Women at the Helm

Women’s entrepreneurship training constitutes one of the keys for unlocking the creative genius of African women, said Ms. Remi Duyile, a program manager at Gender Entrepreneurship Markets, appealing to women to pursue that path despite the many difficulties and limited access to credit. “Success,” she said, “is a journey. It must never be a destination”.

Ms. Regina Amadi, a retired assistant director general for the International Labor Organization, urged world leaders to attend to what she called “the social dimensions of globalization” and for women around the world to return to what she termed “old time mobilization”: in order to ensure that this decade becomes “an ‘uhuru’ (rallying) moment for gender equality”.

Suggesting that the limited involvement of women in managing global financial issues was one of the reasons for the current global crisis, Baroness Amos, the former leader of the British House of Lords, cited an unnamed source as saying the world might have avoided the current crisis with more women at the helm of financial affairs.

According to Amos: “Someone said the crisis might have been avoided had Lehman Brothers (the last major bank to collapse before stock markets worldwide tanked) had only been Lehwoman Sisters”.