Sustainable Development Goals (UN)

Research indicates that gender-based violence costs the world approximately $1.5 trillion a year, but governments have struggled to address it. Though Latin America has made significant progress in empowering women, gender-based violence remains widespread throughout the region. From the classroom to the workforce, gender-based violence stymies opportunity and undermines development. Rosa Celorio and Julie T. Katzman discussed what governments in Latin America are doing to reduce gender-based violence and promote women’s economic empowerment through legal and political reforms, as well as through shifts in cultural norms.     BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Good afternoon, everybody. I think we’re going to get started. So my name is Carrie Bettinger-Lόpez. It’s wonderful to see so many folks in the room, many old friends and colleagues and new faces as well. So it’s wonderful to be hosting this today. I am an adjunct senior fellow here at the Council on Foreign Relations. I also teach at University of Miami Law School where I direct the Human Rights Clinic. And here at the Women in Foreign Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations, we’re very focused on analyzing how we can elevate the status of women and girls around the world to advance U.S. foreign policy objectives. A reminder that today’s program is on the record. So I’d like to just start giving a little bit of an overview on the theme of today, which is the economic cost of gender-based violence in Latin America. Research indicates that gender-based violence costs the world approximately $1.5 trillion a year but governments around the world have struggled to address it with thinking about strategies, and we don’t oftentimes think about that economic cost factor when we, and I count myself amongst this, when we as advocates or we as policymakers are thinking about approaches to gender-based violence. Oftentimes, the economic cost is either separated or not considered when we’re focused on policy approaches, and today’s roundtable and much of the work of the folks in this room is committed to thinking about a more integrated approach there. Throughout Latin America, we’ve made significant progress in empowering women and gender-based violence, however, remains a widespread problem and a public health concern and a criminal justice problem. The Pan-American Health Organization reports that two out of three women killed in Central America are killed for reasons related to their gender, and a 2018 survey by Oxfam reported that most fifteen- to twenty-five-year-olds in eight Latin American countries believe that women are to blame for violence, including sexual assaults, because of the way they dress. And so our roundtable today focuses on how governments in Latin America can reduce gender-based violence and promote women’s economic empowerment through legal and political reforms as well as shifts in cultural norms, and we’re going to be taking a hard look at the numbers and at some innovative strategies from a financial perspective as well. I’m thrilled to introduce our two speakers today, both friends and colleagues that I cherish and who are just doing really innovative and path-breaking work. To my immediate left is Rosa Celorio, and Rosa is the associate dean for international and comparative legal studies and the Burnett Family professorial lecturer in international law and comparative law and policy at George Washington University Law School. Previously, she served as a senior attorney at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and she has a deep professional background in human rights, discrimination, and gender. Rosa, thank you for being with us today. We are also privileged to welcome Julie Katzman, who is the executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Inter-American Development Bank. Previously, Julie served as the general manager of the Multilateral Investment Fund, which provides grants that support private sector-led development benefiting the poor. Julie is a long-time investment banker and throughout her career she has been a champion of women’s economic empowerment. So please join me in welcoming Julie and Rosa. (Applause.) So our format for today is that—and those of you who have attended CFR roundtables know this format well—I’ll pose a series of questions to Julie and Rosa and we’ll engage in a dialogue, and that’ll happen for the first half of the program and then for the second half we’ll open it up to questions and when we do so if you could just take your name placard and place it vertically and then we will get to as many questions as we can. We’re looking forward to a robust dialogue. So, first, we want to lay the groundwork for the nature of the problem, right. I always tell my students that if we don’t understand the nature and prevalence we can’t think about solutions. So according to the United Nations, Rosa, Latin America and the Caribbean is considered the most violent region in the world for women. Femicide occurs on a, quote, “devastating scale,” according to the U.N., in Central America, where two out of three women who are murdered die because of their gender—a statistic that I just mentioned. What factors contribute to such high rates of violence against women and can you talk about some of the consequences, whether they’d be about migration or access to education, employment, political participation, or likewise? CELORIO: Thank you, Carrie, and good afternoon. It’s really an honor to be here to be able to spend this time with you, to be joined by such a distinguished group of panelists and to really be discussing such a timely issue in Latin America. I really like the way Carrie started this panel talking about the nature of the issue because at the end of the day, when we’re thinking of strategies governments can employ, part of the challenge that we have in Latin America is that we’re still learning not only about the widespread nature of gender-based violence but also its features, its components—who are the women affected and how to engage the different levels of a specific state or country in addressing this issue. So in terms of the nature of the issue, I think it’s important to highlight, again, that gender-based violence in Latin America is still a very widespread issue. It’s a major human rights issue. The numbers speak for themselves. When you study the numbers of international organizations, most of them really highlight one in three women and girls that are affected by different forms of violence, and Latin America is not an exception in that trend. And I think one thing that’s really interesting about the Latin America context is that there are certain forms of gender-based violence that have had a significant amount of documentation, like, for example, gender-motivated killings, forms of sexual violence and torture, and domestic violence. But every day there are other, I would say, forms of gender-based violence that have been there historically but now they’re really coming more to the forefront or at least they’re starting to be more documented or at least more understood, even though maybe the international community hasn’t necessarily caught up entirely to where these forms should be in terms of how to address them or even governments themselves. Like, for example, sexual harassment, I would say, is one of the forms. Online violence against women is one of the forms as well. Economic violence and the way access and control of economic resources can be used not only in the home but outside of the home to actually produce violence against women. These are all concepts that we’re starting to understand better now and you see a lot of governments starting to pay attention to them but not necessarily with all the guidelines necessary. So this is why the work of so many organizations is important here. And I think if we’re talking about the factors and the consequences, I think another very important feature of gender-based violence is the amount of settings where it occurs, right. It occurs in the family. It occurs in schools and employment places, in health institutions, in entertainment and press outlets, in political venues, in prisons, and many other settings. It really occurs everywhere and we’re starting to understand or at least grasp what that means in terms of a notion and in terms of a problem to address, and we have a range of actors involved. We have government actors that can be perpetrators. We have private actors that can be perpetrators as well. So that adds to the complexity of the problem. In terms of factors, it’s very difficult to understand or deconstruct why gender-based violence is in Latin America or anywhere, really, without understanding discrimination and without understanding stereotypes and they need to really address this historical discrimination, how it’s ingrained in social norms, and also the conceptualization of stereotypes and how they affect the actions of all levels at the state level in Latin America, in the Caribbean, and I would say this is a global problem as well. I think we still have a problem of social tolerance of violence and the view that this is normal, that this is just part of our day-to-day lives. High levels of poverty are not very helpful to reducing levels of gender-based violence. In Latin America, you see something really interesting, too. You see a lot of women now assuming very important economic positions in their families and you see this evolution of the conceptualization of the family in Latin America, and it’s interesting how now we’re starting to understand how that can fuel domestic violence, how that can produce more gender-based violence, and you see also women every day occupying more public roles as human rights defenders, as women that are on the streets protesting not only gender-based violence but other gender issues and other social issues—women opposing extractive and investment projects, and all of this is producing also gender-based violence that we’re starting to understand and grasp, right, especially women that are working to defend sexual and reproductive rights for LGBTI issues or that are opposing extractive industries, right. And in terms of consequences—and there’s a lot that we can discuss here—one of them that’s very important, especially because this is a panel about economic cost, is the impact on women’s access to the labor market, and not only to access the labor market but to stay in the labor market, to be promoted in the labor market, and to really have a substantial control over economic resources, right. I think that’s a big consequence. Also, obstacles to really have that participation in public life or in political life or have decision-making positions in that regard I would say affects also under psychological and physical integrity including reproductive health consequences and forced migration, and there’s a lot of issues there. I mean, that’s a very complex issue that requires its own study in itself, and we’ll pause here because we have other—many other issues to discuss. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Well, that’s fantastic. Thank you, Rosa. Well, I’d like to pick up a little bit more on something you mentioned in terms of the actors who are responsible for the violence. And so you mentioned, you know, state actors and private actors—of course, also institutional actors. Could you talk a little bit more about the evolution in terms of international law and domestic law in terms of accountability and attribution of responsibility for the violence? Of course, kind of historically violence against women was—and gender-based violence were considered private matters, that individuals should, you know, resolve amongst themselves or that happened behind closed doors. And so could you talk about whether that—whether perceptions in Latin America are changing that kind of track these changes that we’re seeing in international law? CELORIO: I think that’s a wonderful question and I do think that you see some progress, and I think where the progress is is in discourse. I think what international law has given us and what the human rights framework in particular has given us, and this conceptualization of gender-based violence as a human rights violation, as a woman’s rights violation, is this understanding of gender-based violence as a public problem—as a problem the states need to tackle because it has social, economic, political consequences and many other consequences. And you see this in the discourse. When you talk to governments in Latin American countries, it’s very difficult right now to find a government that can deny publicly that they don’t have a major gender-based violence issue or that they don’t have major legislation on gender-based violence or a major national plan to address gender-based violence. It’s in the public discourse and it’s in the public mindset, right. But the problem is we have a huge distance between that public discourse and what happens on the ground. The problem is still endemic. Women are still victimized on a daily basis. So I think that what international law has been good about in Latin America particularly is piercing the family, right. It has entered the family. Like, at this stage, gender-based violence is not necessarily only a private issue anymore, at least in the public perception, right. But I think we still have a long way to go in terms of how do we translate that into an actual implementation of policies, of legislation, of programs, of services, that really help women and the prevention aspect. I think the prevention aspect we really have a lot to work on and there’s actually a lot of strategies there that you can think of that, in my view, are connected with international law but that really go beyond the realm of international law because, I mean, there are things like the economic empowerment of women, for example, the education of women, for example, fostering the leadership of women, for example—that that’s part international law but that’s part of a multidisciplinary strategy also at the national level. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Fantastic. You’re getting me very excited about possibilities here. Great. Well, and I’d like to return in a little while to the question of some promising practices and examples that we might look to for future directions. Before we do that, in terms of continuing to lay the groundwork and to think about the nature of the problem, I’d like to turn to Julie now to talk about data and the importance of data. Could you tell us about what data we have on this issue? What do we have on gender-based violence, what are we missing, and why is data important? KATZMAN: OK. So I’ll put that in the context of you can tell I’m Inter-American Development Bank—the bank part versus the academic part. So I’ll be a little bit more transactional, shall we say— BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Great. KATZMAN: —because, in fact, all of this we’ve known for a long time and yet did we move the needle in the region in terms of what was happening. And we go to countries and sit with women’s ministries—called lots of different things but, generally, that—and along with the environment ministries, sadly, generally the weakest ministries in government. And so getting things done, getting resources, really hard, right. So I promise I’ll get to the answer on statistics. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: That’s OK. No. KATZMAN: But so we decided to take actually a page out of the climate change folks’ book where our climate change people said, OK, where’s the power, where’s the money—finance ministries. So we developed a type of loan product that is budget support and it requires governments to take on a set of policy reforms in order to get that kind of loan, and that worked in the climate space and we got countries energized around making major changes in climate environments. So we’ve taken that and applied it to gender and, actually, to disabilities. Why were we able to do it? Why were we able to get finance ministers to decide that this was a smart way—reason to borrow money? That goes to the data. So we know, thanks to GiZ that violence against women costs small and medium-size enterprises 6½ percent of GDP per year in Paraguay—Bolivia. Sorry—Bolivia. We know that it costs 2.4 percent of GDP in Paraguay and 3.6 percent of GDP in Peru. Those numbers are stunning, and when you say to a finance minister whose economy is growing 1, 2, 3 percent a year, look, this is the cost of gender-based violence in your country and if you can get your arms around that you can actually change your growth trajectory. That’s compelling. And so when the previous finance minister in Argentina where we did the first of these policy-based loans said to me, has the violence against women thing always been this bad or is it that we just, right—or it’s only now that we understand it. I said, right, so we can’t answer that question because we don’t know. We can imagine we know but we don’t know, and that’s why this loan is so important because a component of that loan is actually creating a national registry with a national standard around reports of gender-based violence. So, you know, those kinds of statistics that make this not just the right thing to do but the smart thing to do, the necessary thing to do, are what I think open the conversation in a very different way with very different actors to create different vectors to create change. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you. Can you talk a little bit more, Julie, about the economic aspects of violence against women? You already spoke about that, of course, and specifically, how is gender-based violence connected to access and control of economic resources? KATZMAN: Yeah. So let’s take another example. We created something called the Gender Transport Lab. It’s a collection of seven cities in the region who are part of the Gender Transport Lab that are looking at the criticality of transportation and the role it plays in economic empowerment, and violence in the transport system is actually a really important thing. So and it goes beyond violence, right. It’s, like, how do you include women-owned small and medium-sized enterprises in the procurement value chain in transportation. It’s how do you think about equity in terms of pricing in transportation, because if you look at how a man uses transportation and how a woman uses transportation, when the majority of primary care givers are women you find that a woman will get onto a form of transport and drop off, say, a child at school, get back on transport, drop off another child at school, get back on transport, go to work. If that woman is charged three fares and a man just gets on transport and gets off at work, there’s an inequity problem there, right. So this covers a broad range of issues around transport. But on violence, you know, there’s a lot of experimentation going on because transport’s connection to economic empowerment is really huge. So some countries are experimenting with single-sex cars—metro subway cars or buses. You know, the vote is out because if you look at those single-sex cars in São Paulo on an average evening you will not find that there are only women in those cars. But there are other experiments going on as well. For example, in Quito they put a—let’s call it a panic button—on the bus and what that does is it notifies the driver that there’s a problem, and at the next stop the police are there and they address the person who’s the perpetrator. And about six months ago, the first case was fully adjudicated and this guy, who was groping a woman, went to jail for thirteen months. I mean, I think that that is the kind of intervention that you need to see if you’re going to interrupt those kinds of blockages in front of women in terms of economic empowerment. If the culture of impunity—if people see that someone goes to jail and they go to jail for a serious period of time, then I think we can begin to change behavior and remove some of those impediments. You know, there’s the other piece of this, which is less directly about violence. We have launched something called the Gender Parity Task Forces in Chile, Panama, soon to be in Argentina, and one or two other countries, and those task forces look at the economic gender gap—the gap in wages, labor force participation, and the seniority of women—and it’s a public-private initiative where public sector and private sector companies join the initiative and agree to move the needle on two of those three gaps over a three-year period of time. Well, if there is more equity in the workplace, this also goes to the overall view of how women are seeing what kind of gender parity exists in the dialogue of the country and we see that as playing a less direct but an important role. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Great. Thank you. So we’ve now kind of bridged into thinking about programs and solutions, and I’d like to move back to Rosa to talk a little bit about legislative and policy reforms at the governmental level. So the World Bank’s Women, Business, and the Law report has noted that all the countries in Latin America have legislation that protect women from domestic violence and most of the countries have legislation addressing sexual harassment in employment, though not all, as you noted. So could you talk about—a little bit more, as you alluded to earlier, about the next steps in legislation and policy to address violence against women in these various places and sectors? CELORIO: Thank you, Carrie. I think Latin America has been—it’s a fascinating place to study when it comes to legislation because, I mean, it has— KATZMAN: Lots of it. CELORIO: It has tons of it. (Laughter.) KATZMAN: (Inaudible.) CELORIO: Tons of it in on gender-based violence, right? I mean, it has been amazing all the legislation that we’ve had on different forms of gender-based violence, and I come from the human rights world, right. I mean, I worked thirteen years at Inter-American System of Human Rights and every time we had a hearing with a government on gender-based violence, the governments would come in and they would be, like, look at all of my legislation. Look at all of my policies. Look at all of my programs, and they were impressive. So I have to say that my read is that those are steps that we have to recognize from governments. The problem is that usually those formal steps are not consonant with what’s happening on the ground. I mean, at the end of the day, you can have the most beautiful piece of legislation but if you don’t have adequate funding or training of public officials of how to implement it or basically a set of regulations to make sure that this is properly applied by different officials in the government system, if you have different languages in a country—I’ve worked extensively with indigenous peoples, for example, and women of African descent and a lot of women that speak different languages in different countries and they weren’t familiar with the legislation on gender-based violence. They didn’t have sufficient information or they didn’t have any participation in this legislation. Because that’s part of the problem also. We have this beautiful legislation but it’s legislation that has been adopted maybe by a very small group that doesn’t really represent, you know, the diversity in women—the different ethnicities, the different races, the different economic decisions. So there are a lot of problems in the text of legislation but also in the way that the legislation is implemented as well. I think legislation is not enough and I think we’ve learned that and we’ve known this for a really long time as well. Legislation is just one step forward. I mean, there’s a lot of strategies and, I would say, a multilayer set of strategies that involve many different sectors that you really need to be able to address a problem as vast as gender-based violence, right. and I really think that we have to go beyond the legal strategies. Even though I’m a lawyer by training, at the end of the day, one thing that I’ve learned working with gender issues is that you need to go beyond the law, right. You need to work with the health sector. You need to work with the education sector. You need to work with the economic sector. You need to work with both public and private entities. You need to work with corporations, with individuals. You really have to work with a range of persons in sectors to be able to address this problem, and we really have to start studying—and I think this needs more studying—how to adequately prevent. In international human rights law we’re very good at saying prevention, prevention, prevention is so important. Prevention. You know, it’s our—it’s our main line, right. But what is prevention? How do you really prevent, right? And I think it’s something that we really have to examine and also what does it mean to have the adequate availability of legal avenues and reporting conditions. One thing that we have learned with the #MeToo movement, for example, is that we have all these women voicing their experiences and voicing things that should have been voiced for a really long time but now we have more conditions to be able to do so. But what happens next, right? Where are the reporting mechanisms? Where are the legal avenues? What kind of reform are we going to see after this? What is our response to the #MeToo movement? You know, and that’s really where we are and we have to figure out what is an adequate response there. I think also the tools to economically empower women are very important. One thing that we have learned is the more economically empowered a woman, is the least likely or at least maybe a little bit less exposure, maybe—or at least more control in how to respond to that exposure. But the exposure is still there because all women experience gender-based violence in some way or the other. But at least economic empowerment could give you more tools to respond, to report, to defend yourself, right. So we have to think about how to economically empower women, how to expose them more to education, how to expose them more to access, to quality and decent employment, opportunities to access public domains. I mean, I think the more we see women in public office, for me, it’s a fascinating process that we’re seeing in countries like the United States where you have more women entering public life. What does that mean? You know, where are the conditions, you know? How do you facilitate or motivate that women actually enter public office? I think that’s very important to address problems like gender-based violence, right. I think one big challenge that we have is intersectionality and how to address the diversity of experiences that women have. And I can tell you this. Coming from a regional human rights protection system, we talk so much about intersectionality and the need to incorporate the different experiences and races and ethnicities and economic positions and conditions that women may have and how all these factors can combine to expose a woman more to violence. But there was really little understanding of what that meant in terms of a legislation or a program or a service or how do you properly include these women in the development of laws and public policies and reforms. We talk so much about intersectionality but I think we’re still at a point where we really have to start adding more practical components to what that means in practice, right. And I think also we have these amazing international platforms like the Sustainable Development Goals, for example. International development efforts. I’m sitting next to, you know, a very important representative from the Inter-American Development Bank. I used to work at the OAS and the Human Rights Commission. How do you combine the human rights framework with international development efforts? I mean, I think there’s a lot there to be said in terms of also combining strategies because at the end of the day, I don’t think it’s only a legal problem. But one thing that we do know is that when we’re talking about one in three women around the world, this is a problem that needs more resources, needs more thinking, needs more strategizing. But I think we have to start thinking outside of a box. I think we’re at a moment where we have a lot of tools there. We have a lot of legislation. We have a lot of formal steps. But we’re not necessarily at a point where we can really say this is what we should be doing, you know, to really address this or to change women’s lives and that’s really what we need to do. I mean, that’s really the next step in many ways. KATZMAN: Can I jump in? BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Please. KATZMAN: So the tools beyond laws, right. So first I’ll tell a story of a law, which is as a result of the Gender Parity Task Force in Argentina. We found a law from the 1920s that prohibited women from operating heavy machinery. It’s still on the books. So really high-paying jobs in ports, roadworks, et cetera, against the law actually to hire women, which there were a minority of women being hired but until we went looking we didn’t know, great, yeah, lots of laws to protect women that actually are doing the reverse. So there’s that piece of laws as well. But, you know, I think there’s a broad range of tools that we think about. One is transparency and knowledge. So, you know, the launch of the Mexican National Data Bank and Information Center—I wrote it down so I actually said it right this time—I think is important because now there’s actually out there a transparent platform that the government owns that is tracking and putting out there gender-based violence statistics for everyone to see and when everyone sees them they get horrified and then, you know, the population kind of goes, oh, what are we doing. So I think that’s an important tool and creating the similarity of the way people start to look at these statistics so that they’re comparable across countries. Second, you know, the IDB has created a model that’s most robust, let’s say, in El Salvador, Ciudad Mujer, which is an integrated way to look at treating victims of those who experience gender-based violence but also a more holistic way to look at their health, their economic opportunities, and to bring the state to bear in terms of investigation and prosecution. Third is technology. So in Uruguay, we know—and Carrie, you certainly know better than I think probably most in this room—you know, the restraining order is a very flawed instrument. But using, like, ankle monitoring-type GPS-based technology for those on whom restraining orders have been placed so that if they’re violating the restraining order it’s being monitored in real time police can be dispatched so that tragedy does not happen. And then financial tools. So there’s a website that I encourage everybody to look at called asyousow.org and they launched last month a tool that lets you look at every single mutual fund and ETF in this country, and then it’s got a score based on the companies in which it invests and how well each one of those companies do on gender policies and—OK, there are two categories. They sound kind of alike. I pulled up the page so I can say it right. Gender balance and gender policies, and under gender policies, for example, are protections for employees reporting harassment and initiatives to reduce trafficking in human rights risks throughout their supply chain. So you look at your own 401(k) and you say, well, I’ve got this T. Rowe fund and I’ve got that BlackRock fund and I’ve got that PAC Zelidate (ph) fund. I care about this. So let’s see how they all do. And then you go to your employer and you say, you know what, we shouldn’t be in that fund because we need to move money toward companies that are doing the right thing and away from companies that are doing the wrong thing. And the other tool that I’ll mention on that is the Criterion Institute, which has created something called the Trillion Dollar Campaign, and it’s a really fascinating thing that they’ve done, which is they’re getting institutional investors to sign what I will call a letter of intent which says, in effect, I really wish that the money that we invest was being invested in ways that had an impact on gender-based violence. So it doesn’t require somebody to do something. It isn’t a divestment approach. It’s saying we really want our money to help move things in this direction and in parallel with that is work to say what are some of the things money could be invested in to actually move the needle on gender-based violence. And when a trillion dollars starts to speak things start to happen, and that’s the underlying thought there and they’re already at close to $100 billion. Yeah. And so we don’t necessarily think about financial tools as a big tool in the tool set. I think it’s going to become and is becoming an increasingly important tool. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Great. I have one last question and then we’d like to open it up. Rosa, you mentioned #MeToo, and, of course, #MeToo is kind of hanging over all work around the world right now in terms of thinking about kind of what it means for movement building, what it means for institutional and legal change. So can you talk a little bit more about the #MeToo movement in Latin America? Any promising developments? Any places we should be watching, where it’s reached, where it hasn’t? CELORIO: Thank you, Carrie. I think it’s a movement that has had a very interesting impact in Latin America. I think where you’ve seen it more publicly is in the streets and the movements on the streets. Women every day are marching in the streets of Latin American countries demanding accountability and more serious attention to gender-based violence, and we have well-known campaigns in that regard like #NiUnoMenos, for example, the 16 Days of Activism. Like, some of the historical campaigns have also been focusing on the #MeToo movement as well in Latin America. So it’s really interesting to see that. I think it’s very interesting also in Latin America on gender-based violence the activity of the movement itself, you know, of the woman’s rights movement itself and what they have been focusing on and what they’re focusing on right now. I mean, it’s a movement that has evolved historically in terms of what they’re focusing on and right now they have specific fears and concerns that they’re voicing and a lot of it is connected to the #MeToo movement and what has been happening globally, in my view. There’s fears for a regression of rights. It’s interesting. There’s a lot of #MeToo concerns, a lot of documentation of stories, a lot of women coming out with their stories, but also a lot of documentation of what we—fears that we have with specific legislation, with specific—that the steps that or the gains that the women have had to make sure that we don’t lose them, right, in Latin America, and this is probably the most palpable in sexual and reproductive rights. I mean, at the end of the day, even though this is a roundtable on gender-based violence, when you’re thinking of gender issues in Latin America and when you’re thinking of mobilization issues, it’s very difficult to divide gender-based violence from anything happening with sexual reproductive rights and it’s seen as something very interconnected and it is very interconnected in international law. So there’s a lot of fears of regression there. There’s also a lot of fears of this interpretation of what gender is—the contemporary interpretation of what the gender term is or what we have gained in international law when it comes to this gender perspective. There’s a lot of fears toward the gender ideology—I’m sure a lot of you work with gender ideology directly—this interpretation or misinterpretation of gender or what has been defined as international law of this gender perspective that is supposed to be empowering women, that is supposed to be addressing discrimination historically, that is supposed to be addressing gender-based violence to this term that’s supposed to be promoting patriarchalism and traditional notions of the family, right. So there’s a lot of misuse also of language that has been a game and there needs to be not only a redefinition but also highlighting what the real or at least the international law accepted definitions are of this term, so especially gender. So that’s a big fear, I think, of the movement right now. A lot of the human rights, especially the woman’s rights movement, is really fearful of its defenders right now. I mean, probably from the situations that I’ve studied in gender-based violence in Latin America one of the most concerning right now is the situation of women human rights defenders in general. We see killings on a daily basis. We see harassment on a daily basis. We see acts of sexual violence on a daily basis against women human rights defenders for the causes that they defend, for the context where they’re working, for basically defying what the social expectation is of a woman in a society because they’re holding leadership roles. I think it’s a situation of a lot of concern and I know a lot of the woman’s rights movement is very concerned about the situation and this has been the subject of a lot of documentation by not only the Americas’ human rights system but also the United Nations’ system, and I think a lot of women in Latin America are wondering what comes next. If you have #NiUnoMenos, if you have the #MeToo movement, what do we do now? How do we—what do we do with these stories? What do we do with this mobilization? You know, what do we do with all this information that is now public, right? Do we change legislation? Do we change public policies? What are our strategies, you know, to really address gender-based violence in the future? And not only against women, but there’s a lot of concern over girls, for example. You know, this is a huge concern in Latin American countries right now. We have all these girls that are ten years old, twelve years old, basically with early pregnancies because of sexual violence, very well documented. So the layers of the problem are still acute, right. There’s a lot that’s out there now, right, and women are taking a more leadership and protagonistic role in this, right. At the same time, where do we go from here? What does this mean, you know, for the future of international law, for the future of government action in this area, and for multilayer strategies to address these issues, right. I wish I had all the answers, but I don’t. At least I can (throw ?) the questions. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Julie, is there anything you’d like to add? KATZMAN: Yeah, I just had one quick thing, which is that, you know, I think some of this relates to how you redefine what it means to be a man and you can’t forget that side of the equation here, and there are—I just recently stepped down from the board of the International Center for Research on Women and ICRW did this amazingly successful program in the schools of Mumbai, which is now in Maharashtra State as a whole, hundreds of thousands of kids involved in it, using sport to in fact redefine what it means at an impressionable age—of what does it mean to be a boy—what does it mean to be a man, and it’s had a measurable impact on views about violence and later on behavior, and I think that that’s something that the region as a whole has to start to embrace more fully because that’s a big part of what’s going on here, as Rosa said. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: And I’ll just add that that theme, of course, was a huge concern of my former boss, Joe Biden, and, you know, with a campaign that he worked—It’s On Us campaign—and thinking about the role of men and boys in addressing and stopping sexual violence in schools and beyond, and so it’s incredibly important. We’re having this conversation in my own university right now about as we’re thinking about retention and promotion of women, for example—you know, taking a step back and saying, my goodness, we’re so focused on kind of women and women’s roles and women’s voices and there’s not a focus on men’s role in all of this. And so as we all kind of think of our own institutions and the ways in which we are advancing these conversations in our own institutions I think it’s a great point. Well, with that, we’re going to open it up for questions. So, yes, please place your cards in a vertical position and I’ll start with individual questions. Well, actually, for purposes of time maybe we’ll group a couple questions at a time and then have our panelists respond. So why don’t I take these first three and then we’ll go down the line. So Loribeth. Q: Great. Hi. I’m Lori Weinstein from JWI. STAFF: Could you use the microphone, please? Q: Oh, the mic. Yeah. I’m Lori Weinstein from JWI. We do a lot of work to end domestic and sexual violence here in the States and we also do work through partnerships around the world. Thank you both for your wonderful remarks. I thought I was depressed about our country. Clearly, the depression only grows. But I have a couple of questions. One is about the SDGs, because the U.N. and the Commission on Women, of which we play a role or are involved, has put such an emphasis on ending violence. I think it’s number five. And I’m wondering, kind of from your perspectives from where you both sit how you see that’s going and whether we’re really having any impact, and I appreciated your point earlier about how things stay at the top. The second question has to do with women and employment. Many years ago, we did a project in Russia, in the former Soviet Union, where we used two strategies. One was creating domestic violence programs in small cities but the other was encouraging and creating employment opportunities for women, and we found in that three-year project that was funded by the State Department a real decrease in the amount of domestic and sexual violence in those homes where women had jobs, had access to employment, and were actually more of the breadwinners oftentimes than their spouses. So I’d love your comments on those. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Monica Tejada. Q: Thank you. Thank you for your remarks. Very interesting. Monica Tejada from the Millennium Challenge Corporation. So we have—we’re funding an education project in El Salvador and the data in El Salvador is 90 percent of the victims of sexual crimes are girls and adolescents. So I have two questions. One is how does the analysis—the economic analysis of the costs of GBV take into account underage women and girls who are not officially in the labor market yet and—well, if you could elaborate a little bit of that. And then the second part is are there any interesting programs or measures that address GBV within the schools system that, from your experience, you’ve seen as successful within the Latin American context? Thank you. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: And over to Begoña Fernandez. Q: OK. Hi. (Off mic.) BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Do you want to go ahead and— KATZMAN: You go ahead. CELORIO: Thank you so much for your question on the sustainable development goals. You know, I try to be positive in nature because I’m an international human rights law lawyer by training, right. So if not, I would give it up and not do anything, right. So and I think—you know, I think it’s very difficult to measure right now what kind of impact the sustainable development goals have really had. But I do think there’s been a measure of progress. It’s not as if we’re in a moment in time that when we talk about women’s rights or we talk about, you know, the rights of girls, et cetera, that we can say that there hasn’t really been any sort of progress. I mean, every day, especially in the area that I study the most—international human rights law—you see more government action. You see more private actor action. You see more actions from individuals to address gender-based violence. You see more women vocalizing, you know, what’s happening with gender-based violence or their own stories. I mean, you do see a lot of tendencies that, in my view, at least they give me hope, right. It’s very difficult to say that this is an advance or a good practice. I’m usually very careful about using that kind of terminology. But at least I see some steps in the right direction. I think what the sustainable development goals give us is language and a platform—a consensus platform. I’m a big fan of consensus platforms because I’ve always worked historically with governments, and at the end of the day when you have governments on your side there’s a lot that you can accomplish, right. Governments have resources. They have influence. They have connections with other governments. They can use things like international law to protect and to create good interventions. So for me, there’s promise there. I think it’s very difficult to really talk about a good practice or, really, advances at this stage. But there’s been some progress. The problem is that at the end of the day, what most of us are trying to do is improve the situation of women, improve the situation of girls. Make sure we have prevention. Make sure we have adequate redress, right. and we’re not seeing that yet, right. So there’s a long way to go here. But I do think you have at least some light there. In terms of women unemployment, it’s fascinating what you said because most of what I’ve studied and what I’ve learned from my practice is that it does make a big difference, right, to have quality and decent employment, to have economic resources. But then you have documentation in areas, you know, especially in Latin America. For example, so in Juárez, Mexico, which is one of the most—best documented cases in Latin America where there were a lot of killings, you know, right after you had all these maquila corporations coming and employing all these women and suddenly women were the main income earners of their households, right. It’s not clear whether it was the maquilas employing the women. It’s not clear whether it was because they were, you know, the wage earners. But there was a specific change in that locality happening economically in terms of economic roles and it was actually happening at the same time of the killings, right. I think you would have to study more whether this was connected or not. But it was certainly presented, for example, as expert testimony—as part of expert testimony before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights when they ruled on their main case on the killings in Ciudad Juárez. So just—it’s interesting. I think employment and I think quality and decent employment and I think economic empowerment are key. But we have to also study the short term, the medium term effect—what does that mean in terms of gender-based violence. I just think it’s a very interesting issue to look at more. In terms of El Salvador and education and the situation of girls, from my experience, at least in the realm of international law and human rights where I’ve worked with the most, the situation of girls is invisible. It’s invisible, and I think that’s something that we really have to work on, especially in the area of women’s rights. A lot of the standards that we have today were conceptualized not thinking of the particular situation of girls. Even though technically and legally they’re applicable, there’s a lot of nuances and needs there that need to be better studied and there’s a lot of governments that are trying to understand that now, especially—because especially in the past five years the situation of girls in Latin America have become more of a forefront issue, especially because of the situation of the early pregnancies and the situations of sexual violence. But in my view, we’re a long way to go in terms of understanding really the situation of girls and how to best apply international law to really understand the nuances, their needs, and to really protect their human rights, and I think that that’s very connected to your question as well. I think there needs to be more standards developed when it comes to connecting the situation of women and girls and I think we have to start with an understanding of what that means—that connection. We usually lump them together, right, but we don’t necessarily understand what it is—you know, what the specific needs of protection are for girls, you know, and where the differences may lie or the nuances may lie, and I think that’s a shortcoming that we have in international law from the—in that specific field, right. And I think that was it, right. OK. For now. (Laughter.) KATZMAN: So I will start by saying I’ll probably disappoint because I think they were really good questions and I’m not sure I have anything definitive to say in the context of the answers. But, you know, the point about the decrease in violence for women who had jobs, there was a lot of talk early on that the reverse was true and I think as time has gone on it’s become more and more clear that women who have resources are in a better position across the board. You know, it’s interesting in an agricultural context that you do have to be really careful about unintended consequences. So we have an experience where, for example, you use extension services to increase production of what are the cash crops and the cash crops are generally the domain of the male in the household, and that minimizes the percentage of the income of the entire household of the woman who’s generally managing the crops that feed everybody, and it upsets that gender balance and then you see a rise in violence, right. So I think that the big picture of be careful when doing these programs that all look like they might all be good if you then don’t make sure that the women are benefitting from the extension services and et cetera. Do you know, I have a supposition that girls and adolescents aren’t taken into the account in the statistics because we’re looking—the statistics that look at the economic impact—because we’re looking at the formal and informal economies but, yeah, I’m going to guess that those girls are very underrepresented in that and I think it’s a really interesting point and it’s something that I’m going to bring back and ask somebody about. You know, we’ve done some interesting programs in the schools and I was looking to try to find the results of this impact evaluation in either Guatemala or in Mexico where—and I couldn’t find it. There happens to be something wrong with the website, which is also something I’m going to bring back. It won’t let me in to that specific impact evaluation. But where the work that was done in schools with young kids and adolescents really did have an impact on future violence. So there are some programs out there and I’m, you know, more than happy to get in touch with you with those, and how to connect those two agendas about children and girls. So I do think that there’s an underlying issue here, which is if you look at the region and you look at the age of consent, that’s a place where actually more laws are actually needed and, you know, in a lot of countries there’s an issue here around indigenous rights. But that’s a piece of this that—you’re not even there yet and you can deal with that, and I think that’s actually a place where the two agendas do come together and relates to, you know, a woman’s right to her body and what happens there and family planning and, you know, we see all sorts of statistics around this, which I think could be better leveraged and thought about if we’re thinking about the intersection of the two agendas. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: So let me ask my colleagues—my CFR colleagues—may we go over for a few minutes? OK. So we have five minutes. So I see about five or so cards up. Why don’t we—why don’t we just go through the remaining— KATZMAN: Take them all. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Let’s tick them off. We’ll be efficient. We’ll do this. Go ahead. Q: Hi. Thank you so much. My name is Aapta Garg. I work with Promundo. And I wanted to ask in terms of when the—when governments are looking at these numbers around the economic cost, to what extent are they going deeper towards more entrenched and preventative—entrenched norms and preventative measures to address these rather than just kind of accommodating measures? I mean, we talk about the single-sex trains but that doesn’t stop men from harassing women on the trains. It just removes the women from those opportunities. And thinking beyond just kind of like how do we, like, put a bubble around women. And then I guess kind of a little bit further, how do we—to what extent are they also going beyond punitive measures to address violence? Because in many countries—I’m thinking of Brazil in particular—you have communities that have high interactions with the police that don’t necessarily address the root causes of violence but actually can exacerbate it. So how do we address violence without increasing police interactions for communities that are highly surveilled anyway? And then in terms of school-based interventions on preventative violence, in El Salvador our colleagues in Brazil are working on our program (age ?) program in the school-based situations there. I don’t have data on that. But I’m happy to connect you with our colleagues in Brazil if you would like that— KATZMAN: Sure. Q: —as well as anyone else who wants to have that information. Thank you. KATZMAN: Yeah, and I should have mentioned program (age ?) program in because we’re involved in that and it’s rolling out. Q: Hi. I’m Cindy Dyer from Vital Voices, and I just have a quick question as a follow-up to the question about laws and policies. I know that many of us are familiar with the many countries that are passing femicide laws to address high rates of GBV and they’re certainly willing to use their criminal justice system to address, you know, really outrageous forms of violence against women, which is good. But I’m wanting to know if any of you are familiar with countries that are trying to address GBV by focusing on the low-level violence against women so that we can try to prevent the need for all the femicide laws. Are there any countries that are really trying to aggressively address first-time violence or low-level violence that does not result in a front-page newspaper story? Q: Hi. I’m Jenna Ben-Yehuda, recovering State Department official—(laughter) —and I teach at GW on security and the Latin—in Latin America. MS.     : How is that recovery going? (Laughter.) Q: Right. I’m sure there are others. MS.     : (Laughs.) I’m sure there are. Q: So, you know, Rosa, your excellent comment on the need for donors and multilateral actors to come together on some of these issues had me thinking back to my Haiti days—like 2004, pre-earthquake, major raise round, right? So like these—I mean, could you use the donor roundtable model; like when there is a no-kidding crisis, what would this look like for multilaterals if this were really treated as a crisis? Because I think it is a crisis, but it’s kind of like a creeping, silent crisis. So if we take Julie’s point about the data and how these countries are barely creeping up with 2 percent GDP growth, right? I mean, if they could harness even half of that, there would be like landslide electoral victories for incumbents, right? Like, it would really be huge. So I mean, kind of a big question, but like what would that look like to have a huge, multilateral kind of donor community push to come together on these issues, collapse some of these strategies, band forces, and just charge ahead? Q: Sure. Hi, Cindy Arnson with the Woodrow Wilson Center. Thanks. Just as a note of advertisement, we’ve had over the past year and a half a project with the IDB on gender-based violence, lots of resources on our website covering various Latin American countries. My question goes mostly to Julie, and it has to do with how—and I’m not disputing the data, but I’m just wondering how one measures the economic impact of gender-based violence on GDP. And I agree that it’s a very good tool for getting people’s attention, but what goes into that calculation? Q: And mine builds off of—I’m Alex Arriaga with Strategy for Humanity. Mine builds off of the previous. So just umbrella question: In terms of what is happening in the region, there are some countries where we have really seen a reversal, and true threats on what has been gained, I think, in Nicaragua, for example. And at the same time, Julie, you have spoken about some very exciting initiatives with specific countries, so just big picture, I’d like to know how you are addressing—you know, how you’re—especially with the bank, how are you addressing the countries that are truly reversing, how that’s impacting your programming with them, and also, big picture, are there countries where you see the trend and potential for championing in a positive way? BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: And Judge Brower, you had a question. Q: Thank you. Charles Brower. I’m the only one not attributed to having any institutional connection on this list, but I’m an international judge in The Hague at the World Court, and also the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal by appointment of both Republican and Democratic administrations. I just have two questions. Apart from emphasizing the importance of training boys how to be tolerant, non-violent men—that’s the major half of the—you’ve got to deal with the offense as well as the defense. My two questions are simple. Do these efforts involve also those whose gender identification has changed—so-called trans? The other is the march of thousands upon thousands of people from Central America through Mexico currently to the southern border of the United States—I understand from interviews on television and from reading the print press a lot of it deals with the gang violence. People are afraid of being murdered because their relatives have been murdered, and they live in poor sections governed by gangs, but a lot of them have said—and its mostly women and children—heavily women and children saying if I go back there my husband will kill me. Now I wonder what all that says about the degree of success of these efforts in that part of the world. Does it simply say, well, you know, we’ve just got to keep on, or does it offer any judgment—preliminary judgment as to the level of success in that area? Period. Thank you. I figured it was appropriate for a gentleman— Q: In the interest of time I’ll just pass. Q: —to ask a question. KATZMAN: OK, I’ll pick off a few hopefully accurately. So the question about entrenched norms and how you get beyond treatment, on the one hand, and punitive measures on the other—so, you know, I’m not so sure we want to get beyond punitive measures, and I hear what you are saying about policing in communities, but I think that goes to the model of policing. And we actually—you know, I think the impunity is such a big problem that punitive action is OK in my book, in many ways. And so we’re really focused on the model of policing, so in Honduras we have worked really hard to change the model of policing to integrate with the country many more women into the police force so at the community level women can—and it goes to another question that was asked, I think—women can go to the police locale and report lower levels of violence, not when it ends up being femicide, and have somebody who takes that report seriously, and a process in place to respond to that kind of report. So, you know, it is part of changing the policing to a community model and not just a come in and raid the neighborhood to get guns, for example. So I think there is a certain amount of nuance associated with how you operate along that spectrum, which I think, Cindy, goes largely to your question as well. So Jenna, I just—I think that what you said is really interesting and important, and you know, there are parts of the region where there are donors who are focused on this topic, and where we have tried to collaborate, and we do collaborate with those donors. I don’t think that anyone really has—we’ve tried to cast this as a big issue, and we have—you know, we’re a demand-driven institution, and so where we have demand, that’s how we’re approaching it, with that kind of lens. But across the region, and thinking about it the way you said it, I think there’s some really good food for thought there, and I’d like to continue that conversation. So how do you measure the impact relative to GDP? I will tell you that those numbers are not IDB numbers; those are GiZ numbers, and the methodology which—the specific of which escape me at this moment was really very detailed. So there’s a really robust methodology which we would like to now replicate. We’re looking for donors so that we can replicate this in other countries, and Andy—who you know well—can have a conversation with you about that. Judge Brower, I—yes, so the question of people with other gender identities, that—if we think that women’s gender-based violence toward women is bad, you know, multiply it, raise it to the tenth power, right? And so that is a part of the work that we do, but we—I mean, without doubt it’s an even more complicated path, but the reforms that we are working on, and where we work on this topic, we do it in an umbrella sense so that it’s not just, you know, not—not bipolar—yeah, forgot the word that— MS.     : Gender binary? KATZMAN: Thank you—gender binary. Thank you. The comment that, you know, a lot of people are fleeing gender-based violence, I think there’s no question that the scale and the scope of the things that are being done are not sufficient to be able to say it can change in any way, shape, or form—at the macro level we’ve changed culture; it just hasn’t happened. And it has been exacerbated by the fuel of gangs and guns into Central America, and so it has made a bad situation worse; not a bad situation better. And everything that is being done—back to Jenna’s point—in some ways are still gathering drops in large buckets. And that’s why there is a lot more that needs to be done. And just, Alex, I—I think for—well, for—speaking for the IDB, it’s hard to—if you have a country that is going in the wrong direction, that probably—although not necessarily—implies that their engagement on the topic with an institution like ours is not necessarily robust, which makes it hard to then kind of have a dialogue around why that is happening—not impossible, but not as the central core of the message or the work with that country because they must not be focusing. But the flip side, we are trying very hard to take all of the very positive things that are going on in the region and use those to be advocates and leading voices. So when Mexico puts up the website that creates great transparency around the scope of the problem, we’re not marketing that platform to every country in the region. When Argentina says, OK, I’m going to do all these things from changing the way we investigate femicide, to changing the way that we train our officers, to gathering all the data in certain ways, we’re marketing that across the region. And I think that’s the way we can carry the positive messages and start to show how that pays dividends to the countries. BETTINGER-LÓPEZ: Well, with that, I want to thank our panelists. Please join me in thanking them. (Applause.) And I want to thank all of you for your excellent questions and participation, and for joining us. So stay tuned for more CFR roundtables. You will be getting them in your inbox. Thanks. (END) This is an uncorrected transcript.  

Girls’ education is one of the most effective development investments. Yet 130 million girls remain out of school, and each year, twelve million girls are married before their eighteenth birthday. To commemorate the International Day of the Girl Child, Dr. Kakenya Ntaiya and Sarah Craven discuss new models to further girls’ empowerment and education and advance U.S. foreign policy objectives, such as global health, prosperity, and stability.   VOGELSTEIN: Good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon. Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations. My name is Rachel Vogelstein. I lead the Women and Foreign Policy Program here at CFR, which analyzes how elevating the status of women and girls advances U.S. foreign policy objectives. Today we will explore an issue in honor and recognition of the International Day of the Girl that is really at the center of the strategic case for the advancement of women and girls, and that is education. As you know, improvement in girls’ education globally at the primary level is one of the major development achievements of the past two decades. But despite this progress, persistent gaps in girls’ education remain, particularly at the secondary level. You all know the statistics well: thirty-four million girls remain out of secondary school, with significant gender gaps in sub-Saharan Africa and in South Asia. The gender gap at the secondary level leaves girls at risk of practices like child marriage, early pregnancy. And in addition, at a time when secondary education really serves as the passport, in many respects, to formal-sector employment, this education gap also limits broader economic growth and potential. We know many of the reasons for the gender gap in education at the secondary level: son preference, harmful traditional practices like female genital mutilation and child marriage, threats of violence, and social and cultural norms that confine opportunities for women and girls. Today we are here to talk about not simply why these barriers exist, but rather how to surmount these obstacles. What are the most effective ways to get and to keep adolescent girls in school? How can leaders on the ground break through the social norms that constrain girls’ schooling? How can we ensure that girls who are educated at the secondary level are able to transition successfully to higher education or to the workplace? And how can we bring innovative models to scale? Perhaps no one is better-equipped to answer these questions than our experts today. First, we are very pleased to welcome Kakenya Ntaiya, a pioneering Kenyan leader who has dedicated her life to this cause. She is the founder and president of the Kakenya Center for Excellence, which uses education to empower and motivate young girls to become agents of change in their families, communities, and nations. Previously, she was the first youth advisor to the United Nations Population Fund, through which she traveled the world as an advocate for girls’ education. She has been widely recognized for her work and has been the subject of a BBC documentary that I commend to all of you. And, Kakenya, thank you for joining us. We’re fortunate to host you today. NTAIYA: Thank you. VOGELSTEIN: Second, we are delighted to be joined by Sarah Craven, who is a leading official at the United Nations Population Fund as the director of its Washington office. She previously held positions at the State Department and in the Senate, particularly for Senator Tim Wirth, and was a policy advisor to the Center for Development and Population Activities during the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. Welcome back to the Council, Sarah. So, Kakenya, I’d like to start with you. You’ve spoken in the past about your personal story and the challenges you faced as a young child. You were engaged at the age of five, underwent FGM in preparation for marriage, and yet you managed to negotiate a return to school and do what no other girl in your community had ever done, which was to leave your village to obtain higher education abroad. How did you accomplish this? And, importantly, what advice do you give to the young girls with similar dreams who face similar challenges in your community today? NTAIYA: Thank you so much, Rachel, for hosting us here, and everyone for coming. It’s nice to see good—lots of good friends and all friends. And I’m really honored to be here with my mentor and good friend, Sarah Craven, my very first boss. (Laughter.) We’ve come a long way. We’ll talk about the BBC. (Laughs.) We were on that journey together. So I’m very thankful for this opportunity to be here. I think, you know, I don’t want to go into my story, and I know everybody here knows about Kakenya, who negotiated with the father to get—you know, to go through FGM and go to school. What I want to say, that I think one thing that I’m reminded as I work with girls on a daily—on a daily day is that there are girls throughout the world who every single day being courageous, looking for an alternative to the life that has already been set for them. I talk about my girl Faith, who heard about our work and she’s been hearing about our schools and all we’ve done. And when the day for enrollment came—we do this enrollment once a year and, like, every girl wants to be there. And one of the requirements we have is that a girl comes with a family member. So Faith went to her dad and told her that, dad, can you take me to enroll at Kakenya Center? The dad said no. She went to the mother and the mother said she had to go do something else. And she didn’t give up. What she did is she went inside the house, took an egg, and walked to the market, sold the egg, bought a pencil, and came to school. She wanted to enroll in my school. So it reminds me that even though I negotiated, I fought, there are girls on a daily—day in, day out who want a different life, who don’t want to be married when they’re children, who want to see a different life. And for Faith, what she was running from is her father was very abusive. He just drinks a lot and he has, you know, three wives, and her mother was the youngest. She’s seen her sisters getting married. She was running away from that life. I was running from the life, that of my mother. My mother was abused by my dad. You know, the life that, when you see something different, you want to look for that. So I want to say that there are so many girls out there that need a helping hand, and we’ve been fortunate as Kakenya’s Dream where we have really worked on these girls. We’ve created a safe space for them to be able to walk in, to be able to say I want to go and enroll, I am going to take my chance and I’m going to walk without a father, without a mother. I’m just going to go to school. And that is—I think that’s, like, it’s not my story is not just one story; it’s the story of many, many, many more girls, and those who are not in school, those who are being mutilated, you know, each year. And what I have learned is that—as people who work in this field is that we need to create many, many more spaces, many more places for girls to come in to be empowered. What I tell girls and I tell anybody is that every child in the world has a dream, and it’s our—it’s us to create those dreams to become a reality. And go for it. I mean, if you want something, you go for it. Be Faith. You know, get up and go. And I think that’s the biggest thing, that anybody in the world should just go for what they want. VOGELSTEIN: So let’s talk more about the steps you’ve taken to help those dreams become reality: the Kakenya Center for Excellence, which started over a decade ago in a shack under a tree, and now today has a full campus with art and science facilities, and safe dormitories, and a library. And importantly, a hundred percent of your graduates stayed in school throughout, and then went on to higher education. So talk to us a little bit about the model. How did you achieve those remarkable results? NTAIYA: The good thing about—we’ve really grown with our girls. (Laughs.) I think, you know, for me, it was—I was a student at the University of Pittsburgh, working on my Ph.D., and you know, I had women who, you know, wanted to help me—you know, I kept saying I want to build this school—and really came together to support me to start that dream. And so I had gone home for—actually, for the holiday, over December, and when I went there one of the girls got married and I couldn’t help her. What happens is that when you get married, the next day of course is the honeymoon. And this girl, you know, she wasn’t ready. She was twelve. She also had gotten married to a young man. And I could see pain. I could see—there was no place for her to run to. And worse was that, you know, the elders had to come to help the man help, you know, perform whatever he wanted to do, and they had to use a horn to—you know, to open up the girl, a cow horn. And this girl stayed crying, and everybody in the village knew what had happened to her. And I was helpless. So I come to Pittsburgh, and you can’t go to class and, like, not think about that girl; and you can’t just get up every day and forget, that she doesn’t exist. At that time in my community, when you are in the rural—I mean, rural communities need our help. We talk about NGOs. We talk about work that people have done. But no one wants to go to the place that the road ends. There were no rescue centers. There were—you know, the government is there, but they don’t—like, there’s no place to take her. So I couldn’t even take her to a rescue home. So I went home and I said—you know, I tell Sarah and the team—(laughs)—we’re going to start a school. And, you know, my head is just like—I just wanted to grab those girls and I just wanted to put them in a little place. And I just said, you know, I just want ten girls. I just—I just want to help ten girls. And at that time, you know, I had been talking about it, but getting there in a hundred girls—(inaudible)—enrollment, and I wasn’t ready for that. I mean, I was like, oh—(laughter)—I guess—because I had to, like—I needed to go through a criteria. I needed to find the most needy or find the extremely needy. I mean, I grew up in a community where everybody’s needy, but there’s those other level of neediness. So I thought that, you know, I had a panel of people to do all these things, and every single story that day I wanted to take every of those girls in. So we started with thirty girls, and it was—for me, what has—like, I’ve really grown with the girls. At first we didn’t have a boarding school, so we just took them, put them in a landing place, and then you realize that the walk from school to home was a long distance. The girls were having tea in the morning. They come to school. A cup of tea, and then you walk three, four, five miles. By the time it’s 10:00, the girls are sleepy. You’re thinking, what’s going on? Apparently, they needed food. And, you know, I learned that, oh, food is important. (Laughter.) So before we even thought about a boarding facility, we started with food, feeding them. And all of a sudden you see transformation like their hair color, their faces, their—you know, food. They needed food. And from there, we knew that, of course, the studies—numerous studies talk about how girls, when they are home, they are cleaning, they are cooking, they are doing everything else other than to read. And furthermore, there is no lights at night because it’s rural communities, so at night: dark, go to sleep. You wake up, morning, you start (fire ?). So there is always work for girls. So the next thing we did was to have a boarding school. And literally, when you say under the shade of tree, that’s where the teachers were sitting down marking the exams. From there we went to uniform and the pride that comes to that, a bed. I mean, I had a room like this full of sixty girls—(laughs)—and people were like, why are you—you know, people would come and visit and they’re like, they’re so crowded. I’m like, no, they’re dying to be here. I mean, they are happy to be there. And from that I will tell you that every single girl that has gone through our school, I mean, our greatest happiness now is to see the first ones in college, walking the step that I walked, some going to Australia. And it’s just like, oh my gosh, we are finally getting there. But we’ve learned over time it’s not just the school. You need to bring the parents along. Fathers who never thought that girls need to be good in school, we had to use a pretense of saying come look at the grade to start look—developing a relationship between the father and their daughter because it didn’t exist. We worked from that and empowered the teachers. We’ve gone out to the community now. We work with about ninety schools, working with the boys, bringing the boys into the picture. It’s really been, for us, a growing learning with our girls. And there is no—I mean, I love—when we create programs, I think we normally create this thing up there with like a classroom, but it’s not really just a classroom. It’s every single part of the society is part of a girl’s life. It’s the mothers. It’s the fathers. It’s the brothers. It’s everybody. She needs—you need to empower the whole community to be able to empower the girl, and that’s what we’ve learned. That’s why we see our girls continuing with school, because everybody is part of that equation. VOGELSTEIN: So a holistic, community-based, community-driven model. NTAIYA: Exactly. Yes. Yes. VOGELSTEIN: I want to talk about one of the challenges that you mentioned, which is scale. You know, I remember we were talking last year and you told me that the Center had forty spots available and over two hundred and fifty girls applied, which must be heartbreaking to have to turn away so many. So my question is, what will it take to actually address the need that you see in that one community? Or scale up to the whole country: What do you need to scale a program like the one that you’ve created? And if you got the resources that you need, what are the challenges that you would face, do you think, in bringing your program to scale? NTAIYA: So what I have learned over time is you need to be patient. It’s a constant reminder every day that, you know, educating a girl—and I say it all year—it’s not about being in a classroom; it’s about empowering the whole community and it’s about everybody being part of that. And what we would love to see now, and we are just in the process of an organization where we are looking at what has made us most successful. How can—how can we share that with the world? And we are in the process of asking ourselves, one, is the model actually a government partnership, where the school is registered as a government school, we are the sponsors? And what that creates is that we have an opportunity to work with other schools, we have an opportunity to work with other teachers, we have an opportunity to impact other local schools. So that’s one of our really greatest things. The other thing that we’ve learned over time is that our girls are going to high school, but their high school education is not preparing them for the next—for the—for the world that we are in now. We are no longer about just teaching to pass exams. It’s about what skills are you coming out of—I mean, we had our girls finish high school last year, and I was shocked. I mean, you don’t think about this, but none of them had had computers. So, in reality’s sense, they had to apply for college using a computer and they have never had a computer. And I’m sitting there like, so, in high school, we should be giving the girls access to computers. We should be able to learn this skill. So I’ve learned about that. And then the other thing about career development—and, you know, we talk about in a rural setting where the only thing that a girl knows is her teacher and us, and that’s still limited. So one thing I came to realize: if you ask the girls in my school, each one of them wants to be a doctor. So I finally figured out, why did they want to be a doctor? (Laughter.) Apparently because I’m called Dr. Kakenya. (Laughter.) So—(laughs)— VOGELSTEIN: That is wonderful. NTAIYA: So the whole time I’m thinking they want to be—you know, they think I’m actually a doctor because they have never seen—I mean, I’m the first woman in the whole community to have a Ph.D., and they’re like—their minds doesn’t even—so you have to really bring in that kind of setting, like, you know, creating those spaces. So I think for us, one is really we want to be the—(inaudible). We want to be the Center of Excellence where people come and learn from us. We are building a second school now. We are really thinking about being sustainable. Working in a rural community, we are talking about waste management, something that we wouldn’t think about in the city. We are talking about using local resource(s), because for us to build our first school we had to get everything from outside into the village. Now we are thinking about how do we make our own bricks, how do we, you know—you know, we talk about the solar system. How do we tap into the solar system within our own community? How do we become sustainable in terms of farming the right—like, we don’t need to buy food; we can make our own food. So we are really looking at that, solving that problem, because I think the biggest thing that’s scarce, people who are well-wishers and who wants to make a difference in the world, is when that road ends where do I get water? Water is very—it’s life. So when you know that you’re not going to have a shower, you’re like, really? (Laughter.) You start thinking about those things. So we want to show the world and we want to show that if you invest in girls in rural communities they are at the center of everything. So you are investing on that girl. That girl is invested in her family. She touches—it’s a ripple effect, and it really starts with the girl. So that’s what we are trying to do. We want to create a model that people can just jump into the most difficult places to make a difference, because if we leave those girls—I mean, in Africa, eighty percent of the populations are in rural places. So how can we get to them if we don’t jump into that line? So, yeah, so that’s what we are trying to create. And it’s not—it’s not necessarily—and I’m looking for—this is where, you know, I’m looking not just for financial support, but I’m looking for people who want to think beyond just, you know, skills, you know. Everybody has skills. And I think—I look at it like my team and, I mean, from interns that we’ve had who are amazing people who want to make a difference, I look at this as a lab. What can you bring in to create something that we can share with the world? So that’s what we are—we are doing. VOGELSTEIN: So let’s move now from the local, from this rural community in Kenya, to the global. And, Sarah, I’d love to ask you to talk about the State of the World Population Report. We actually have the most recent report, which is hot off the presses, for 2018, but I’d actually like to start by asking you about the one that came out before, in 2016, that focused on the ten-year-old girl and stated that the world’s future will be determined by the fate of its ten-year-old girls. Tell us, from a development perspective and from a global perspective, why it’s so important to focus on girls, and specifically how this focus manifests programmatically at UNFPA. CRAVEN: Is it on? VOGELSTEIN: It’s on. (Laughs.) CRAVEN: That’s a huge—that’s a huge question, Rachel. I’ll do my best. First, I just want to start by just letting people know that I’m here wearing several hats. So I am assuming three hats that I want people to be aware. I work for UNFPA, the U.N. Population Fund, so in that role I’m here as an advocate. I’m also on the board of Kakenya’s Dream, which is another hat I’m wearing. But I think the most important hat that I’m wearing is I am one of the backup singers to this rock star. (Laughter.) There are many people in this room who could be sitting in my chair as one of those rock star backup singers. So I have the honor of being here today, but when we open it up to dialogue I feel really humbled by everyone here who’s been part of this journey. So, with that in mind, I’m also happy to talk about UNFPA’s report from two years ago, which was on the—which was on the ten-year-old girl. And from my perspective and from UNFPA’s perspective, the most important person in the world was the ten-year-old girl. And for those of you who can go back and remember when you were a ten-year-old girl, or when you were a ten-year-old boy and knew ten-year-old girls, it’s a time in your life where the world is still full of possibility. You are in school. The world is your vision. You are dreaming of becoming a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher or whatever role it is. But for many girls in the developing world, that world can suddenly change dramatically when they’re twelve and they hit puberty; and suddenly those options, those opportunities, the choices they had suddenly become much more diminished. And in the case of Kakenya, you know, she had to make this dramatic choice of undergoing female genital mutilation, this cultural practice that was preparing her for being a mother and for being a wife, and for no longer having those options. So girls no longer are able to stay in school. They are put into situations where they are being married before they’re physically ready, emotionally ready to be in that situation. They’re taken out of school. And that impacts, of course, the life of that girl. It also impacts the family, the immediate family, and it impacts the larger community, and then the nation. So it’s that ripple effect. And so at UNFPA we really want to drill down and focus on that ten-year-old girl. What investments can we make to ensure that that ten-year-old girl can grow up to be Kakenya, to have that opportunity that she can stay in school, that she can decide who she wants to marry, she can make that decision on what she wants to do, when she wants to have children, how many children she wants to have. And that involves a very large enabling environment. So it involves situations like having a school like Kakenya’s where she can go to school and be there safely and get herself there. It also means an enabling environment, a legal environment which is supportive of her rights and her ability to be in school and to be able to maximize her health and potential. And it means having someone believe in her. So Kakenya believes in all of those girls in her community and has become a real advocate for them. So if you go on our website today, we do have a new report—(laughs)—that builds on that. But what I really would say, unfortunately, it doesn’t have any of Kakenya’s girls, but we have a very beautiful visual on today that’s looking at the girls that we focused on two years ago and where they are now. And, happily, many of those girls are—they represent a global picture. Many of them are still on a very good chart moving forward. Next year is going to be the fiftieth anniversary of my organization, the U.N. Population Fund. And what we’re going to focus on next year—and unfortunately, I’m happy to say, I do not qualify—but it will be looking at sixty-year-old women and ask, looking back from when they were a ten-year-old girl, how has the world evolved in those fifty years, and then looking at a new cohort of ten-year-old girls and what their vision is for the next fifty years. So I’m hoping one of your girls, Kakenya, and maybe one of your sixty-year-old mamas back in the village, can be profiled in that. NTAIYA: Yeah, that would be good. VOGELSTEIN: Sarah, you’ve talked about the support UNFPA gave to Kakenya in developing her leadership role in her community, and now of course there’s this whole new generation of Kakenyas that has resulted. And clearly, Kakenya’s leadership made the difference there. What other programs that UNFPA has supported have been successful? And what are the elements of that success? And what would you like to see the United Nations do—not just your agency, but across the organization—to better support the programs, the best practices that you see working well? CRAVEN: Well, first of all, Kakenya is our—you know, one of our shining stars. I’ll tell you, the way I first met Kakenya was we were doing a panel on child marriage, and Kakenya had just been featured in The Washington Post. And so my colleague gave me the job that I had to take her out to dinner to vet her, to make sure she wouldn’t embarrass the U.N. (Laughter.) And so I met her and I thought, oh, I think—I think she’s going to do a pretty good job. (Laughter.) So the next day she spoke with our at the time executive director, Thoraya Obaid, and Thoraya’s story had been similar to Kakenya’s. Thoraya was from Saudi Arabia, and she was the first Saudi woman to come to the United States on a government scholarship. And I had told Thoraya—I said, oh, you’re going to really like Kakenya; she’s just like you. And Thoraya was like, what do you mean she’s just like me? And then, after Kakenya spoke, Thoraya got up and she said, this girl is just like me. (Laughter.) And so, after that, Thoraya said—I said, well, you know, she needs a job. And Thoraya said, well, we’re going to hire her. And I will give UNFPA great credit for that. We give more than lip service to engaging young voices in our work. Kakenya was a youth fellow, where she worked at headquarters. She was a little bit unique in that she came to us through Washington, D.C., but usually we identify young professionals in their home countries. They’ll work in the country office and then come and do a stint at headquarters. Our colors at UNFPA are orange, and so we have what we call the Tangerines, which are our younger staff. So whenever we have any kind of global meeting or programmatic work, we actually have our younger members of our team as full participants in terms of they’re not just the ones setting up the nametags, but they’re there leading with their ideas and leading. And so I see for the whole U.N. system I think we have done some good work, but we need to do a lot more in terms of engaging young people’s participation—that it’s not just, oh, the youth are having their own separate meeting, and here’s their list of wishes or demands; instead, that they are part of that dialogue and conversation, and that youth perspective is as valid and as important. Because right now we are entering a moment in the world where we have the largest cohort of young people in the world. We have over a billion young people entering their reproductive years. And so not just the U.N., but member states all have to be focusing on ensuring that young people’s potential is fulfilled. VOGELSTEIN: You talked a little bit about the importance of an enabling environment for girls, and I wanted to ask about the environment for UNFPA. It’s now been a year since your current executive director assumed her role as the head of the agency. Can you talk to us briefly about what some of her main priorities are and some of the biggest challenges that you face? CRAVEN: Sure. Well, I’m hoping you all can get to meet her if you haven’t already. Her name is Dr. Natalia Kanem. She has been at UNFPA just about a year. She’s has very interesting story herself. She is a(n) Afro-Caribbean from Panama, and came to the United States when she was a young girl. I think she didn’t have the same family support structure that would support her, but she got here. She ended up graduating from Harvard and getting her medical degree from Columbia, and spent most of her career in sub-Saharan Africa working on these issues. So we’re really delighted to have her leadership. Under her leadership we have a new strategic plan at UNFPA. So our goal is to go out of business, and our goal is to get to what we call the three zeroes. So that is by—under the Sustainable Development Agenda, we’re focusing on three pieces: one is zero unmet need for contraception or family planning; zero preventable maternal deaths; and zero tolerance for gender-based violence, with a particular focus on harmful practices such as female genital mutilation and child marriage. So we have a very ambitious agenda. Today’s report, if you go on our website and find it, is like a kickoff to next year, where we’re really focusing on these three big goals and focusing on next year, where we have the twenty-fifth anniversary of the conference that happened in Cairo, Egypt, which has created this blueprint of action for us. And I just want to say Anju Malhotra—butchering your name, Anju—my colleague from UNICEF, is here, who has been a key partner to UNFPA, where together we do work on ending child marriage and ending female genital mutilation. So a lot of that joint work has been very critical to the issues that Kakenya works on every day. VOGELSTEIN: Well, we have a lot of experts around the table, so I’d love to open the discussion now to questions. Please raise your placard and state your name and affiliation, and we’ll get to as many as we can. Why don’t we start over here, and then over to Anju? Q: Hi. I’m Tami Hultman from AllAfrica. Kakenya, on your website you have a conversation between two interns, Canadian from—students from—college students, I guess, from British Columbia, and it’s about their time there. And in contrast to so many organizations which have international volunteers who come to teach, to help, the whole tone of their conversation is that they were there to learn, and how much they learned from you and the girls and the school and the way things were done, almost as thought they really were interns there to absorb expertise and come back to Canada and share it. How do you—how do you get interns like that? Do you—do you say to people you’re not coming here to tell us what to do—(laughs)—you’re coming here to be part of us as we move forward and to learn? NTAIYA: I think my organization has always worked with young people from our beginning chalet. (Laughs.) And I don’t necessarily go out there and say we need intern. I think what we have been very successful is we’ve been able to find people who want to go, who want to help. And I think that curiosity is something that so many young people are now learning in college, and that—just curiosity of a heart that wants to help and wants to learn. And I’ve been very fortunate for George and Rachel, who spent three months. That’s the other thing: you cannot just come for one month—(laughs)—you have to come for at least three months and above. I think the first month is like, where am I? And then the second year is really about learning about the place. And by the time you’re leaving, you really feel that you know the place, you know the people. The interns stay with families, so you are embedded within the family. You have to do what the family does, and it’s really about the living experience. And I think the thing I’ve learned is that to truly change the world we have to listen to the young people. And I think Sarah shared about the work that UNFPA does bringing young people from developing world, from—in their rural villages to giving them an experience to learn how to shape the world. I look at young people as these are the—this is the future. And when I see how my country—my country is, the issues of corruption we are fighting, the issues of, you know, gender-based violence, all the things that you look and see that is not good in the world, if we can work with young people—both my girls, the boys that we work with—and connecting them generally, they are going to be creating laws. They are going to be implementing. This is the future. So we—they have to be part of that, solving that problem. And I think for young people from the—you know, from the developed world or from the place that they have never entered into that, what it means to be in a poor place, what does it mean to go through FTM, to live in a community that practices that it changes who you become in the future. Q: And would you take interns from other parts of Africa? NTAIYA: Yes. We have interns even within Kenya. Yeah, it’s—we don’t have a boundary saying that this is the only people. (Laughs.) We work with young people across the world because I think that is—that’s the way to go. You can’t just say this, this, so you have to put them all together, create relationships that will change the world. VOGELSTEIN: A lot of possibilities there. Anju, please. Q: Thank you very much, Sarah, for the collaboration message. And certainly, I think that the U.N. is for the first time in a space where the generation that we are facing currently is both a promise and a challenge that we have to really realize. So at UNGA this time Generation Unlimited was launched, and UNICEF’s new executive director is also very much with Natalia in moving that agenda forward. My comment and question is a little bit convoluted and is for Kakenya, but I hope you’ll have patience to sort of appreciate what I’m trying to ask her. You know, over the last six years while I have been at the U.N., part of the reason I went to the U.N. is because I wanted the girl agenda to go to scale. And so the issue of scale has been the one that has been absorbing me the most, and we are working on a large—a global child marriage program, a large FGM program, but also at UNICEF I’m working on girls’ education programs, nutrition programs, water and sanitation programs, and I’m very much active in the gender and adolescent community. And it makes me wonder when I look at people like you—and I think you’re absolutely right in saying there are so many shining lights like you. There are so many courageous girls and women who have taken action, and either must managed to save their own lives but also become models for so many others, and taken courageous steps. Malala comes to mind and you come to mind. And when I talk to Malala, she says there are so many Malalas out there that we don’t talk to. And I think the question is, are we putting too much of a burden on you by putting all our ducks or all our whatevers, investment options, in you? Because the issue is not just for you to shine, but for you guys to become a Milky Way. That’s really, really powerful. And what are we doing? Where is it that we’re building the infrastructure to make sure that there is a road and there is no end to the road, right? Where are we building the capacity for those schools to actually have the teachers? I mean, it’s one of the most interesting things I recently have been doing with our education colleagues when I—when they say, yeah, of course we are working for girls’ education, what else do you want us to do? I’m saying, well, let’s do a pipeline analysis. First of all, it’s not just convincing. It’s not just norm change. We can change the norms. We can—most parents actually really do want their girls to go to school. (Laughs.) But there aren’t schools. There isn’t a road. There isn’t transportation. There isn’t safety once they’re there. There isn’t food to eat to make them, as you say. So even when we will build toilets and school(s), they are not—there’s water—(laughs)—for them to function, nobody’s taking care of them. How do we build infrastructure that actually really supports girls and is maintained? Where is the capacity we’re building so that those schools actually have teachers who teach, and teach the skills that you’re talking about? So it’s not just an issue of giving computers, but having people who can teach the girls—(laughs)—how to use the computers and not lock them up in a cabinet because they’re so precious, right? So I guess my question to you really is, what do you ask of us, those of us who are not just giving small amounts to NGOs but are part of government and multilateral systems that are spending billions of dollars? Where should they be going? NTAIYA: Thank you so much, Anju, for your wonderful explanations and your continual work. I thank UNICEF and UNFPA. I mean, they are everything in Kenya, and we really appreciate the work that you are doing to support the girls. I think you really hit the nail on the head—(laughs)—as they say, because I think for a very long time, you know, we come with these policies—free primary education—and it’s really good. But what we realize, yes, girls are going to school, but there is no teacher, there is no toilets, there’s no—like, there are all those things that are not there. And I think us and Sarah and my couple of teammates here and my—we are really trying to show the world what does it really mean to empower a girl? What do you really need? So somebody will say uniforms. Somebody will say toilets. Somebody will say a classroom. Somebody will—I mean, there is school fees. And you realize you are paying school fees, the girl is going to school, and in that school she’s being abused. So you really have to look at a holistic—a holistic model, a holistic approach. And that’s what we’ve learned. The reason why we are building a second school is because we want to build a high school, because for a long time we are sending our girls to different places and we realize we are lacking. The school system is not ready to empower that girl, so we are losing. So how do we—how do we create that thing when—Anju asked: What do I need to empower a girl? I will hand you something that says, you know, you need a good teacher because teachers—it’s not just about the teachers who come to the classroom. Are they passionate? Are they willing to educate a girl? Or are they there to abuse the girl? So you need to sensitize that. You need to be able to say, a boarding school, yeah, why are we doing a boarding school? Because we know that when the girls are home—but then they go home. So in their homes, are they being used as workers? Are they—are they being children? So these are really—it’s a complicated issue. It’s challenging. But I think the biggest thing that you would need to do is I think the approach need to change to just—it’s great to invest in governments, but I think the funds that you put into those local NGOs, those local people who are doing the things in the most extreme, the funds that you put there are more—there is more to show than what you are—you know, you do with especially our government, which is just another talk for a different day. But I think—I think your question is that you need a lot of Malalas, and they are there. It’s about identifying them, creating the space for them to thrive, linking them so that they know that somebody else is doing something somewhere else, and really creating that road that you already started. There is no end. It means that we are coming. And trust me, the young people who are coming from behind, they’re just going to push us all out and they’re going to change the world. And that’s what we need to do. When I look at my girls, I mean, they are passionate. They are passionate. They are saying no. They are saying no to FGM. They are saying—I mean, it’s—for the very first time my community has these girls who are going to college who have never been cut. And I’m like, uh. And then, like, this is a wave because the biggest thing we’ve done for—especially for our girls, it’s a network. They know that I cannot do alone; I need you as a team. And I think you just—you answered your own question, actually. You just said what you needed to do. And I think we need all of us to start changing our minds, changing the way we do things, and just let—empower the young people. Let them run the world. VOGELSTEIN: Sarah, anything you want to add on this question of supporting individual leaders versus building infrastructure to create that enabling environment you were talking about earlier? NTAIYA: Oh, you need all of them, though. You can’t just choose one and leave the other. VOGELSTEIN: So both and. NTAIYA: Yes. CRAVEN: I have—we should, like, sit for hours because there’s so much—(laughter)—to unpack in what you just talked about. I mean, one thing I want to say, that I just really want to emphasize was so amazing when I’m wearing my hat as Kakenya friend/board member, is, imagine, she was the first girl in her community to go to college, right? And now how many girls did you just send off to college? NTAIYA: Twenty-four. CRAVEN: Twenty-four, right? So that’s in ten years we’ve had a big change right there. It’s sort of amazing. This past spring four girls came for the model U.N., and they came with their teachers. And what was amazing about this was their teachers had never left the village or the community. So first they all had to get to Nairobi, and then they all had to get here. And then guess what happened? It snowed. (Laughter.) And so there was this quick, like, oh my gosh, everyone give you mittens and your gloves and your jackets. And so these four—it’s a little bit an anecdote, and then I’m going to get back to maybe knowing how to answer Anju’s question. But the—we met with these young women. They were the four years that don’t want to be doctors. Three wanted to be pilots and one wanted to be an accountant, I think, to add up all the money that the pilots were going to make. (Laughter.) But when we asked these girls what was the thing that, like, struck them the most about—one said snow. I’m trying to remember what the—one said snow. One said Times Square. I forgot what the third one said. And the fourth one said the Martin Luther King Memorial, because of what your country has done for civil rights. How old is that girl, ten? NTAIYA: She’s thirteen. CRAVEN: Thirteen. Can you imagine? I mean it was unbelievable. So I just want to say if the U.N. could somehow figure out how to get more funding into the hands of the Malalas and the Kakenyas—and Linette (sp), who just went off to university in Australia, who was educated in Kakenya’s school—I think some of this ripple effect could happen. I think for me, listening not as the U.N. but listening to Kakenya as her friend, she sometimes tells me the most harrowing things that are going on that we talk about at this level, and then she talks about the reality. For example, if I’m telling this story right, in Kenya, FGM is illegal. NTAIYA: Yeah, mmm hmm. CRAVEN: Is illegal. And so some—it was cutting season and some girls were being cut, and so they came through and they arrested all of the perpetrators, which included these girls’ parents. So then Kakenya had the situation of girls who were bleeding, who were injured, who didn’t have any of the—and these weren’t students at your school, but who didn’t have any of the support structure and parents who were there to help take care of them. So we don’t think about all that, right? Like, we just think, like, oh, we did a great thing because— NTAIYA: We stopped them. (Laughs.) CRAVEN: We stopped this— NTAIYA: The law is there. CRAVEN: The law is there. So these are the things that I think that Kakenya can help us in our lofty seats realize how important it is. It’s important that we outlaw FGM, but we also have to know what that means in terms of the reality on the ground. So I’m just mumbling in terms of response. It’s hard. But I think how we can create more Milky Ways is very important, and I think that is getting resources in the hands of local communities. VOGELSTEIN: Of our leaders. Let’s come over here to Daniela (sp) and then we’ll move to the other side. Q: Thanks. So much to think about. Wow. So glad I’m here. Thanks for all you’re doing. My question was a little bit related to what Anju was raising. And I guess it’s something we’ve been struggling with. You know, we’re a public-private partnership that works with UNFPA, UNICEF, et cetera, but really trying to change this kind of mindset of doing things in a multisectoral way at a national level. But every time I hear about these shining stars, what we like to call sometimes these boutique projects where you—where you see someone who, in a small community or in a district or in a—at a small scale has been able to do that, it really raises for me whether—I agree it’s an and/or. It’s a both, like, from national level—so kind of a top down and a bottom up. But I think there’s more to do at that bottom level. And I’m wondering whether you have thoughts about, for example, is it just about finding a single NGO—because that’s what we tend to do—and then putting money there? Or are there opportunities to try to bring together at a district level, at a village level multiple actors—I know you don’t want to talk about government, but that’s an important piece, you know—(laughter)—and other players to perhaps start doing more at that local level to see what can change? And so I’m wondering whether you’ve had some experiences with that and whether it’s just kind of a lost cause in your case. But have you seen anything that’s been able to work in a multisectoral way at a smaller level that perhaps could teach us about where to make those investments? NTAIYA: Daniela (sp), that’s what exactly we do. So we do work with the governments. Even, you know, I have this love/hate relationship with the government. (Laughs.) I want to give you an example of a program that we run that’s called—we call it Health and Leadership because we are hiding too many things under the health, because we want to talk about FGM but we actually want to talk about teen pregnancy, we want to talk about rape, and we want to talk about, you know, hygiene, we want to talk about sanitary part. So we pack it all together so when you come we’re actually talking about health, but we talk to (many ?) about other things. Within that program, the leadership component is really about raising their hand and overcoming some of the cultural things that are—a girl should not look at somebody’s eyes, so you should always look down. When you are walking on the road and there are boys, there are men, or there are people who are passing there right behind you, you step on the side and then they go. And what we are trying to teach the girls is that you matter. So when you are in class you raise your hand. You know, girls—and this is common, actually—women, we want to be right before we answer, we poke up the hand. So we have that. But the most exciting part with that is we have a self-defense component. I think we talk about gender-based violence from, you know, women and when it comes to children, finding nine-year-olds, eight-year-olds, you know, who are being raped by relatives at their homes. That changes how you approach things, because it’s one thing to—and I’ve learned a lot. I mean, I used to just come and give information, and now you realize somebody writes a question and said this is happening to me at home; what do I do? So that changed our approach to where we actually bring the children’s office, which is part of the government’s body, into our meetings. We bring in the police, because we have this relationship, we don’t like police at all. So we want to create a relationship between the police, the gender desk, and the community so that the girls can know if something happen(s) to me, if I go to that police station, I know so-and-so. We bring in the doctors and the nurses, because the biggest challenge is that a girl would report a case; between the reporting and the time they go and do the doctor’s report, something happen(s). I mean, all the doctor needs to do is just write no penetration, the case is out. So between those two, there is corruption and all the things that happen between that. So we realize that. We will bring information, but we need to bring in the whole team so that there’s a relationship between all those offices, all those stakeholders. The chief needs to be there. Like, when we are implementing our no-FGM policy, the chief is the one who is actually implementing it. He’s the one who is telling the parents you’re signing, your girl is not going to be cut. And it’s really—it’s a small scale, but if you think about, you know, the over three hundred girls that we have touched over the last few years, remember that their generation, none of them is going to be cut. That means their children will not be cut. And that’s really a ripple effect. And I think we need to start changing our narrative about scale. When we think about scale, we just think about up there and, like, all the things, all of a sudden the country’s changing. But it’s really about the networks. It’s about my work. It’s about so many other young people. And there’s so many of us. I mean, so many amazing people that are coming up doing amazing things. It’s about: How do we amplify that as a whole? How do we share experiences? How do we—how do we create that network? And that’s really what you want to lift up. It’s that network of people, of organizations, of individuals across the world who are doing good. And that’s—really, truly, for me it’s the scale. It’s not about the whole community. I don’t know how, but it’s about those networks of people. That is scale to me. VOGELSTEIN: Thank you. Let’s come over here. Janet. Q: Thank you so much. It’s really—in these dark times, it’s really wonderful to hear what you’re doing, and to hear what you’ve learned, and to hear your perspective on how to move forward. And I’d love to draw you out a little bit about—with some advice for us in this moment in Washington and around the world, particularly in the areas of sexual and reproductive health, family planning. Sometimes this administration will say that people on the ground in the countries where we have programs don’t want family planning or they—you know, it’s culturally inappropriate for the U.S. to be pushing or even providing a range of methods on a voluntary basis because of all of these perceived barriers that people who tend to not be proponents of these services are advocating. So I guess what I’d love to hear from you is how would you frame the issue of sexual and reproductive health and rights for adolescent girls? And what’s your message to the U.S. government about how to move that forward? VOGELSTEIN: Small question, Kakenya. Jump right in. (Laughter.) NTAIYA: Oh my goodness. I think one thing—I am not even trying to address the U.S. government right now, but I think for people in this room my advice or my little knowledge is that, you know, for a very long time we keep saying, you know, we need to be culturally appropriate, we need to be—you know, we don’t need to step over—this is how they do it; we shouldn’t bring our ideas. I don’t know, what, and what, and what, and what. At the end of the day, you know, when somebody tells me, oh, it’s cultural, we just cut the girls, I mean, it’s mutilation. It shouldn’t happen, you know? It’s like giving them permission to keep doing that to girls. So we should never apologize for supporting human rights, never apologize for rescuing girls, never apologize for taking girls and making sure that they don’t go through FGM. That just culturally, religion, whatever you call it, stop. It’s wrong. I mean, we all know that. We shouldn’t try to make it look pretty. I think I always say—you know, I put myself—and I have this weird because I live in I don’t know how many different worlds where I’ll go to the village and I would see a girl getting married, and somebody will tell me it’s culturally OK for a thirteen-year-old, fourteen-year-old to be married. And then you find her a few months/years later, she’s pregnant, she has another baby, and she has another baby, and she’s living in poverty. If you talk to that lady, she would tell you, where is family planning? (Laughs.) I need to space. I need—I need—I need—I need—I need—I need to be able to manage. Because food—at the end of the day, you can have children and they don’t have food. It comes to the basics of that. So I think—and I’m rambling through too many things—but the bottom line is that never apologize for human rights abuse. Never apologize for it. Just don’t apologize. Just do what is right. Yeah. VOGELSTEIN: Sarah, I don’t know if you have anything to add on the— CRAVEN: A lot. (Laughter.) VOGELSTEIN: —challenging moments that UNFPA faces with respect to the— CRAVEN: I’m not going to talk about the U.S. government. (Laughter.) VOGELSTEIN: —the current administration. CRAVEN: I’m not going to—I’m not going to talk about the U.S. government. (Laughter.) But I guess I think it’s just important whenever we can get real voices to policymakers. Kakenya certainly has gone and spoken up on the Hill in one of the most moving moments—well, I’ve had many moving moments with Kakenya, but it was when she testified in the U.S. Senate before Senator Marco Rubio and Senator Tim Kaine and really raised these issues and lifted them up. So I think there are U.S. policymakers who understand, and the more we can use those opportunities to talk about Kakenya’s story and what the reality on the ground is, I agree, we shouldn’t—what’s the word—we shouldn’t dilute the reality of what it is because it makes people feel uncomfortable. I’ve been in too many situations. I’ve had a Democratic female senator who shall go nameless who said she was not going to talk about menstruation or sanitary napkins because it made her feel uncomfortable, and I don’t think—that was a decade ago. I don’t think we would say that now. So I think we just have to be very honest and also talk about why investments in sexual and reproductive health have had great benefits and is something the U.S. should be proud of, which is something you do all—do so well and all of us around this room do so well. VOGELSTEIN: Let’s come over here, please. Q: Hi. Hi. My name’s Samantha (sp). I’m a second-year student studying international studies and global economics at American University, right, two minutes up north in D.C. And you had discussed about wanting to push forward the model of community and relationship building and sustainable education within not only rural communities, but just all over the world. And my question for you was, what thoughts have you had or what ideas have you had for streamlining? Just because, at least coming from a college perspective and especially someone who’s participated in model United Nations, model G-20 summit initiatives, the one question or the one idea that has always been brought up here—and it’s almost the default that every student, whether it’s on the collegiate or high-school level—is social media campaigns. And that’s always been the default people go to, is use social media campaigns. Yet, there is obviously some areas that don’t have access to that. So my question is—for you is, what ideas have you thought about in order to push this model forward, especially within rural communities? NTAIYA: Hi, Samantha (sp). I think, yeah, I did international relations—(laughter)—and I tried economics. I left halfway. (Laughter.) I did model U.N., so you are—you’re just ready to go. (Laughs.) I think, you know—I think we shouldn’t underestimate social media. I mean, Facebook is everywhere. (Laughs.) It’s amazing. When I came to the U.S. to go to college, I couldn’t call my home. It took me six months to get a letter there. And now I have to call my mom into the room, it’s like a different two worlds. So I don’t think you should underestimate the power of social media. It has helped us a lot, especially Facebook. People will find—we do—we don’t put ourself as rescue people, but occasionally we will be called on to rescue girls who are being abducted for marriage, and people will literally put it on Facebook that this is happening, and it has helped some girls a lot on that. So I think the question goes back, again, to where we were with Anju. It’s really about where do you start and where do you—where do you go from there, and what do you need in the—along the way to get it there. I think it’s a question that Kakenya would not be able to answer alone. I think it’s going to really take a lot of people to come together and to shift the mindset of doing things the way we normally do, and really focus how do we—how do we change that narrative. Thank you. VOGELSTEIN: Why don’t we come over here to one final question. CRAVEN: Can I add on to that real quick? VOGELSTEIN: Please, Sarah. CRAVEN: Just to say also on the social media, I’m going to do a little plug for Kakenya. There’s a new video out called Keeping Up with Kakenya, which is going to come out every month, every two weeks. Every month? NTAIYA: Every month. CRAVEN: Every month. So— NTAIYA: India (sp) is like—(laughs). CRAVEN: So India (sp) here is part of that, telling the story. So certainly we have to use social media to do cultural/social change at the rural level, but whatever anyone in this room can do to help tell this story, because all of Kakenya’s efforts are done based on individual contributions, a few—a few foundations. So get that story out. So there’s another great one that we like called A Mighty Girl, and we’ve never met the mighty girls. We don’t know who they are. And then suddenly one day there will be a post talking about Kakenya, and then within, you know, twenty-four hours, like, seven thousand people have contacted Kakenya. So it’s really when you can tell this story, social media helps broaden it and gets Kakenya the support she needs to then be able to support it on the ground. VOGELSTEIN: Great potential. One final question. Q: Hi. Thank you very much. My name is Anne Griffin. I’m a new member of the board of Kakenya’s Dream, and my background is with international foundations over the last twenty years in Africa with a focus on education. And I wanted to just ask more kind of a point of clarification and also just a way for you to talk about how things work and how they work so miraculously for Kakenya’s Dream, and in particular this notion of centers of excellence and the holistic approach that you’ve touched on here and there, but haven’t really gone into. And I just thought, one, I’m just curious more and more about how it is working; and, two, this different approach that I would imagine you have when compared to just, you know, a regular boarding school, and how important it is, of course, to differentiate yourself and to explain why it is working so well. And it relates to what Daniela (sp) was saying, too, about the—you know, the ripple effect, and what is happening on the ground, and what kind of networks are taking place. So I was hoping that if—and as part of that explanation you could touch on your experience with schools. And you were saying you’re working with a number of schools now outside of your own, and how that is working, and what lessons you’ve learned, and some of those experiences that I think would help us to get a sense of how magical it is and, you know, how we can look to be supportive in the future for this approach. NTAIYA: Thank you, Anne Marie (sp). That’s a setup question today. (Laughter.) Thank you so much for asking. And, Sarah, I would love for you to help me on the way—along the way. And I have a different team. All of them can speak. I think, for us, the center is really the place. I talked earlier about we started as a day school and then we moved into a boarding school. And we take—we took thirty girls the first time, and after that it kept going up because each year we receive about two hundred and fifty girls applying to come to our school. We are not just a school that is just placed in a place; it’s a school that is really changing the perception of how girls are viewed in the community. The boarding school is essential. It’s a place where it’s residential, so they live there. And most people are telling me, how would you take a ten-year-old away from their parents? But you realize that at that age, when they are nine, ten, it’s when the society’s starting to tell the girl that now you’re a big girl, behave well, stop playing, and they just start changing their mindset. So we come in and we change their mindset. And the greatest exercise I like doing with the girls is that when they walk in, I tell them to draw their future. And literally, most of them are—they are drawing buildings. Some are drawing orphanages. Some are drawing being a lawyer. Some want to be doctors. And each one of them, the reason why they are choosing that is because of a relationship that has to be with something. So an orphan will always write—will draw an orphanage because she wants to be protected when she—when orphans are left at home, they become the workers at their home. So they are—they are really exploited. So when we come to the school, we put those girls, we have good teachers. Our teachers, we vet them. In high school is where I’m having challenges of getting more teachers, but the primary school we have a lot of teachers from different parts of the country. They are not just from my home village. There are actually maybe two or three, but most of them are from outside. We train our—we retrain our teachers to know that they need to respect the girls. Our classroom is not a regular classroom where there are desks facing forward; it’s mostly tables to create collaborations with the girls and to also let the teacher know that it’s not about hierarchy of you up and the girls down. So we have different blackboards or whiteboards in different locations. So there is that shift, that it’s not just a normal classroom. We ensure that the girls go through a training where I talked earlier about on leadership and health. We talk about, you know, you need to know your rights. So we are not just teaching math and English and all the other amazing subjects, but we are really creating that voice to be out so that the girls can be able to advocate for themself. The new additions that we did in this year in the school is we’ve had—we have a library, the very first one in the community. That is not just helping our girls, but it’s also helping schools from (within ?). So, you know, that—you know, in these communities in America there are, like, libraries everywhere? I was really shocked when—my very first time is to go to a library and I was like, wow, you mean I can check them out for free and I can bring them back? There’s nothing like that in the community. So we do that. We do field trips. Field trips are—you know, when we talk about field trips, maybe here it’s a concept that everybody knows, but we realized one thing is that all these kids are coming from their local villages. They have never been out, like out of anywhere. They’ve always been in the village. So one of the trips we do is to—(inaudible)—is like the lake and where there’s fishing for the very first time. The girls are like, oh, you mean you can eat fish? (Inaudible)—we don’t eat fish. So we’re really exposing them. We (field ?) them to go and see the national—you know, the Maasai Mara is one of the biggest—Maasai Mara, people don’t go there, you know? So we take our girls there and then learn from there. We take them to Nairobi. We take them to the parliament, where they meet women MPs. We really expose them, because at the end of the day it’s not just about learning in the classroom. It’s really learning from the outside. And there are so many other things to do. Can you, Sarah, help me continue the chapter? (Laughter.) We do so much. It’s really not just a school. It’s really, I don’t know, a center where you get to be exposed to so much, because that’s the only way you can really open up the minds of the people. I think the Masasais say—and I think it’s a saying that everybody say—the eye that has gone out knows more, so that’s kind of what we do. VOGELSTEIN: Sarah, a final word? CRAVEN: I guess final word is that, I mean, Kakenya is quite known in the area not just for her school, but the schools around it. When it’s not term time, the health and leadership camps that you talked about actually brings students from other areas in the—in the community who can come and then have some of that experience that they might not be getting in their own schools, which is incredibly important. We as a board, and certainly Kakenya, have learned a lot along the way because the first school is a hybrid with the government, and so there’s been a lot of learning—slow learning back and forth, and how much, you know—for example, the head teacher is someone who’s come through the Kenyan government, and she may have a very unique perspective. And so when this young Dr. Kakenya shows up with a lot of different ideas it was like, oh. So there’s been that kind of learning along the process. I think there’s been great validation. There’s a Catholic school that’s been quite supportive of you that has come and—who has a headmaster who really sees what Kakenya’s doing and then amplifies it, and has given you a lot of support. And I think, too, that when Kakenya gets a lot of global attention or when she’s seen, that trickles back to the village, too, and that gives her a lot more power in the sense that, for example, she as a woman can meet with the chief and bring up issues in a way that a woman probably couldn’t before. But there’s also, like, the challenge of that in that that can be threatening to the system as well. And so sometimes—or there’s beliefs sometimes within the community that Kakenya has—you know, she’s a millionaire or that she is magic. NTAIYA: (Laughs.) CRAVEN: You know, things like that that Kakenya has to balance. Q: She’s not a millionaire? NTAIYA: Um— CRAVEN: I don’t think so. (Laughter.) VOGELSTEIN: Let’s see. Q: She is a rock star. CRAVEN: She is a rock star, which are usually millionaires in the same time, so. (Laughter.) VOGELSTEIN: Not a millionaire, but a rock star. That’s a perfect place to conclude. Well, there is— NTAIYA: Could I—can I say one thing before I— VOGELSTEIN: Yes. Kakenya, one final word. NTAIYA: Sorry. VOGELSTEIN: Please. NTAIYA: I think, you know, I am on the light, kind of people saying Kakenya doing all this magic. But trust me, I have an amazing team from my matron to the cook to the team that just works with me, India (sp) as well. I mean, I have all of them. And it’s really not about—I think what I keep telling people, it’s just people willing to support a dream and believe in me, and willing to bring their ideas out. So I don’t have answers all the time, you know. I’m always like, what can you bring on the table? So if you know you’re really good at something that can help my girls, please talk to me and let’s work together. It’s going to take all of us. It’s going to take all of us to create a different—a better future for our children and our grandkids and all of the above. VOGELSTEIN: Well, there is no doubt that a lot of work lies ahead, but also that the conversation today has really illuminated the path forward. So please join me in thanking Kakenya and Sarah for spending time with us today. (Applause.) (END) This is an uncorrected transcript.

Panelists discuss bipartisan efforts to promote development within the Trump administration and Congress. 

Amina Mohammed will join us for a discussion on how to implement the ambitious post-2015 agenda. This roundtable meeting is part of a new high-level series, in collaboration with the UN Foundation, to explore issues related to implementation of the sustainable development agenda. Transcript VOGELSTEIN: Good morning. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations. My name is Rachel Vogelstein. I’m the director of the Women and Foreign Policy Program here at CFR, which has worked with leading scholars for more than a decade to analyze how elevating the status of women and girls advances U.S. foreign policy objectives. I want to begin by expressing my gratitude to Ambassador Elizabeth Cousens and to the U.N. Foundation for their support for the Council’s work, including our event this morning. Today is the fourth meeting of CFR’s U.N. Foundation Roundtable Series Road to 2030: Implementing the Sustainable Development Goals. And it comes at a critical moment for global development, as nations are developing plans to implement an ambitious new sustainable development agenda, and following the adoption of an expansive set of indicators to measure progress against this framework. As we know, the SDG agenda was forged with an unprecedented level of collaboration by the international community, and goes well beyond the predecessor framework that preceded it. And as we’ve noted throughout this roundtable series, the scale of our ambition has grown to fulfill a universal set of goals, to include issues like peacebuilding as part of our development efforts, to harness a data revolution, to advance a new international consensus on climate change. The bar has also been raised with respect to our commitment to advancing gender equality. Sustainable Development Goal 5 for the first time creates time-bound targets related to a range of issues, from property rights to financial inclusion to ending violence against women to child marriage—issues that were previously overlooked. And we know that realizing this agenda in just 15 years’ time will not be easily achieved. How will governments prioritize their efforts among the 17 Goals? And how can we ensure that Goal 5 remains elevated on the agenda? How can we finance the efforts that are needed to make progress against this framework? And what partnerships, including with the private sector, must be forged to achieve it? And perhaps most importantly, upon what tools can the international community rely to ensure accountability against the ambitious agenda now in place? Well, perhaps no one is better able to share insight into these questions than the speaker we are privileged to host this morning, the honorable Amina Mohammed. Ms. Mohammed is currently the minister of environment in Nigeria. She is also the chief executive officer and founder of the Center for Development Policy Solutions, and an adjunct professor in the Master’s Program for Development Practice at Columbia University. Previously, she served as the special adviser to the U.N. secretary-general on post-2015 development planning, overseeing the development and adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals. Prior to that role, she was the senior special assistant to the president of Nigeria on the Millennium Development Goals, and also served as the coordinator of the Task Force on Gender and Education for the U.N. Millennium Project. She received the National Honors Award in 2006, and has been inducted into the Nigerian Women’s Hall of Fame. Madam Minister, thank you for being here, and welcome to CFR. MOHAMMED: Thank you very much. VOGELSTEIN: I’ll begin by asking a few questions, and then we’ll invite our participants to join the discussion. Let’s start by talking about implementation of the SDG framework itself. We know that this new agenda, you know, is unquestionably a landmark achievement—in no small part thanks, of course, to your leadership and your efforts. And now the focus is on implementation. So what do you see as the biggest challenges as nations turn to implementation? And in Nigeria, what is the government doing specifically to address some of those challenges? MOHAMMED: Right. Thank you, Rachel, for having me here. It’s also great to see Elizabeth and Molly. They were partners, I like to say, in crime, because we had a huge struggle to get these Goals up there and such a collaborative effort. So it’s great to see you, and thank you for having me. Implementation. Well, that was always going to be the huge challenge. I think we thought the ambition was it when we framed the Goals, but I think every time we thought through them we were building on experiences, lessons learned, the need to have them there. And so implementation shouldn’t be as difficult as one would think it should be in terms of thinking how to do it. I think it’s probably, for me, about the context. You know, what is the context now that we’re putting these Goals into a universal agenda? And each and every one of those contexts is different. And it is just incredible what has happened just in the last three to four years in country context, whether it’s Europe and migration, or it’s the kind of protracted conflict in my country—two types of conflict, one that’s economic sabotage and therefore a very big deal in the Niger Delta when we’re blowing up our pipes, gas pipelines and otherwise; or it’s Boko Haram in the northeast. So, really, context matters. And I think that’s been one, I think, challenge on how we think through implementation. Grappling with, I think, acknowledging this is about a transition. People don’t like to hear about transitions, and transitions are difficult to keep transition moving from one thing to another. It’s very easy to slip back into the siloed thinking, because that’s where everyone’s comfortable. And this is huge. The being fit for purpose we talked about for implementation meant going home and looking through the institutions what we needed to do to respond to that. And then, suddenly finding out if we’ve got it right in the public service, what about in the private sector, what about within civil society, and how about those wonderful people in the parliament? And I think that’s the struggle to have some leadership that says we’re actually engaged with the sustainable development agenda conceptually, and we’re going to use the Goals, integrated into our plans, to lift that ambition, to make it happen. And it’s a really sort of tough part of the conversation because things are happening 24/7, and almost that’s a discussion that’s put to the side—well, when we’re ready, we’ll do that, and how do we struggle with what’s happening now. So I think the challenges really are about context, about the changing narrative, and about the transition—how to really get that laid out properly. And what are the actions that you can take alongside of those is something that I’ll speak to what we’re doing in Nigeria. The opportunities to take—to carry some of those actions out brings me to the opportunities. Opportunity is a partnership. And the partnerships are—they are huge because everyone is talking about how to implement this. I think you have buy-in, you have ownership at all levels of government, whether we’re global or local. But people are looking for those partnerships with the actions that they can take. The most, I think—most of the actions that we see coming right now are from the private sector. Surprisingly, that’s where it’s coming from. Governments are still struggling. And civil society is motivated, but also I think struggling with the partnership with private sector. So I think the opportunities are going to come with the partnerships—partnerships that can go to scale, because a lot of what we’re doing to respond to the SDGs, we do know how to find the solutions to those. And there’s so much available in terms of expertise and technology to share. So I think the partnerships are going to be really key to that. The other aspect is one of the two Goals that has motivated many people to speak to the reality of success here has been Goal 16, and that’s been the rule of law and strong institutions. That really has helped us to put on the radar and in the conversation that we can spend money in improving capacities and institutions because we need to go to scale and we need to deliver. The governance issue has come up over and over again: efficiency gains in terms of the way we collaborate; questioning, in fact, that third arm of government in terms of the enabling environment for rule of law. And all of that, I think, has got strong threads on the human-rights agenda, something that we didn’t think we would really get because people didn’t want to see human rights there, but we wanted to thread it through. And I think that Goal has given us a lot of opportunity. What have we done in Nigeria? Coming into the Ministry of Environment, which is probably the last place I thought I would be—(chuckles)—but we—it was very clear for me we had three asks of the secretary-general, United Nations. It was SDGs, financing for development, and environment—the climate change deal. And climate was bubble, and we would try to do the rest. So when it happened, going back home to implement this, the struggle is that environment is still the poor relation. It’s really difficult to get a narrative for environment within sustainable development at the country level. It is difficult with the donors. It is difficult with government. It is difficult with parliament. It’s easy to sell climate change, because that’s actually been the entry point for, you know, sort of scaring everyone that we have to take action. In fact, that’s what my president said to me the other day: everyone’s being scared by climate change. But I’m not sure that’s done the job, because then it’s, yes, we care about it and we’ve got to do something about it, but then in reality the day-to-day of growing your economy, of making the investments in infrastructure, for instance, in my country, and looking for jobs, very few people even come across the green economy or green jobs or adaptation and mitigation, and the conversation is really not there. So for me the first thing is, how do I change that narrative? How do I become more than the dustbin lady? Because that’s what environment does in my country. It’s sanitation day once a month, and my state and the people who thought it was great to be a minister said, oh my God, and she’s gone to this ministry, which means we’ve got nothing. So we’re not seen as an integral part of what we achieved in both September and December, which was—which was pretty tough. So we go about it in three ways. We talk about how the whole ministry’s going to empower people. So we have to have the conversation about the jobs we create through the work that we do and investments that we make in environment, and how that links to other sectors—and do that every day starting with the ministry itself, because they also have been stuck in some time warp and there’s a lot of them. (Laughs.) I have in headquarters 1,600 that I have to move to some action. The second is actually taking climate action. And climate action is much more real for them because they see the things that have caused it, and so therefore we can end gas flaring, we can look at our forestation, we can look at the coastal issues of erosion. So those climate actions—or desertification. We can take actions around those, and that actually is a hook for us on the climate action. The third is a little tougher, and that’s protecting the environment, and so to the issue of pollution and sanitation is a big one. So just those three issues of what we use. And then we speak to people in the terms that we see are attractive with the Goals. So the Goals become that vehicle to better understand what we want to do when we say protect the environment, and seeing the environment Goals or the climate Goal as that sort of docking station for the rest. And have that discussion on gender, have that discussion on cities, have the discussion around poverty with that. And that seems to be working. It’s still a work in progress. We are very far from where we need to be. But that’s why I would underscore the whole transition challenge. VOGELSTEIN: I want to pick up on something you mentioned, specifically resources for implementation. You know, you’ve said that the SDG agenda is about financing; it’s not about charity. And, as you well know, the world agreed to a new financial architecture last July by adopting the Addis Agenda for Action, which recognizes the importance of leveraging dollars from a variety of sources—so certainly official development assistance, but also domestic revenue, private-sector investment, trade, international financing, et cetera. How should we think about the development finance landscape in the 21st century, particularly with private capital flows dwarfing, in some respects, international aid? And how can we encourage the private sector to invest in this agenda? You mentioned the private sector already. MOHAMMED: Mmm hmm. One of the, I think, bright notes that my president had on his few trips that he’s been making around the world over the last six months was the Chinese one. And we all thought he was off—he was going to China, and it was really about better deals and loans coming to us, government-to-government, on infrastructure. Well, we came out over $6 billion in loans, private sector. And so the attraction to—actually fueling and bringing private sector to the center, and not government, was a big change in the way we’re doing things in Nigeria. So, again, the private-sector players that were spoken to do have integrity. They are globally known and have—and so that’s helpful. But I think it was—you know, seeing how they were investing in the full value chain of agriculture, for instance. So it wasn’t just about the production and what we needed to go in terms of irrigation and government-to-government infrastructure, but it was about putting in industry. It raised a number of issues. Again, this goes to, I think, everybody very clear that we want the business, but we don’t want it at all costs. So, very quickly, it was about, well, you know, we have imports here that are Chinese. So if we’re putting up manufacturing base here for our agricultural produce, what about the stuff that’s coming in and the quality of it? And then we started seeing cross-sectoral engagement in our country around the table to say, well, this Chinese investment’s really good, but we have to put a stop to two things: they’ve got to stop logging—Amina, hand up; they’ve got to stop bringing in tomato paste that has got carcinogenics in it—NAFDAC, health. So there’s a very interesting conversation going on. We’re welcoming private-sector investment, but we’re putting the checks and balances that we knew in the conversation for the SDGs civil society was so vocal about. This is OK, but, you know, how do we know that this is not—this is going to be about us at the center and not on the outside? I think there are different entry points for the private sector. Again, the context is going to matter. In my cases our private sector will ask you about the stability and then today, you know, many of the oil producing, or at least the fossil fuel, are having the challenges that they’re having. People are trying to find solutions around that. So the diversification question of many economies is big on the radar. And people are looking to how can we make that happen, from solid minerals, to agriculture, to other downstream activities form oil, for instance. We can see, let me see, fossil fuel no good gas flaring. So what can we do to put the incentives in for the private sector to enable LPG be the alternative for cooking, and cooking across the semi-urban. We’ve not got to the rural yet, but at least people are thinking solutions about that. So I think, again, it’s a green field because of the context. And I think many—I do feel—I was in New York at the end of last week on the climate signing. And there was a sense that the financing for development was losing it—I think, its ambition. And very quickly people were looking for the reasons why they couldn’t do things, rather than finding solutions to that. But I think we have to just keep pushing for those solutions, yeah. VOGELSTEIN: Pushing for solutions. I want to apply that same mantra to another topic we were talking about earlier, which is the issue of gender in the Sustainable Development Goals. We meet following the recent adoption of a new set of indicators to measure progress against SDGs, including implementation of Goal 5. And as we discussed, there are a host of targets that re now included, that were overlooked in the predecessor MDG framework. And yet, there’s still a concern about whether countries will, in fact, hold themselves accountable to many of these new targets, and whether countries have the ability to track many of the agreed upon indicators. So what do we need to do to actually achieve Goal 5 by 2030? And how can we ensure that the targets under that Goal stay high on the SDG agenda, particularly given the historical tendency to overlook and to underfund issues related to gender equality? MOHAMMED: Well, we’ve got the 230, there may even be more, indicators that are coming along. I think what I like about the whole set is a lot of it’s very practical. And it’s very—I can touch and feels these. So if you’ve got targets that talk about discrimination or the violence, and you look at the indicators that are asking us to report, I can say as a victim of violence in my home the fact today that I have an indicator that allows someone to report what is happening is really big, because it was swept under the carpet. It’s not something spoken about. And I think if we can find these indicators, having a conversation—having our conversations with them in mind, rather than as an end result of a reporting mechanism that will help—that will help, for us to say: This is what we’re working towards and these are some of the things that we are—we should be speaking to. So if we—in the general conversation, unpaid work shouldn’t wait until we have to monitor the progress of a country. It should be the conversation we have as we’re framing that policy framework, the plan, the implementation plan for a lot of the issues around here. So I think, you know, again, we always said bottom-up. Actually, maybe that’s the good way to do it with the indicators. Reading through them, they are pretty practical and they are responsive, to a large extent—surprisingly, I have to say. I wasn’t as confident that they would do what they’ve done now to the targets, and then from the targets do we get the goal that we set out to do. Again, all of this is very difficult if it is not a part of country’s plans and their overall policy frameworks. And I’m finding that they aren’t. As we go through, we’re still at the MDG level. And so I think you have to push for these longer-term plans and to see these integrated. It took a while. I got home and we were very much about the short-term planning. In fact, no one wanted to hear about a 15-year plan in my country three, four months ago. What we did do, then, was to say: You have to have a long-term plan, because this three, four years that we have has got to have a longer projection for some of the outcomes that we need. And how are we going to do that if we don’t even have that in sight? What perhaps we do have to do in many developing countries is to see how we work with the parliaments on this because, again, the investments have to be consistent. And we have to look at those institutional frameworks we have for making that happen. What tools do we have to make this happen? The budget is the biggest one. I remember about last week in our Cabinet meeting, one of the requests that was coming was that in—we were approving that we were going to have issues around our—what was our issue on—it was a line item that we needed for gender. But the spend that we needed had to be approved at Cabinet for it to get some traction then at the parliament for it. Once you have a line item that is spending on a woman’s issue, a gender issue, then it stays. It’s very difficult to take it out and getting that approval for it. What did come up in that time as we had this discussion was the amount of time women—we had—you know, we had been pushing for the exclusive breastfeeding of women. It’s only been in our service three months that you get, but we’re saying you need six months. And just a recommendation to say to our leader: OK, Mr. President, we need a six-month, you know, break for women to go off, paid leave, for exclusive breastfeeding, because they can’t do it otherwise. And in that Cabinet meeting, it got his full support. So again, as a result of that, what then comes into our policy frameworks and what gets approved in parliament. VOGELSTEIN: So it’s the national-level focus, the budget, the resources, but also the political will, as you just mentioned. MOHAMMED: And speaking about all of it together, this is an integrated agenda. I think, you know, if we—you don’t have to go very far as the gender goal. You just go up to four, in health, and you’re discussing some of the same indicators that are asking you to do things. So relevant to the health indicators. And they will be when you come down to the cities. And you know, the other day someone was giving me the statistics on the respiratory disease burden we have as a result of cooking with firewood. And I was saying to them, where are we getting this data from? Because this has some really serious implications for us. If the disease burden in my country’s talking about malaria, and somebody’s telling me that this is causing more deaths than malaria, HIV, and TB put together, you have to explain that to me. And you have to explain really clearly where you’re getting that baseline from and how disaggregated is that data? And so we are actually asking more questions than we would have done by just swallowing a WHO statistic, because it now has implications on the way in which we will look at our investments and prioritize them. VOGELSTEIN: Back to the importance of data. MOHAMMED: (Laughs.) VOGELSTEIN: I want to ask you about—last week, you mentioned, you were at the U.N. when 175 world leaders were there to formally sign the historic Paris agreement. What do you think it will take for this accord to actually succeed? MOHAMMED: I think last week was amazing, because the momentum and the energy from Paris, peoples willed it into the signing of those 175 people on those pages, of which I wasn’t one. I did go in solidarity, but I did not sign. Nigeria did not sign. And we didn’t because the Paris agreement is incredibly important when it comes to working out what it means to implement this, and what are the implications for fossil fuel countries like ours. And I think that signing was a good way of saying that we have good intentions, but it’s not enough. And I think the ratification of this agreement needs far more thought. And so Nigeria has to go through a process where the implementation of its INDC is critical. There are many decisions in that INDC which are conditional or non-conditional that have to pass through a process that includes our parliament. It also includes some of the pains our people have to go through. And I don’t think that was something we could have signed onto with intention without going home and having that discussion. Having said that, we intend to sort of sign and ratify this by September, working back from the GA then. And I think some of the tensions that we’re going to have is that, you know, how are we going to want to make the investments? We want to make the investments in growing our economy, diversification in oil, moving from fossil fuels to renewables. Who is going to pay for it? By and large, our domestic resources should be doing that. And as we’re improving on our revenues, that’s the sustainability. But there are many technologies we can’t pay for just yet. And so when I would like—I’m responsible for the environmental impact assessment certification that we have to give for any industry that invests in Nigeria. So when a cement company says to me two months ago, we are doubling the capacity of our plant to produce cement. And I’m asking, so, how are you firing it? And they say coal. And I’m saying, right, OK, clean coal? Because I can’t actually say an alternative energy yet. We can’t get the gas up there. That’s going to take some time. So it’s about that conversation of investments in, again, the transition to cleaner energy. And it has to have these partnerships in the finance framework that will help us do that. And they’re not yet there. Commitments that we make, for instance, now putting an end to that gas flaring, still leave a considerable amount of investments to—those that are failing most with the flaring of gas actually are local companies and local businesses. And they need a leg up. So where is that going to come from to help us get cleaner? So I think there are a number of huge challenges that we have going ahead. And I think we have to break them down, again, have that conversation around the table with our partners from those who have, you know, still the 55 of the biggest emitters. I wonder who’s going to ratify for that, and then what are the implications. You do that in Africa all put together, doesn’t get anywhere near it. But it will if it starts growing and it grows in the right direction. And what we want to do is to try to grow cleaner than we have been. VOGELSTEIN: A lot to watch as this conversation unfolds in Nigeria and elsewhere. Well, I’d like to open the discussion now to questions. Please raise your placard, state your name and affiliation, and we’ll get to as many questions as we can. Carl, please. Q: Thank you, Rachel. Good morning. Karl Hofmann with PSI, Population Services International. Thank you. In Nigeria, we operate through the Society for Family Health. And thank you very much for being here, Madam Minister. I was struck by your comment about the president and exclusive breastfeeding. And obviously the point that in the U.S., we are a long way away from having even national level maternity or paternity leave. And it seems to me your comments have been rightly focused on Nigeria, but I wonder if you could take yourself back to your previous role, when you were looking at the world, and the important change that the SDGs represent in elevating this from a north-south dynamic to a global dynamic, and just comment on how you think countries like the United States are approaching this. I mean, I sense that there is very little traction on this set of issues here. Maybe it’s not surprising given the political year. But you know, going forward will this resonate here in ways that you think will be politically impactful? And what do we do about that if it/s not? MOHAMMED: Conversations like these ones are really helpful in the right quarters. Again, my president’s been here twice now. And I think those conversations have been a healthy learning curve for where priorities are. And I think it’s been quite amazing to see the government of the U.S. come into my office, where I’ve least expected them to come, to talk about the kinds of partnerships that they have spoken about on the environment which they just didn’t speak about a few years ago. So I think it is—again, these partnerships, and pushing the public sector partnerships globally, is going to be incredibly important. Having a different conversation around the table has to change. Whether it’s the development days in the EU or it is something that we do when we have bilateral visits or we gather around a particular issue that the U.N. convenes, the conversation has got to be different. And it’s got to be this integrated one that has got many players and many contexts to deal with. And as I think, I think many people in the global north are struggling with today’s context and how to manage that. But there are some signs there that, you know, some of those complications could be resolved by a lot of what we’re speaking about how and investing in that. We talk about two sides of it. One is that, you know, invest in the root cause, and not the Band-Aid that we’ve had before. And I think that that may be a conversation that could change the way the U.S. looks at this. I still haven’t quite understood where USAID is going. And I hope, because they were so helpful and engaged when we did this and shaped the agenda. But for implementation it’d be really interesting to see which way the new leadership is going to take this. The other side is that many of the issues that we have—and I have to say, we don’t—everybody is playing so much attention to their own problem right now where they are—but on the migration issue, some of the challenges that are being thrown up in Europe and other places are ones that are development issues on health, on education, on women’s rights. It’s really quite amazing how there are two—there’s sort of a tale of two cities for that. And so maybe that’s something that we could be speaking to about it. It’s opening up all sorts of things. I think young people in social media has been the biggest eye-opener for me on the depth of the challenges and the response I’m getting from young people who want to be engaged and are not waiting for us to give them the answers. And I think that’s been, you know, another way. Maybe in the United States, there is that. You know, it’s not been—many, many countries have not been open to looking at themselves in the mirror. And I think that this is a tough one. And young people will probably do it better than anyone has. The only thing is that—be prepared to get some shocks, because if you’re not as well-informed, then those same opinions could just be ones that will dig deeper in the same frame. VOGELSTEIN: John, please. Q: Thank you. Thank you very much and welcome, Minister. We enjoyed your remarks. A question about when you take the long-term view with regard to energy development, particularly within the context of the environment, how do you see that occurring, particularly for LPG and renewables? MOHAMMED: I think the conversation so far—I mean, we’ve—we’re struggling with—I know Tanzania at one point, and they did this a little while ago with the sustainable energy for all initiative, that they were going in one direction. But even understanding what your energy mix is today, country by country, region by region, and mapping that, is really quite a big eye-opener to the efficiency gains that you could get, to the sharing of resources that you could get. And very few of us actually know it. We don’t know what our energy mix is currently. And then looking to see as you are growing, what is it that you need in the short term and in the long-term transition from being able to do the first one, which is if I want to grow green and I have the resources, then that’s the track that I ought to take. But what if I can’t get the resources? My population, my country, and what matters to the people there and the services they have to provide? Then I have to take track two, which is I’m going to continue growing brown until I can get green. And that’s that transition from fossil fuels to renewables. And in the case of renewables, if I just take Nigeria as an example—because I think many of them—many countries struggle from the infrastructure base that we have that is so long. But there are people willing to invest when they understand if they put in the infrastructure, then what they open up are markets. The population is young, and so therefore with the right skill sets and the proper models for business in our market we will make huge in-roads. So Nigeria, for instance, we say north and south and people would think that that’s half and half. It wasn’t. Two-thirds of Nigeria is the north. And two-thirds of that country, with the majority of the population, is underserved with infrastructure. So do you take a pipeline and the grid to every single hamlet? No you don’t. What you have to do is really look structurally, institutionally, market population, the whole of it, how best to serve those populations with what we have. Today power in our country, we’ve got, you know, targets that we’re setting. But where is that power going to go to? And if it’s on-grid right now, it will still not reach the north unless there is a pipeline for gas. Who is going to invest in that pipeline? And even if you do, it’s going to take you a minimum of five years to get that investment and that up and running. And you hope you have the continuity with the next government. So here comes renewables. Who is willing to invest in the renewables? And we’ve had exciting feedback from people who want to look at solar power off grid. The partnership that came up with India and France with many—all of us. I think it was about 158 countries there on that, to how to make that happen. And you’ve got places like UAE who are offering that financing, not just for dropping off grid solar power to us, 200 to 400 megawatts, which is huge for small businesses in rural areas, but it’s actually that they want to develop the industries. They want to develop the market. So they’re actually looking for that partnership and that engagement. So while the solar people are speaking to us, at the same time you’ve got this huge conglomerate of companies who are also saying to us, well, we’re also interested in your fruit industry. We’re interested in solid minerals. And that’s now a conversation that’s happening that didn’t happen before. Those were silent conversations before. VOGELSTEIN: Please. Q: Thank you. Whitney Schneidman, Covington & Burling. Just sort of picking up on that theme, and sort of going back to your earlier remarks, you mentioned that it was surprising to see the private sector moving forward with some programs, and that civil society was, you know, struggling with the private sector, as I understood. And from my perspective, I think it’s an easier conversation to have with a lot of companies together about aligning commercial objectives with economic development objectives. But I’m wondering, from your perspective, where you’ve seen it happen the best, and where government, civil society, and private sector come together to really, you know, address SDGs, address the kind of global goals that I think we all want to see advanced? MOHAMMED: I’m not sure that there’s anywhere that’s really done that yet that I can speak to. But I can speak to the conversations happening that are looking or so, that are coming to finding the solutions to make that work. We had—for instance, I walked into our office and said: Well, how do we make this whole waste to wealth thing work, because we have huge amounts of plastic all over the place. How can we collect that and how can we recycle it and make that work for people? And we need the private sector for that. So, again, it was one about, OK, the regulatory environment could enforce that they do a large part of the collecting and recycling, but they will go under the radar because I haven’t provided the incentives. And so we’re having a healthy conversation which says we’ve all got a vested interest in taking this off the street. So how do you think you—what would be the incentives you would need to make this work, and how far can I push the bureaucracy and everything else to make that happen? And it’s not that we’ve not had waste to wealth. I was shocked in my country that we had over 33 programs and projects, of which I think less than 10 percent are functioning. Some never even got off the ground and were vandalized because no ownership in the whole idea of partnerships and what, from the beginning to the end, we intend to do with this. It was much more about what investment would happen in a contract that would supply equipment, rather than what that equipment would do and how we could follow that up with business and with jobs and with, you know, sustainability. So I think ask me that question in a couple of years’ time. (Laughter.) But right now, we’re just trying to think, you know, OK, so how do I engage the private sector in very real terms to do things in sanitation, to do things in waste to wealth, to get them engaged on the LPG. And we have a number who are saying to me: We’re ready to do this. We can provide the gas in cylinders safely. And we can take this to peri-urban centers. VOGELSTEIN: We can reconvene in five years and discuss. (Laughter.) MOHAMMED: I won’t be in office then. (Laughter.) VOGELSTEIN: Ambassador Cousens, please. Q: Thanks. And let’s reconvene more often than that. It’s really delightful to see you, Amina. We really miss you. But it’s wonderful that you’re doing what you’re doing. MOHAMMED: Thank you. Q: Two questions. First, about the relationship between the SDGs and climate. I think people worked really hard over the course of last year to have those agendas be seen as mutually reinforcing in the advocacy community and the political community and so on. It feels as though there’s a bit of a renewed risk, that they diverge as we get into implementation. So I’d be interested in your thoughts about how to have them be as strongly reinforcing as possible. Second, this whole question about implementation and transition, I often think about a phrase that you used to use when you had your former hat on about the transition to implementation, and creating the constructive space and time for countries, for companies, for communities really to digest the implications of what was agreed last year and figure out how to integrate that into—in ways that are meaningful to them. Yet, there’s also an incredible sense of urgency. We only have 15 years. We need to rush, rush, rush. As you’re sitting now where you are, how do you advise we try to strike that balance between the space that countries like yours really do need, while keeping up the kind of pressure for action where it can be taken? MOHAMMED: Thank you, Liz. The climate actions that we need to take reinforce the implementation of all the Goals. So I really think that that climate goal has been very important to us. So where I may not be able to get the traction, talking about environment and climate, the minute that I speak about the other Goals I’m asking about the climate actions they need to take, because they’re synonymous with each other. And I think that’s been very helpful for us when we’ve spoken to water, to cities, to infrastructure and transportation. We’ve brought in the climate actions. And the INDC reinforces that because it came out of—I think it’s the cleverest thing we ever did was to get countries to sign up to that INDC, because it had specific targets on emission reduction. And then people see the synergy between the two, even on gender. I mean, you know, you’d think, OK, you’re not going to get anything there, but actually you do, because you see that the burden of climate change, which is very vivid in many of our countries, is on the shoulders of women and young girls, particularly adolescent girls. And so that’s a really big hook for us on all the SDGs. So while it doesn’t—it’s not sort of the narrative or the construct or the conversation we had about this, as you know, an integrated set of environment, social, and economic—no, it doesn’t happen like that. But I think the investments, and having an impact in environment and on the social agenda, through what? What actions do we need to take for it? And again, context, context, context. It’s just two weeks in Paris negotiating those final bits and pieces on the agreement. Two weeks later I went round the country just for me to feel what does this mean in my country. And it was from coastal erosion to the pollution in the Niger Delta, and the gas flaring. People talk about the water and they talk about the soil, but they don’t talk about the air. That sort of gets lost. And all the way up to where the desert has, you know, come all the way down. But you’re seeing it in conflict, but you’re also seeing it in other areas where poverty is grinding and malnutrition is horrible, with the children that we have that are facing the brunt of that. So I think it’s a really interesting time right now. And those conversations are happening. And it’s about investments, what do we have to move this? It is still a little scary that we are—the sustainable development agenda has brought the economic focus to it. And I’m just—you know, we need to push that the results, for whatever economic—macroeconomic framework we put in place and investments we’re making must result in health and in education, otherwise that will slip. And I think that that’s a feeling we have now, is that sometimes there’s less conversation about that. And we’re looking at the indicators and they’re not very good, when we see what’s happening in our countries. On the transition to implementation, it was all about fit for purpose. You know, how do you become fit for purpose and create the space for that conversation, urgent, but no hurry to fail? It’s really tough, because, you know, every government in what I call in our major challenge, democracy, has got four years. And how with weak institutions do you carry that through, the sustainability. So I think it’s a wide range of conversations, and particularly with players that will be there regardless of the administrative change politically. So business is important. Civil society is really important. But even getting the public service and institutions much more aware of this and building skills—not training for training or capacity building for capacity building’s sake, but really capacity building against these types of investments. That’s been missing. When I look to see how much we have invested with our donors in Nigeria on capacity building, millions and millions of dollars. And it really has had almost no effect. I go into my ministry. I’ve said 1,600 people. I cannot find 20. Across the whole system, I can’t find 20 who can bring the skill set I need to work with this. And it’s not that difficult, but it is obviously a huge challenge. So now we’re training against what we want to do, rather than, you know, sort of a set list of skills that you want to put into place over time. So I think that’s going to be really important. Our international partners have to become much more coherent and coordinated about this. I think there is a cacophony right now at the country level. It’s not just in Nigeria. We’re seeing this in a number of places that when we go to our U.N.-convened meetings, whether it’s in environment, or oil, or corruption, governments, fellow ministers are all struggling with different messaging. In my country, different sectors. So what we’ve done is put in—put roundtables of ministers together for, one, so that we can be coherent and for, two, to say to our partners, whether they’re business or in the international community, stop. When we’ve got our road map ready, then we’ll tell you where we need you to come in and help us. But it’s a struggle, because everyone needs to satisfy an output from their different constituencies. So if you don’t make it with me, you go check my minister of power, because they’re environment, or you go to minister of petroleum, or you go to the VP. So it’s really very hard. The reality of this is that, you know, we’ve had to say to our partners: You have to be fair. We understand you’re under pressure, but no one can be in more or a hurry or understand the urgency than we that live with the demands that we have to respond to, the rights of our people to give them health or education. So it cannot be more urgent among the outside. So help us to help ourselves. And that’s really difficult because, you know, the pace is different. There’s much more capacity here. And you’ve got this year that you’ve got to fill all these, you know, bottom lines. But we don’t. You know, we go on from one year to another year to another year, and sometimes really slow. It’s one of those things that we struggle with. But, yeah. VOGELSTEIN: So coordination, a really big piece of this. Please. Q: Yes. Thank you very much, Minister, for your comments. And I think particularly the question I would have is on the ability of regional partnerships to help drive action and new multilateral frameworks to actually help facilitate that action as well, something that really struck me as the context, context, context, and yet scalability, and the importance of new partnerships to help drive action. So in a similar way I had the opportunity to work in the trenches with both Elizabeth and Molly at the White House on the Sustainable Development Goal work, but then recently moved home to my home state of Hawaii. And now I’m trying to implement this on the very local level. So it is an interesting struggle, heading up a public-private partnership that is working to implement the state’s 2030 statewide sustainability goals, which were actually agreed to prior to 2015. So it’s actually interesting. We were approached recently by other island economies to work with them to identify similar goals and a way of actually tracking progress. And so one of the things that we’re struggling with is how do you look at the locally and culturally important context when you look to do this? And what is the role of sort of regional partnerships, whether it’s an island grouping, a Pacific grouping, and Africa grouping—different partnerships to drive action? Would be my first question. And then in your new capacity, where do you see specifically, say, the upcoming IUCN World Conservation Congress as an opportunity to take the SDG discussion forward? You know, the IUCN and WCC traditionally being more focused on conservation. It’s now taking place in the United States for the first time, the first time the U.S. has ever hosted the World Conservation Congress, which is being hosted in Hawaii. So I would also like to invite you to attend this September. (Laughter.) But the fact that it is September 1st, is this an opportunity, do you think, to actually break open the dialogue in advance of the other conversations that take place in September? Thank you. MOHAMMED: Wow, OK. (Laughter.) I think the whole SDG conversation and regions, together we can go further. For the first time, there’s actually an opening for the conversation to happen regionally. And we have so many issues that are the same. And the networks and partnerships, the consolidating around programs that have been there for a long time, but they got any traction. Now they are, because the finances are not there. More can be done regionally through some of our bodies that are there, whether they’re government or otherwise, or you’re finding, for instance, Unilever all over the place, but it’s all over the place with other private sector companies that are coming together and saying, well, we’re going to make our headquarters to discuss this issue in West Africa and Ghana, or we’re going to do something about that in Kenya, on telecom. So I think there’s some new partnerships that are coming up, but they’re no longer just bilateral. You’re finding networks coming together because they really can do these things. And there’s a lot of learning. People don’t want to take the risk alone. And so there’s that sharing of, you know, this is important. And we can’t afford to invest too much with many losses. And I think that’s really important. It’s important on some of the struggles that people have for some of the gender issues of unpaid labor. And suddenly that coming into the discussion on labor. It’s not been there before. Recognizing it and valuing it, and trying to do something about it, is important. Again, just checking within that network, in ECOWAS, for instance. So this issue of women and assets and access to finances and resources, who’s doing what. And it’s no longer about whether you’re in a group of one to 10, who’s doing the best who’s not. It’s how did you do that and how can we do it? So it’s sharing and learning. There’s much more of that conversation going on, particularly in contexts where things are really tough with conflict, with migration, the IDP situation in Africa, it’s now a big issue all over the world on migration. So there are different—you know, different solutions for different places. And I think that’s being shared quite well through the networks. Conservation—whew. OK—(laughs)—going beyond saving the gorilla, because it’s about the ecosystem. And I think that for—there’s going to be some major challenges here. I think conservation is going to come up against big business. And it’s going to come up against, perhaps, issues that we thought were resolved and are very far from being resolved. I have seven national parks under my responsibility. And the biggest challenge I have right now is security. So there’s a lot of poaching going on. Every game warden wants me to give them more ammunition so they can protect themselves and their families and the wildlife. And I’m saying, no, you can’t have bullets. You can have tranquilizers, so you can put, you know, people to sleep. But don’t kill them. But I need a collaboration with the security agencies. And that’s not there because they’re already struggling with other issues. And there’s no option for the alternative for a lot of this in terms of livelihoods. But there’s also the other—the business side of it. We have a heritage site. It’s a huge forest in the southeast of my country. And a highway is going through this. We’ve moved the highway out. It’s 260 kilometers. It’s a really good idea to have that highway. It connects people, and it’s development, and it’s fine. But it’s now not so fine, because what has happened is a manipulation of that highway, where we have—normally, engineering, you have 45 meters set back from the middle of the road, so that’s about as far as you can go into any of the woods or the forests, wherever we’re talking about. But in this particular case, they’ve gone 10 kilometers either side of the center line, which has almost wiped out some communities that have been there for hundreds of years and will have a huge effect on the ecosystem and conservation. Fortunately, we have processes that we can put back in place to do that. And it’s—you know, you’re wondering why 10 kilometers? And then you suddenly find out, there’s a massive logging exercise, and that logging exercise is one of collusion between national government and international companies. And so I think for this global agenda, when we come to speak about conservation, it’s everyone’s role, just as it is in the illicit flows it has to be in this as well. And I think there are new grounds that we need to explore, and to see how we can protect better that. I mean, I can sit there and, because of Rwanda’s experience, can say to the leadership in this particular place, you know, this is the revenue you’re losing, because I am being told that for every gorilla there is in Rwanda, that’s looking at a million dollars revenue annually. That’s huge. So what can you do about sharing that revenue with bettering people’s lives, protecting the environment, and keeping that sort of ecosystem together? There are other things going on as well. We have taken programs that are regional in nature—the Great Green Wall in Nigeria is a huge opportunity. It has only been in the past looked at like let’s plant trees and stop the desert coming in. That’s not the answer. The answer really has been for us that whole ecosystem of economic trees, of jobs, of services, actually of taking back the desert, because we’ve got conflict between herdsmen and farmers, because there is no land. And we look at China and we see what they’re doing with the Gobi Desert. And it’s economic how they’re reclaiming so. So how can we use that? So those kind of, you know, cross-border, cross-region activities to try to also do some of the conservation we need to do. VOGELSTEIN: A very realistic example of the earlier comment you made about context really mattering a lot. We are getting close to the end of our time, so I’m going to ask if we can take three questions in a row and then, Minister, will give you a chance to respond. Molly, please go ahead. Q: Great. OK. And Madam Minister, Amina, a real pleasure to have you here in Washington. So I have sort of two questions here. So the first is about—you said something that really made sense to me, which is that the action now is really at the national and subnational levels. So it’s what do countries, what do states decide that they want to do with this agenda, and how do they drive it? So I’m curious, and especially given your experience with MDGs, do you see that happening? Do you see that energy and that, you know, practicality of, OK, here’s an opportunity and we’re going to embrace it, you know, in your own government, in others? If so, then what’s driving that? And if not, I’m curious what do you think would encourage that action? And then as you do that—so it sounds like Nigeria is perhaps undertaking a cross-ministry exercise in this. And as you do that, and you look at the 15 years, but you know realistically you also have some short-term, you know, pressures as well, how do you think about that? Are there certain sort of foundational or cross-cutting things you say here’s the three things we absolutely need to get done in the first few years to make progress across this? And how does that get done? VOGELSTEIN: Thank you. Please, Will. Q: Madam Minister, congratulations on your appointment. Your country’s gain is the U.N.’s loss. And as a former UNDP rep here in Washington, I think I can get away with saying that it’s easy to get lost in the U.N. architecture. So this leads to my question. With your departure, where does ownership in the U.N. system lie for the SDGs? In many ways, you were the very public face, and a superb public fact, but particularly when it comes to, as many have mentioned, the issue of monitoring and reporting on implementation, where will the lead lie? Thank you. VOGELSTEIN: Thank you. John (sp), please. Q: Thank you. And let me just echo Mr. Davis’ comment. You really played an outstanding role, Madam Minister. I mean, I was with the BIAC in the OECD and interacting with—and you really were a common focal point for all of that. One of the things—I just wanted to underscore the—one of the issues which seems to me to have become submerged, but which really deserves much more prominence, and I’d like to get your thoughts on it, is that of the informal sector. You talked about the Goal 16 and the institutional structure. You’ve mentioned property rights. But even though the U.N. had the U.N. Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, which did some really fantastic work, it doesn’t seem to me that within the SDGs we’ve given it enough prominence. We’re talking about somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of the populations of most developing countries, the ownership of property, the employment—the employment, as well as the submerged GNP that isn’t recognized, being locked out, unrecognized, not incorporated, and, in many cases, because of this institutional issue. How can we give this some more prominence so that it really becomes, in so many ways, the Rosetta Stone to unlock the complexity of these 17 Goals? VOGELSTEIN: So questions on inspiring action and prioritization, on ownership of the SDGs in the U.N. system, and the informal sector. MOHAMMED: Oh, OK. Thanks. We need much more in terms of champions at the country level right now. I think countries are really grappling with day-to-day issues, and they haven’t figured out how the SDGs can help them. And in trying to do that, they need someone to make that easy for them. And so I think it’s, you know, creating—I sit in—I sit in my own Cabinet and I’m listening to budget and planning. And they’re talking about—finally I’ve pushed them, OK, you got to do the long-term plan. That’s happening. And then they’re saying, OK, so can you give us the pieces that we need on the SDGs? And I’m saying, don’t forget 2063. And you know, how does that all fit? But when I look at the implementation plan for the budget, then I don’t see what it is that we need to be seeing there. Maybe that’s a prioritization of how we move the SDG agenda. So for us, context, security is a big issue. It is the first responsibility of my president to his people. And he’s got to deal with that. The second that he’s dealing with is the governance structure. The corruption is a symptom. And that symptom has a lot to do with the way we’re structured. So institutions matter. And, you know, that whole rule of law that he’s trying to straighten up. The third is, again, this is where we struggle with the urgent and hurry bit. Infrastructure: If we don’t have infrastructure, we can’t put up the hospitals or the schools or the access to water. None of it will work. And we’ve not been doing that over time. And that’s scale and that’s money. So he’s trying to deal with infrastructure in terms of power. And he’s trying to make sure that that relates to jobs. So he’s saying: Look, I’ve got to do the infrastructure. I’ve got to do the jobs. So all of that requires for us, I think, to keep being reminded in the context of sustainable development as a concept, and the Goals as that that will help us get to where we need to get to, and how can we do that? Now, civil society is doing really well, but they need to be connected. And so I think with the private sector this is where actually they’re partnering quite well. And how can we do this at the local level, local governments, state governments on that one. So a way to go. How are we doing it? In our ministry what we’re doing is what can I do in setting those regulatory environments better—setting them up better? I have two or three under me. The laws are pretty archaic. And that is something that I can do that gives a proper platform for going forward. Alongside that, a couple of campaigns, campaigns that put partnerships together that will run because people will see immediate results, and then really figuring out a really good communications strategy. We need communication, communication, communication. Today we have a town hall meeting with some of our ministers. It’s the first time we’ve done this town hall meeting, gone down to Lagos, sat with the ministers who probably have the biggest headache today because there’s no power, long fuel queues, and people are asking why have we gone to China and why have we gone to the United States. So explanation. Six ministers sitting there taking grueling questions has been important. So that communication with people really, really important. On the U.N. ownership—whoa. OK, so—(laughter)—the next secretary-general—who is going to be a woman, by God’s grace—(laughter, applause)—needs to take that up. That’s the gauntlet she’s going to have to take up. I think that the indicators, again, as I said, are much better than I thought they would be. I think we can take those up and have that conversation. We are still far from the U.N. agencies being fit for purpose in a coherent way in the center, never mind at the country level. And a lot of it is because they haven’t figure out that they don’t need additional jobs; they need to retool themselves. The same people who were doing the MDGs need to find a different skill set to help us in our countries, and come out of their offices into ours and have these conversations as DFID has with us, to how to put together a concept, a terms of reference, an implementation plan, and make that work. And they’re falling off because they’re not doing it. They’re still the most trusted. People believe in the U.N. And I think that that’s incredibly important. So they convene. But we need to support them. We need investments in those people that are at country level. And maybe we can sort of make it, but there’s some kind of service that you have to give, that the people in New York have to go to the field for six months, you know, more frequently than they do, because I think the skill sets they have are so valuable to us. You have no idea how many times you’re thinking about how many concept notes. Ideas abound and I can make them work because I have money. But just that middle bit of putting all of it together completely, you know, we haven’t got it. And so we need to have that. Last on this list of questions, on the—it’s the different entry points to that. The informal sector’s huge. It’s what keeps us together and going. And yet, we can’t service it, we can’t—we don’t know where it is, who it is. So I think the leaving no one behind agenda has been getting a lot of traction. And it’s led to many questions being asked of our government, for instance, and I know in a number of other governments as well, you know, where are the birth certificates? Where is the birth register? Of recent, we made a commitment to a missing persons registry in Nigeria because we didn’t realize that it wasn’t 219 Chibok girls that were missing, there’s actually a couple more thousand. And we don’t even know who they are. And they’ve been coming home. And we didn’t realize they’d gone missing. So that was a really big eye-opener for how do you strengthen the institutions at the local government level to begin to put these things back in place? The identity for bank accounts, for the telebanking that’s going on, and access to health services through different insurance schemes, is also putting together the ask-for strengthening the institutions to look now at the informal economy. But how? I think you need—you know, we need to be having some really good conversations with people like the bank on making this real. I think countries would like to get their head round it. And tax is one way through it. And we need to do better with that. Customs is another way. But it’s still a huge challenge. But it’s a work in progress. I think people are more and more recognizing and asking a question. I don’t think there are enough tables like this to really dig into some of those issues that need to be addressed. VOGELSTEIN: Well, our table is always open. (Laughter.) And it is clear that while much work lies ahead to realize the agenda— MOHAMMED: Can I take the three ladies? It’s really is not fair to leave the ladies behind. (Chuckles.) VOGELSTEIN: Absolutely. Absolutely. Why don’t we—fair enough. If you can stay, we can stay. Why don’t we quickly start here, and then we’ll come to all three. MOHAMMED: Sorry. (Laughs.) VOGELSTEIN: Please. Q: Thank you very much. My name is Fumi Adine (ph) from Nigeria, a Georgetown law student. My question is on the issue of climate change and linking it to women’s health in the IDP camps. What is the government doing concerning that? Because we have a lot of problems women fact in IDP camps in Nigeria. VOGELSTEIN: Thank you. Rachel. Q: My question, you’ve mentioned the importance of civil society a number of times today. And we’ve heard a lot about the role that civil society can play, and accountability in particular in relation to the SDGs. But in my engagement with a lot of local civil society, they’re still really struggling with how to understand and incorporate the SDGs into what they’re doing. And in terms of accountability, there’s been a lot of talk but not as much financing of civil society’s capacity strengthening in engagement and accountability, likely because of where the funding comes from, right? I’m curious what you see as the role of civil society and accountability in the SDGs, and where you see that support potential. VOGELSTEIN: Thank you. Emily, please. Q: Hello? Is it— VOGELSTEIN: It is. It’s on. Q: You can probably hear anyway. But as a corollary to that, wanted to ask in a sense about global civil society, media, NGOs, others, because you mentioned a disturbing loss of momentum on the issue of financing for development. Could you talk a little bit about how you see the role of other actors—regional, globally, as well as locally, nationally—in pushing that agenda and giving it traction again? MOHAMMED: Maybe starting from that, because I think we got the momentum continuing, and I really thought it was really useful to have the 175 signatures and bring everyone to New York. I might not have done it, and don’t want to sort of advertise that, but—because I think there is the downside to not doing things like that. So all the entry points that we have, and the build-up to discussions around the financing, we need to have civil society at the table reminding us, the same way they did in trying to get the ambition of the financing for development in Addis. And I think that’s not happening. I think at the spring meetings this year it was rather quiet. You didn’t feel any feedback. The media were not carrying anything about the urgency of following up on the ambitions. So I think there are points of entry where we need to keep holding, you know, fire to our feet and to particular leaders in doing this. And there are a number of issues that came out of the financing for development that we can run with. It seems we haven’t done that. And maybe it comes to the question of how do you finance people to do this, because this doesn’t happen in fresh air. And that’s a little bit more difficult because whether you want to partner with government or the private sector, that certain level will curtail the independence you have the voice that you have for it. So where is it going to come from? And I think that that’s the struggle that civil society is going to have to deal with. We need to see more of the resources that are gained off the back of the issues at the local level move from global to local. It just doesn’t work. There’s so much that is, I think, acquired at the global level, but it’s not getting down to the local level to help empower civil society. Simple issues like having, you know, an opening to put toolkits together that use these indicators, to hold people to account, to even communicate, whether it is social media or otherwise, or using young people on campaigns. We can still campaign—I mean, I’m campaigning on clean and green and we’re going to—we got two targets, take plastics, you know, water—plastics and bottles off the streets by 2019, and also to stop open defecation, which didn’t know excluded, you know, men urinating until I became, you know, chair of some council and realized that the open defecation was only for one half of it. But to say open defecation in public places by 2019 will no longer happen in my country, and to set that target. And I’m using private sector and I’m using civil society because the campaign does work, and it needs to be taken to schools and to hospitals, and to really touching people’s hearts and minds. And civil society does that best. So I think we’re still looking to see how we can do that. On the climate change, in particular the IDPs, I led the delegation this year on our two-year commemoration to Chibok. And just preparing for my Chibok visit, because government had never gone down there, except when Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala went to lay the foundation stone to rebuild the school, for which we have 500,000—that’s half a billion—lira missing, because it was given to the army, they have not built the school. The demolished it, and so there is nothing there. I’m going down there to—what am I going to say to the parents? Because the parents don’t really care whether it was the former administration or ours. What am I doing about it? But on the way down there, two other things came up. The drought that will happen, is already happening in Ethiopia, will and has started to have an effect in northeast Nigeria. The IDP camps that are getting millions of people in. We’re trying to do two things: First, manage the situation there, malnutrition and children. And the second thing is actually the feeding—the whole feeding exercise, realizing that people just dumped food there. And they were said to be cooking for large amounts of people, and it’s not getting there. So how do we bring the cooking and IDP camps to families—how to families, how to keep them back together again? This is where the cook stoves with LPG came in. And we’ve managed from my ministry to provide about 3,000 in the initial stages to families there. But ultimately, it’s how do we fast track the integration—reintegration of these families into our societies, into Maiduguri, into Damaturu, into all those urban and semi-urban centers. We don’t want to live in IDP camps, and they can come back, but we need these really fast now home building schemes that we need. And we found the technology’s there. We hope that through this tragedy we’re not just going to build back a mud hut. And if we are, we better make it so that solar power is there, reticulated water is there, cross-ventilation, drainage, it’s a grid system that works and doesn’t become a slum. So it’s an opportunity as well. And we can see, you know, the governors there are struggling. And one of the things that we did do was that the World Food Program was not in Nigeria. And we were reaching out to Ertharin Cousin, who’s a wonderful person. And within a few days, we unlocked all those little barriers to getting them in. So, you know, it’s amazing. Their office will be there. It’s staffed by Nigerians who are going to come in. And we will push to see how all the red tape is un-taped, and that they can come in and work. And so partners. We still do have another call. The challenge there is that there are too many cooks in the whole northeast situation. Well meaning—I mean, we need trauma care, we need security, we need all the things that we need. But trying to coordinate and manage that is a huge struggle. So any capacities to help us manage and map this and get good information back, not that is sensationalist. Everything is a tragedy in the northeast today. There are one million stories there that are very, very sad and painful. But what we need is to get over that. And it’s not going to be by dwelling on those or looking for those as the objective of a visit. And we struggle with that, because that’s—every person that wants to interview me, wants to interview the misery. And that’s apparent. And what we want to do is can you interview me on the solutions and what I need to help me get through this? VOGELSTEIN: Well, there is no doubt that a lot of work lies ahead to achieve the ambitious agenda you are so instrumental in shaping, and continue to shape. And today’s conversation has really enlightened all of us as to the path forward. So please join me in a round of applause. (Applause.) Thank you. (END) This is an uncorrected transcript.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Heather Higginbottom joined the Women and Foreign Policy program’s director and senior fellow, Rachel Vogelstein, to discuss implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals.