FinEquity 2023 Annual Meeting: Graça Machel Speech

Johannesburg, Wednesday, February 7, 2023

Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen,

Let me commence my remarks with a couple of facts and figures for us to wrap our minds around today:

100 years.

That is how long it took activists to struggle for women to secure the right to vote in the United States.

66 years.

This is how long it took for the United Nations to formally designate March 8^th as International Women’s Day. A day which was born out of the struggle for radical demands for economic and social equality.

We sit here 48 years later – still battling for ‘equal work for equal pay’ and gender parity across all realms of human interaction.

These milestones reveal how the struggles of our generation are long enduring. And as history shows, us, requires unrelenting perseverance along the continuum of time to overcome.

Disenfranchisement, inequality, and gender discrimination are not acts of nature. They are entirely manmade. It is a societal responsibility to dismantle them; with women leading the charge.

Women have been marginalized politically, economically and socially for centuries, and any progress we achieve, is attributable to the leadership of women and us placing ourselves at the forefront of our own fight for progress.

No one will hand women our equal standing in society. We must struggle, we must build bridges and network among ourselves; we have to marshal all the resources and allies at our disposal and band together to write our brighter futures.

Experiences from Scandinavian, Canadian, South American, African and Asian women over the decades tell the same story: without struggle, without that unflinching commitment to mobilize, organize, and insist on getting our fair share of progress, women will always be disenfranchised.

Women must be key drivers of progress. Many countries like Finland and Rwanda have realized that empowering women boosts their economic growth and human development indicators. Analysis has shown that including women in leadership and opening up opportunities to them have been proven successful keys to growing their economies and reducing poverty. A recent report from Africa, for example, shows that if Sub-Saharan African countries could fully close gender gaps in employment rates, the overall gross domestic product would increase by 10%. In effect, allowing women to take their rightful place as full contributors in society is key to uplifting entire nations.

Climate change, and the disproportionately devastating toll it takes on women, is no different. It is a challenge which follows this same trajectory: it will take generations for us to emerge victorious in the pursuit of climate justice, and women can take a lead role in this battle.

Take the nexus between climate change and agriculture for example, investing in women across the agricultural supply chain offers a significant opportunity to enhance sustainable food production, accelerate climate resilience, and mitigate food insecurity globally. A 2021 UN Food and Agriculture Organization research paper highlights that enabling women farmers to access resources to the same extent as men can increase on-farm yields by 20 to 30% and potentially resulting in 100 to 150 million fewer hungry people in the world.

Let me refer to our own experience, the Graça Machel Trust works with 17 women’s networks across Africa, which are the beating heart of our advocacy: The African Women in Agribusiness Network (AWAB) – with chapters across five countries, aims to propel women’s agricultural activities beyond subsistence farming and into viable businesses that participate equitably in the agricultural value chains. Our network members are mitigating the food crisis in Africa through agri-processing businesses adding value to sunflower to produce cooking oil and peanuts to make peanut flour and grow lentils. The women recognise the value of rural communities around them, empower themselves and use an out-grower scheme where thousands of smallholder farmers are involved in sunflower, groundnuts and green grams production. This is helping in building their capacity through the training provided to them in profitable agricultural practices and looking at agriculture as a business for economic empowerment. 80% of the farmers employed on the farms are women.

Our experiences working with women in Malawi’s agri-business sector, for example, have seen them diversify crops to help maintain healthy soils through legume production. Our capacity-building efforts with women in agri-business will ensure agricultural interventions are focused on climate-smart legume seed production, multiplication and certification among legume farmers, and promotion of local seed-sharing networks to enhance seed diversity.

We are advocating for climate resilient, indigenous forms of farming. We support women farmers utilizing organic fertilisers and integrated cultural, biological, and mechanical methods to develop recycled resources, promote ecological balance and conserve biodiversity to maintain healthy soils. These innovations, all spearheaded by women, are contributing to reducing the effects of climate change.

Another brief example, which is relevant to many parts of the world, is a holistic intervention to address food security and food sovereignty issues under the “Gender Transformative Seed System Project of the African Food Basket in Malawi and Zambia”. The project sought to develop emerging female farmers’ and agribusiness entrepreneurs’ capacity as seed producers using climate-smart agricultural practices, leveraging collective marketing and finance. They partnered with agricultural research institutions and smallholder farmers to convert breeder seeds into basic seeds of legumes such as pigeon peas, cowpeas, and soya drought-tolerant seed varieties. We helped to strengthen 20 women-owned seed companies that formed a partnership with 2,000 small-scale farmers.

At the Graça Machel Trust, we are intentionally investing in the innovative thinking, economic potential, and power of women. Our Women Creating Wealth Entrepreneurship Development program is creating pathways for women’s entrepreneurship that will strengthen the capacity of over 10,000 women entrepreneurs in the next five years, with many operating in sectors relevant to climate change, such as, agri-business, agri-processing and energy. We are exploring integrating climate change adaptation principles and mitigation in our capacity-building efforts to strengthen smallholder farmers.

Let me turn for a minute to address policy makers, private sector players and development partners, as they have a key role to play to address gender inequalities while fostering environmentally and socially sustainable economies. Finance is a powerful tool for addressing inequalities rooted in the gender-environment nexus.

While the recent rapid growth of the sustainable finance market is a positive development, to date, gender- and environment-related considerations have been largely considered in silos, as ‘distinct lenses’ that are integrated separately in a variety of financial instruments.

It is urgent to consider the impact of climate change on women and children and to design financing tools that consider this impact.

By mainstreaming gender considerations in green infrastructure planning, financing, procurement and delivery, governments must ensure that sustainable infrastructure better meets the needs of women and vulnerable groups while reducing environmental externalities and improving the quality of life for all. Integrated policy frameworks are needed to mainstream gender into all policies, including budgets, procurement and regulatory initiatives.

I maintain that there has to be a deliberate action to transform systems. We need to:

Change mental models within board of directors at state owned enterprises, government department and agencies, towards positive attitudes for integrating women and youth in policy making and infrastructure finance planning.
Companies must design tools that enable them to implement gender mainstreaming and youth mainstreaming, by creating targets in their annual procurement demand plans.
Government should offer feasible tax incentives for institutions to proactively design and execute catalytic finance products.

Drawing on best practice from Asia, I turn our attention to insights gleaned from a Framework for Catalytic Finance for Underserved Clean Energy Markets in India. Around the world, catalytic financing is emerging as a solution in the clean energy sector. Catalytic finance leverages limited public funding, development finance and impact investment capital to attract private investment. Catalytic finance strategies include:

risk mitigation,
aggregation of small projects to diversify risk and to scale,
strategic public-private co-investments, and
market development activities.

I encourage us all here today to think creatively around how must can leverage catalytic funding and green infrastructure projects to serve the needs of women better, and to meet our gender equality and environmental goals.

Evidence gathered through gender and environmental impact assessments can be used to inform decisions throughout infrastructure project life cycle, thus enabling inclusion in capital-intensive large-scale infrastructure development projects. Some actions that can be implemented are as follows:

For an Enabling Environment: Examine existing policies and their implementing tools to unearth barriers to women’s participation.
To create equal opportunities: Examine the intersection of access to finance, market, technology and land, to identify hidden structural barriers to women’s participation.
For gender mainstreaming: Examine strategy development and execution methods and processes to introduce and infix gender considerations, for tangible outcomes in a form of real participation in the market.
And for Barrier Free workplaces: Rally the market to examine structural barriers peculiar to women, and equalize pay for all.

We cannot have any meaningful discussion on financial inclusion or climate resilience without mention of access to finance. Financing remains a key barrier to clean energy markets.

Also, investing in and designing policies for these emerging technologies, it is important that government, private sector and civil society use systematic gender-disaggregated and intersectional data to define policies in a gender-conscious way.

Without these policy initiatives especially addressing risk perceptions of investors, financing may not keep pace with government targets on gender mainstreaming and consumer demand.

Therefore, countries must invest in improving the collection of systematic gender-disaggregated and intersectional data as a competitive advantage and a way to embed inclusion in their policies, strategies, and projects.

This is the reason why the Graça Machel Trust’s focus on advocacy has been long running through the establishment of our New Faces New Voices Network, a women in finance network. NFNV actively engages key stakeholders in the financial sector in order to achieve its three main goals. The first goal is increasing women’s access to finance and a variety of financial products; the second goal is building the capacity and skills of women as entrepreneurs and as financial industry executives; and the third goal is fast-tracking the number of women in leadership positions in the financial sector. Through its work, NFNV wants to deepen the financial inclusion of women on the continent and enhance the performance of women in the business sector.

Our ‘Expert Leaders Group’, comprised of female current and former Deputy Governors of Central Banks, is a collective of professional, experienced and influential actors within regulatory bodies across the continent, with the stature to drive systemic action to advance women’s participation in the digital economy.

Our aim is to transform financial systems at the national, regional and continental levels to position women at the center of Africa’s economic advancement through the engagement of governments, business, development partners, and women themselves at local, regional and global levels.

To close, financial inclusion and climate change cannot be dealt with in isolation. Financial inclusion in the digital era is a powerful entry point for tackling inequality, poverty, the impact of COVID and climate change, as well as the digital divide — all which drastically and negatively impact on women’s lives.

We must take women as drivers of social and economic transformation in every sphere of our society. We have to leverage the power of women’s leadership to solve the ills that plague us as a human family. When given the opportunities and a level-playing field to operate, women are not only well-positioned to change our lives individually, we will also transform our families, communities, and our nations. Let us harness and unleash our power, and be the change agents and solution bringers our world so desperately needs.

I Thank You.