THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
September 6, 1995
First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton
Remarks to the United Nations Development Fund
for Women "Women's Economic Empowerment Zone" Panel
Beijing, China
MRS. CLINTON: Thank you, Noleen. Thank you very much and I
want to commend all of you who are here because I think that this
is one of the most important panels to hear from the three people
that you will be hearing from in a few minutes, that will take
place at this conference. I want to thank Noleen and also the
United Nations Development Fund for Women, which we all know as
UNIFEM. It is a word that in any language translates into hope
for women who dream of a better life for themselves, their
families, and their nations.
Around the world, UNIFEM has invested in the lives and
aspirations of women and has helped to empower women in ways that
have not been tried before such as what we will be discussing
here this evening. I am pleased to announce that the United
States is releasing its pledge of one million dollars to UNIFEM
for 1995 so that it can continue this work.
We are here today to talk about micro credit, where it's
needed, what it is, what it can do, how it has transformed lives.
It's called micro, but its impact on people is gigantic. It takes
just a few dollars, often as little as $10, to help a woman to
self-employment, lift her and her family out of poverty. It is
not a handout; it's a helping hand.
From the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh or to the Self-Employed
Women's Association in India, or to the work in Ghana that you
will hear about, to banks and programs modeled on these from
Indonesia to the Dominican Republic, to my own country, we have
seen that micro-lending works. Women who have received loans from
the Grameen bank, for example, have a repayment rate of 97
percent, and often within one year. And they invest their money
well. Some buy milk cows to expand their family's agricultural
livestock, some buy materials to make handicrafts which they
then sell. Others make bricks, or repair bicycles. But the fact
is: give a woman a seed, and she will plant it, she will water
it, nurture it, then reap it, share its fruits, and finally, she
will replant it. In this way, step by step, the world's poorest
women are leading their families, their communities and their
countries to a better future. When we help these women to sow,
we all reap.
I met many such woman during my visit to South Asia earlier
this year. I met women in India, I met women in Bangladesh.
Whether it is a milk cow in Bangladesh, or a computer in Chicago,
women need help and encouragement and credit to make that first
investment.
I will never forget a woman I met in my own country at a
program called Mi Casa in Denver that is modeled after these
programs you will hear about this evening. It is a program
designed not only to provide credit, but to do something even
more fundamental: to help build self-respect and self-
sufficiency. The women who came to this program were on welfare,
but they saw a better future for themselves and their children.
And they just needed a little help -- a jump-start -- to realize
their own potential. But often that jump-start is hard to come
by.
As this one woman told me: "Many great ideas die in the
parking lots of banks" -- because women get only so far, they
don't even get in the door, in many cases, before they are turned
away." That kind of discouragement has killed the dreams of
millions and millions of women.
In the United States we are attempting to build up a
micro-enterprise network. It is still very young. But already
several hundred programs have enabled tens of thousands of
Americans to seek and find economic opportunity for themselves.
This conference has identified economic opportunity as a
critical area of concern, and we have to look for positive,
practical ways to implement that concern. Access to credit,
particularly through micro-enterprise, is a key priority. Our
country has accepted the challenge of making the world conference
on women a conference of commitments and I want to announce, this
evening, some of the actions our government will take to further
self-employment and micro enterprise development in our country.
Our Small Business Administration is already making more
loans than ever to women. Through the Community Development
Financial Institutions Fund, we will establish a new Presidential
awards program to honor outstanding microlending organizations.
These awards will provide challenging benchmarks for
microenterprise programs throughout the nation and acquaint the
public with the prevalence of such programs within our own
economy. We believe they will also highlight the important work
of programs that provide microenterprises with key support
structures such as access to credit, markets, technical advice,
and training.
The President also is establishing a mechanism to better
coordinate microenterprise programs across a number of our
federal agencies to ensure that those programs are doing the job
they were set out to do. Additionally, the United States will
continue to support microenterprise in developing countries
through USAID.
We know that it will take a lot of education to spread the
good word about micro-credit. Despite a record that is
inspiring, we still meet with skepticism and outright disbelief.
There are very few financial institutions anywhere in the world
that can report a 97 percent lending rate that is returned within
a year. And yet, time and again, at conferences where
micro-enterprise is discussed, bankers and others don't
understand how they could actually do it in our economies around
the world. So we are going in every way possible in our country
to spread the word and to provide such technical assistance as
will make more micro-enterprise programs available.
We are also concerned that capital formation and growth in
some economic sectors often is now accompanying higher
unemployment, longer hours with less pay, and severe restrictions
on access to credit. We can not allow small enterprises to be
marginalized as a result of greater consolidation within the
global economy.
I became a believer in microcredit years ago, when my
husband was the governor of the state of Arkansas. It's a poor
state, and we were looking for ways to help people who didn't
have access to credit. We found our model at the Grameen bank
from Bangladesh and the South Shore Bank from Chicago, Illinois.
That bank helped steer private investments to neighborhoods that
need them, and we worked out a partnership with both Grameen,
thanks to Dr. Eunice, and the South Shore Bank, that created a
development bank, that created a borrowing fund, and began to
make the kinds of investments in that state that we would like to
see made throughout our country.
It's been a priveledge for me to meet leaders such as those
who are on this panel because they have devoted not their lives
to finding ways of ending poverty, they have been successful in
changing the lives of so many people. And they have particularly
focused on changing the lives of women. As Dr. Yin has told me,
one time when he started the Grameen Bank lending idea, he had
the revolutionary concept in mind of providing loans in a fifty
percent, fifty percent ratio, for men and women. He quickly
found out that women were better credit risks, that women would
invest the money more in the family, that women would repay the
loans. And so gradually over time, more and more women became
the focus of the Grameen Bank's lending. That was, ont only
revolutionary, but it set a fire that has gone through the
developing world as a way of telling people that women are able
to become self-sufficient if they are given the tools that enable
them to do so on behalf of themselves and their families.
Because of the success of such programs, the World Bank, and
USAID, along with eight other major donors, have joined together
to form the consultative group to aid the poor in order to
finance small loans to the world's poor, the vast majority of
whom are female. This is the kind of joint effort that we need
to support.
I know that when we talk about such issues such as lending
money to women, whether it is in a conference such as this, or
attempting to make the case to financial institutions around the
world, there are often eyes that glaze over. Issues connected to
women, such as poverty, education, health and children or
micro-credit now, are too often called "soft" by people who have
us think that these issues are unimportant. Nothing could be
further from the truth.
If there is any message that this conference could bring
about economic opportunity, it is that we must engage in
micro-credit in order to build micro-enterprises. We must open
the doors of banks and other existing financial institutions to
women who can become self-sufficient and responsible borrowers
and we have to do so while there are people like those on this
panel who are able to demonstrate clearly that this approach
works. We really don't have a lot of time. The globalization of
the economy has meant that many, many people are being
marganlized, are being downsized, are being deprived of economic
opportunities. We have to now, more than ever, make
micro-enterprize a key element of providing economic opportunity
for women and men everywhere in the world.
And I'd like now to introduce you to someone who has done
that, whom I have had the priveledge of visiting and seeing in
action through the Self-Employed Women's Association in India.
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