International Women’s Day

	Official Bank Web Sites Gender Web Site Related Information Vital Gender Statistics Not Captured in 90 percent of Developing World Gender in MENA

March 8, 2006—Some 40 women entrepreneurs from the Middle East and North Africa told a World Bank-sponsored roundtable that education and wealth were usually not enough to overcome barriers to business in their countries.

The women made it clear they still faced barriers men might not.

For example, a Harvard-educated woman had to establish a medical waste management company under her brother’s name, because women were not allowed to be issued licenses in her country. 

Another woman, who founded one of her country’s largest securities firms, had to have her father’s co-signature to obtain financing, despite the fact her partners, American Express and ABN-AMRO, had full confidence in her.

And yet another woman building the first private petrochemical terminal in the Persian Gulf could not take her two foreign business partners to lunch because she had to sit in the women’s section of the restaurant.

The examples show that women make up an increasing number of small, medium and large-scale producers, investors, and entrepreneurs in the Middle East and North Africa region, and they are creating significant number of jobs in the process. 

	Participants at the roundtable on the role of women entrepreneurs in private sector development in the Middle East.

But as the world marks International Women’s Day today, the examples also show there are many, usually gender-based, obstacles in their way—including obstructed access to decision makers, inaccessibility of finance, unequal treatment under the law, and resistant social norms.

The women who took part in the World Bank’s recent roundtable were among those who made it despite the hurdles—successful  owners or founders of businesses in a wide variety of sectors from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, WBG, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen, Syria and the United Arab Emirates.

But as statistics and anecdotal evidence show many other women are held back, costing the Middle East and North African countries millions of jobs.

The region has the world’s lowest rate—32 percent—of female workforce participation.

“The World Bank’s goal is to increase women's entrepreneurship to strengthen the private sector, create jobs, and advance women's empowerment through economic opportunities,” says Nadereh Chamlou, Senior Advisor and Gender Coordinator in the Office of the Chief Economist for the Bank’s Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

The Middle East and North Africa region needs to create some 90 million jobs over the next 20 years—“twice as fast as in the past,” says Mustapha Nabli, Chief MENA Economist at the World Bank. “These jobs can only be created by a competitive and diversified private sector, since the public sector and oil driven models of the past have failed to create the needed jobs.” 

Much of the gender debate in the region has centered largely on changing family laws and gaining political rights. Another approach, one that has great potential for impact, is to expand women’s access to opportunity within Sharia (Islamic)-based codes, which ensure a woman’s financial independence, right to own property, and authority to enter into any kind of business/legal transaction.

Chamlou says these are important building blocks for engagement in the formal private sector.

Women in the Middle East and North Africa have considerable financial resources, sometimes through inheritance.  A study in one country found $26.6 billion in women’s bank accounts sitting idle because of laws and regulations, which prevented women from opening businesses.

Other obstacles were more cultural than structural, such as the negative perception often attached to working women in the Middle East and North Africa. 

"There is a mentality among even the poor in Egypt who work that work is bad and shameful for women and that we should stay at home," says Randa Addou, Chief Executive Officer of Marketing Mix in Egypt.

She says many countries in the region support female education, but not female labor.  Echoing her, a business leader from Syria noted an incident in which she appeared on Syrian television and encouraged men to allow their daughters and wives to work, but was later criticized by viewers. "They told me” Madam, we do not want our women to work when we can support them," she said. 

In the United States, women-owned business is the fastest growing segment of the private sector – which has an impact on the productivity and competitiveness of the economy.  With the investments that the Middle East and North Africa has made to advance women’s education, identifying and removing barriers that women face, to start up their businesses at any scale, can spur growth, according to the Bank.   

“Our strategy has been to address gender issues beyond education and health,” says Chamlou, author of Gender and Development in Middle East and North Africa: Women in the Public Sphere. “Because growth and job creation are key challenges in MENA, by understanding what specifically holds back women’s entrepreneurship, the Bank has attracted a new cadre of decision-makers—the economic cabinets-- to the gender debate. Now they recognize that these issues are an integral part of the reform agenda that is intended to invigorate the private sector.”