if this happens.
And, but I’m curious, like, is banking gonna continue to fail the poorest people in the world? Like, are we gonna fix financial institutions? You know? Cause like, I think it’s an issue even here in the US, not just in other parts of the world. So, I don’t know if—I’m not trying to set you up.
MARY ELLEN
No, no, no. You’re, you’ve, you’ve hit—I think you really hit the nail in the head and, you know, it’s, it’s something that we talk a lot here. The organization is called Women’s World Banking and I’m, I’m not sure whether the banking industry just has, has, so you know, is tied itself in so many knots is now misbehaves at every opportunity that it needs this, all this regulation is imposed on it.
So, I’m personally really optimistic and excited about some of the FinTech models that we’re seeing. But what, what does worry me a lot is how many, how many FinTech companies we, we get to know, um, women’s world banking has two impact investment funds that we manage.
And the second fund has been making some really interesting investments in FinTechs. They come with a really clear vision to serve that population, that you’re talking about Daniel, the underserved population, but by the time they start getting to their series B, series C, um, rounds where growth and scale are, you know, all about what, what they need to deliver.
Then I’m afraid that they’re going to move away. And so, I think we have to start really talking to those capital providers, getting them on board, about as much as you know, it’s not, it’s not even the banks any longer, you know, our investment funds are doing all we can. That was really the reason behind our, um, our deciding to go down the path as an investor.
But, you know, there’s, there’s a lot more capital out there that needs to be allowing those businesses to stay true to that original mission of serving the underserved.
DANIEL
Okay, cool. Yeah, that’s at ends the thing I’m curious. Do you have you, what do you think about Rutger Bregman? Do you know the, do you know who he is? He’s a Dutch economist. He talks—his catch thing is he says, you know, we have to stop talking about philanthropy.
MARY ELLEN
Yeah, go ahead.
DANIEL
Have to stop talking about philanthropy and start talking about taxes, and so, I just think that, you know, I was, when I, when I was reading through your, your, your book, I thought, oh, you know, like there are these conver—I, I see there’s beginnings of dialogues there, including women, I think solve some of these systemic things.
But I imagine you similar in your dialogues and your work, you guys are talking about us, but I missed, you know, didn’t know if you knew about him or what your thoughts on that are. You might be a bleeding, like pinko bastard, you know, or something like that. I don’t know, but
MARY ELLEN
I think—I think he’s the one always calling people out at Davos and saying like inappropriate. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s, it’s coming back to me. I, you know, I can tell you where, where it’s intersected in, in, in my life and in my work, you know, when we have a lot of wonderful corporate partners who, um, who ever since, you know, mobile money and digital finance became the way we’re getting finance into the hands of underserved people, really opened the playing field for like anybody who has kind of a, a supply line into that.
Woman’s life is kind of fair game for providing some kind of financial service. And if they come to me from the business and they talk about, we wanna work with you to, you know, expand our client, you know, portfolio, or we have a product that’s serving men but not women, or whatever. If they’re talking about it from the business, then I feel like I can take them seriously.
But if they’re only talking about it from CSR, it’s not gonna be sustainable. I’m not saying that there, I, I do think that there is a role for philanthropy. I do think there are, um, causes and investments that do need that capital that is not looking for a financial return, but I also think that too many important real-world problems, real world challenges are, are being dealt with out of philanthropic pools of money and they need to be centered in the business.
RIA
All right. Yeah. So, something that like spoke to me, so, uh, like my back, I’m a commercial actress and, um, I love when you talked about, and I love like the power of entertainment and how it was showing women through like the telenovelas or like the—the commercials of just like, oh, you’re hiding your money into your mattress.
And then your husband finds it and then throws a big party. I laughing so hard.
DANIEL
That’s what I do with my wife’s money.
RIA
Stop. I’m gonna teller. I like his wife. Anyways. Just thought that was really interesting, like a different way that women need to be spoken to and included in like the power of representation.
You know, because I feel like, like I, I brought up Wolf of Wall Street earlier is it’s like, it’s a male dominated industry. And just like having women like you empowers, um, a physician who make the decisions is so important, it’s so important. And just like having. Trying to find ways to speak to women through either these, these shows or these commercials, or even just like that Netflix show Maid even, even happens like in our, in our society.
Now that was a powerful, powerful thing. And just like thinking, oh, she had never even gone through the bureaucracy of having any kind of identification. Or like having a cell phone, like, I love how you talk about like, equality can be found by like, just having a simple mobile device. Like, as we become more of like a technological, you know, world, it’s not just being seen in the global north, like there’s access to cell phones all over now and, and like SIM card technology.
I think that is just really, really important.
MARY ELLEN
No, it’s, it’s really access to that smartphone technology is, is the gateway, you know, it’s, it’s almost being taken as a, um, you know, as a, as a given or, or as a must have. Um, and unfortunately there’s still, you know, an 18% gender gap in, in smartphone ownership.
That was a real disappointment. Um, we’ve made some real progress during, during COVID, um, phone ownership has some real cultural norms. You know, fathers don’t want their unmarried daughters to have access to phones and all of that. When the whole world shifted into digital, a lot of that, you know, we just kind of leapfrogged over it.
But then, um, the industry association for, you know, mobile phones, the GSMA just released their, their, uh, gender gap report about two weeks ago and looks like that, that progress has really, really stopped and slowed down again. So, it was really disappointing to, to see that. But, you know, the good news is once the women get the technology in their hands and are confident using it.
So, the skills and the capability to the point you were making Ria is so important. They’ve gotta feel comfortable using it. They never go back and their adaptation and their usage is, you know, absolutely on par with men’s.
DANIEL
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, I wanna, we wanna not take a lot of your time.
So, part of us wanting to do this is that I feel like people that spend their lives like academics or experts like you, and think it’s fair to ask them about what they really understand about what they do or something they know in the world. And so, I’m really curious to ask, and so. A lot. We get a lot of like, people, like, it’s hard to wanna say like, oh, I really understand.
Or I really know something, but I’m curious what you, what you know, that you can like share in that way where it’s like, okay, I’m really certain about this one thing. I know this, this thing and I think it’s important to say it.
MARY ELLEN
That’s a great question. Um, I, I definitely would be, so, you know, in 2015, when the, the UN was siding about the sustainable development goals, there was a huge debate whether financial inclusion should be one of the goals and the decision was taken. And I agree with this, that it actually isn’t a goal itself, but it’s a means to an end.
And actually, there is sort of specific targets in seven of the goals that are linked to financial inclusion. And so the thing I really know is that we are not going to achieve any of those goals unless we take the time and are deliberate about including women and making sure that women have access, and not just access, but can use and use confidently the full range of financial tools.
DANIEL
I love that.
DANIEL
Wow. Give me chills. You, you did good.
RIA
And one thing we always end with is what is, what is something you’re working on right now that you’re really excited about?
MARY ELLEN
Oh, well, that’s, you know, part I’ve been at, I, uh, I’ve been at Women’s World Banking for 15 years, 16 years coming up. Um, and I think part of the reason I stay is cuz I’m always excited about pretty much everything.
I’d say the thing that really has me jazzed right now is I’ve been so impressed by the impact that we’re able to have as an investor inside companies. You know, um, we had done some research, gosh, I guess it would be about 12, 13 years ago that we looked at 39 microfinance institutions that had gone from being, you know, NGOs or nonprofit organizations to being regulated full-fledged banks.
And we found that at the, the sort of time zero, the day that the board made the decision to become a regulated bank, they had on average 86% women clients. And by four years later, so they’d made the transition to becoming a four-profit bank. They were down to 59% women clients. And if they had a woman CEO or a woman chair of the board, they were gone, you couldn’t have women leaders now that you were a bank somehow.
And so, we chose to become an investor in order to make sure that just because you were bringing in outside capital, that didn’t have to happen, that shift away from women, clients and women leaders didn’t have to happen. And so, I’ve seen what we’ve been able to do on average from the time of our investment to either the exit from the investment or, or to date for those investments, we haven’t exited yet.
We’ve had an 83% increase in women clients in our invested companies. We, so we are really driving that change. So, what I’m very excited about is doing a fund here in states, around women’s economic empowerment here.
RIA
Great.
MARY ELLEN
And investing in FinTech and other sort of technology enabled cuz here in the United States, it’s, it’s more about, you know, financial health than about financial inclusion.
97% of Americans have a bank account. There’s actually a, a slight reverse gender gap. More women have bank accounts that men.
RIA
Oh.
MARY ELLEN
Yeah. Yeah, no, it’s interesting. But then, you know, the, the wage gap, you know, we say it’s 80 cents, but that’s, you know, white women versus white men, soon as you add ethnicity color, those numbers just plummet. And then they’re even more appalling when you look at things like home ownership.
RIA
Yeah.
MARY ELLEN
Business ownership, you know, just general wealth ownership. So, and there’s some really interesting businesses now that are starting, you know, attack these issues. There’s some fascinating work being done in, um, like in credit scoring, um, you know, most many rental payments, even if it’s, you know, on time is not reflected in the credit score that goes to a bank when you try to get a mortgage.
And so, there’s companies, actually, um, uh, Serena Williams just took a, a stake in one of them that if you know you for a monthly fee, they make sure that your on time rental payment makes it into that, that credit score. And it, on average increases your credit score by 50 points.
RIA
That part actually really stood out to me. You were saying like utilities or your phone payment. If they’re being paid, they should go towards your rental payment. Not, not how. Paying on a credit card or like a mortgage. I thought that was really fascinating.
MARY ELLEN
Right. That made a hu. And it sounds like you read the, the text. It made a huge difference here in the United States, in terms of people being eligible, you know, for credit and, and you know, other financial services.
So, I’m, I’m really excited about getting to know how those issues work here in the United States. So that’s, that’s a big part of my, uh, my excitement right now.
DANIEL
Are, are you gonna target specific areas like communities, like, meaning, like, you know, are you gonna be like in Alabama or like, you know, go, you know, to poor counties and Georgia? I mean, is it, is there, is it targeted or is it more policy related? I’m just curious.
MARY ELLEN
No, I think, you know, I, I, I don’t know how geographic that target will be.
DANIEL
Okay.
MARY ELLEN
But you know, it’s funny you use the, you use the Alabama as the example. I was, I was on a panel with a, a guy owns, um, a bunch of small banks, small outlets in Alabama.
And he said there are more payday lenders, like storefront, payday lenders in Alabama than Burger King, McDonald’s, and Wendy’s combined, you know, they’re just, they’re just preying. And the, and women are absolutely the target customer.
RIA
Are these like the check cashing things? The checking things. Those things.
MARY ELLEN
Yeah. So, there’s really a, there’s clearly an unmet need there.
RIA
Yeah.
MARY ELLEN
Um, so I, so, so my, my, my long-winded answer to you is yes, we will be targeting where business will be located. I, I don’t know yet.
RIA
And I know we didn’t touch on it. Something about, we were kind of curious what your thoughts were on cryptocurrencies. I know that’s kind of like aa ah! I kind, I wanna know. I’m curious what you think.
DANIEL
Well, just cause with mobile money. Cause we use a lot of like in the work we do in East Africa, like mobile money’s huge.
RIA
Yeah.
DANIEL
And everything. So, but I I’m, I see their future being crypto solving some of being an even better solution for moving money around in, in, in those markets. So, I don’t know if that’s you guys. Have to be talking about it. I imagine in some way or another.
MARY ELLEN
No, we are. And I, I, frankly, I I’d love to hear more about your vision because I’ve gotta say right now, we’re struggling a little bit to see how, you know, it, it just feels like these are the most vulnerable clients.
And so putting them into any, and then, you know, and then to see the decline in stable coin, like, like you can’t call it stable coin, if it’s gonna crack, you know, the stability of that currency that, that they’re operating in that said, you know, I am very excited about some of the blockchain solutions that might be possible because to the point you were both making earlier around ID, you know, blockchain allows you to have, you know, a unique idea of sender, unique idea of receiver, there’s some really interesting work being done by, you know, a couple of companies in, in terms of, um, sending money to refugees providing, refugee relief because they, they may not have, they certainly don’t have bank accounts. They may not have the right ID identification.
Um, but, uh, a cryptocurrency sent along a blockchain, you know, kind of leapfrogs over that. And there’s, there’s something kind of philosophically almost about crypto that shouldn’t make sense. It’s, you know, it’s a community, there’s no middle man. It’s peer to peer and you know, pretty much every country we work in women are, you know, perhaps they’re in the formal financial system, but they are informally saving to other savings and savings groups are very, very popular.
And so, I, there’s a part of me that says that the, the bones or the, you know, the philosophy of crypto will make sense for women. We just absolutely have to make sure that they’re not made more vulnerable by it.
RIA
And I think a lot of that is education, which you talk about a lot is educating women on being able to use these services or being able to use technology. So, I feel like educating women and like, I love that every year girls in school, you know, it just is beneficial to so many. And like that’s kind of our big thing is we wanna make sure girls are, go to school, stay in school, and can succeed because they have great ideas. We have great ideas, don’t we?
DANIEL
Kinda just to cuz I don’t, you know, I, I know you in terms of reading about you and reading your book, but I’d be curious to hear more like, you know about you, like, you know, what’s your favorite color or where you, where you grew up, like things like that.
MARY ELLEN
Um, I, I think that the pieces of my background that, you know, may be interested interesting to your, your listeners.
I’m sort of first generation on both sides. My mother, um, was from Italy. My father was from Turkey, and they met here in the United States and, and, and stayed in the us. They were both in school. And I think I was really, really, very lucky. My brother’s sister and I were very, very fortunate to have, um, you know, to have that cross cultural, um, understanding in our own home. My, my father’s family is Armenian.
And that was another kind of interesting background. Armenians in Turkey are still, you know, very, very small percentage. Very, very fierce, um, you know, holding on to the, the memory of, of the 1915 genocide.
And that was a very sort of big part of who my family was. And I’ve always given my mother great, great credit because she, it was really important to her that we understand that part of our, our background, even though it wasn’t necessarily her background. So that was a, yeah. So that was a, a really important part of, of who I, I was growing up.
You know what, I think that that, um, I really, really wanted to go to the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, and I wanted a BA I wanted a, an international career. We had traveled quite a bit to Turkey and elsewhere when I, I was growing up and I was raised by my mother was very, very strict Catholic. And then I brought her to, to Georgetown and she saw that there were crucifixes on all of the classrooms that, that was, that was what solved it.
And she got her over, got her over the line. So, um, I, I was able to go into, to the school I wanted to go to and, um, had a, a background in development, economics, um, there and studied development economics. I then took a much more sort of traditional finance path.
I was a foreign exchange trader coming out of college at Bank of America and my family are convinced to this day that all I really learned to do was very, um, extensive cursing. Um, had to have that skillset on the trading floor.
RIA
Extensive cursing.
DANIEL
Yeah. Lots of misbehaving people, right?
RIA
Like Wolf of Wall Street.
MARY ELLEN
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, exactly. When I, I went to, um, I went, I went to the, the Dearly Departed Lehman brothers and worked primarily in M&A coming outta business school, you know, mainstream finance and financial decisions and how they impact people’s lives. The story that I often tell that was kind of my, my come to Jesus moment. Was I, it was the first deal that I worked on that I wasn’t the most junior person.
And I had a, an analyst working with me, and we’d been hired by a client of the firm to identify some acquisition candidates. It was a trucking firm, and they were looking for a company to buy and he had done a very extensive model looking at balance sheets. What would the combined companies look like?
And I was checking it out the day before we were gonna go see the client and at the bottom of this row of, you know, different business combinations was this number that kept changing. And I was like, what? What’s that? What’s that plug figure? And he, he said, that’s the number of people that would have to be fired at each company in order to make the deal?
RIA
Oh my goodness.
MARY ELLEN
And it was like, whoa, this not what I went into finance to do. And I then really feel like it was so fortuitous. I would put on another deal. With a woman who had previously been at the world bank and she had run what they call their young professionals program, which is sort of the entry level program.
They always hire, you know, PhD economists, which I wasn’t. But when I was talking about really what I wanted to do, she said, you know, I, I would give it a try. You’ve got an unusual background. The MBA is important. Um, and to my amazement, I did get into the program. And then four months later, the Berlin wall fell and all of the finance had became incredibly valuable and important.
And I worked for the next eight years in Eastern Europe. I used to say once they finally put a decent hotel in the capital city, I would get a call from my boss that I had to go further east. Um, but it was, it was amazing. And a moment in history, particularly in Eastern Europe, because you could see that, you know, these were people who had a history, you know, they would always bring out in, in, I remember to this day in Poland, what used to be Czechoslovakia, these really old lawyers, they would shuffle them out and they had been the big securities lawyers.Of the time, you know, before communism and they still had, you know, they still had the muscle.
Very different in the Soviet union. You know, there had never really been a market there and did a lot of work in Ukraine, for example. Um, so it was, it was building from scratch there in, in a really important way, but that was really where I first saw finance, having the possibility of helping people, you know, realize their dreams and be who they wanted to, who they wanted to be.
And, you know, never really seeing a bank as a partner in any of that prior. And it was always something that I’d kind of hoped was true, but then I really got to see it come to life and you know, then I worked, I worked in Latin America for a while. I was, um, I was the regional director for the International Finance Corporation, which my fourth day on the job was 9/11.
RIA
Oh my goodness.
MARY ELLEN
Actually, most of, yeah, uh, in Pakistan actually, cuz I was responsible for both um, India and Pakistan, but I was living in Deli and it was the first, the first investment that the IFFC made Post 9/11. Stand was the first microfinance bank with the AGA Khan Foundation. And really a moment of, you know, finance carries a message and can carry a vision of hope for people.
Very, very different from other messages that were, uh, you know, being espoused at the time, you know, a lot of war and revenge. Um, so it, it was a really. You know, sort of a journey, I guess, and going from sort of more mainstream finance to finance really playing a, a, a role of good in people’s lives.
Um, but I did start to feel as I was moving up in the ranks of the bank that I was getting farther and farther away from those people. My job as a boss was to kind of spread my wings and protect all the, the folks beneath me. Um, but then I was farther and farther away. So, I had a headhunter call from women’s world banking and it just looked like it made a lot of sense to get close to the, the women in the field, grassroots.
I’m still so grateful to the board that they took a chance on me because I, to this day, I, it was like my I’m talking good Catholic girl. Again, we know I’m paying the penance that I never wanted. Never once asked a bank, how many women, clients they had, how many women, um, entrepreneurs, they were funding never asked any of the venture capital funds that we put money into, you know, were they seeding women’s businesses?
And, you know, within a matter of weeks here at women’s rural banking, it became so clear that women are doing, you know, so much of the heavy lifting of economic development, let alone the, the health and prosperity and security of their own, their own households. So, it’s been, it’s like one of those things, once you see it, you can’t unsee.
RIA
Yeah.
MARY ELLEN
And it’s been, um, it’s really been a wonderful journey ever since.
DANIEL
There must have been, a must have been like a learning curve, like in terms of like seeing the wizard of Oz, getting the wizard of Oz revealed to you or something like that.
MARY ELLEN
Exactly. Yeah. That’s a real, it’s a great, great metaphor.
RIA
What’s a beautiful journey to me. It seemed like what opened your eyes and what opened my eyes, especially coming over to the nonprofit sector was traveling and seeing, like actually seeing. Because there’s so much you could read about or videos or any of those things. But I feel like being there and meeting those people, meeting these women, you know, like.
First off. I think women can change the world anyway. That’s just my thing. We’re really good at multitasking. We’re really good at building relationships. We know how to take care of people. And so, I just, that’s what I loved so much about your book. It’s like, yes. Let women be included because we will get things done.
MARY ELLEN
That’s really true. No, and it, cuz it got to be like almost repetitive, but you know, anything you hear this often there has to be some truth in it. Like you talk to women and., you know, you’d ask them about the success of their business and what they wanted to tell you was how many of their kids had gone through school that their son, you know, was now a doctor.
They, their, their success and not detracting at all from the success of the business, but the way they measured, it was in what they’d been able to do for their families. And that was just so you know, just such an eye opener.
DANIEL
Well, I, I don’t wanna take more of your time, but to your crypto question, I don’t know if this will make our thing, but I, I think that there’s a world and other people talk about this.
So, I’m saying it’s like we use Western Union to send money all over the place still. And it’s, it needs, it’s like archaic. I wanna break up with them so badly, like all the time.
RIA
But what do we use?
MARY ELLEN
And, no, and they really, they should be broken up with badly.
DANIEL
But in terms of like moving capital, I think like there’s a world where I can see and we’ve experiment with it where it’s like, I think you could theoretically take crypto and move it to local people on the ground and really remote places and have it turn into development projects and, you know, in a, in a broad sense like that. And I, and I, I’m excited for that possibility where you can actually do that.
And. Um, and then it be a wave, cuz the problem is like there are some communities who work with it that aren’t involved in the banking, right? And they’re like, and this is where we would use more money, money. But I’d be curious if there’d be in a way even where we can then interact with a local community to fund them via crypto, and then they can work with the engineers we connect them with and fund them through crypto.
And, and at some point it has to be liquidable for someone on one end because it’s not stable enough. In an experimental way. I think that there, I I’ve, I have fantasies of there being that world. I mean, obviously like the.com it could just tank, but you know.
MARY ELLEN
And you know, I think so many of the, the solutions and the articles that I’ve read about, you know, is crypto, um, a solution, for financial inclusion, it’s coming from somebody who’s flogging crypto. You know, I think I, I, somebody that you are coming at it from the development perspective and how crypto could, uh, could address it would be, you know, would be revolutionary because I, I, and it’s both sides of that dialogue are not, are not taking place.
RIA
Right.
DANIEL
Yeah. No, no.
RIA
Well, I really love your optimism. That is what’s, that’s what I love is your optimism, because it’s so easy to be bogged down by, oh, the glass ceiling that’s never gonna be broken through. Oh, like all of these things. But to me, what I heard from your story, and just from speaking to you is your optimism that you are optimistic that women will be included and represented and it will change the world.
MARY ELLEN
I really am. And it, it does feel like a solvable problem, you know, it really does. So, it’s something I’m optimistic for.
RIA
Mary Ellen it was so nice to speak to you. You’re like so important. I love how like, down to earth and like, awesome you are. I love it.
MARY ELLEN
Thank, thank you. Not so important, but thank you very much, and I’m really glad we moved out here and I can stand and use my hands. And so, yeah. Great. Thank you so much.
RIA
Thank you
OUTRO
At Global Partners for Development, our mission is to advance community led initiatives that improve education and public health in East Africa, we envision a world in which every East African community has the capacity to implement dynamic sustainable solutions to the challenges they face.
To learn more visit GPFD.org.
