Q&A: Tapping Women's Enterprise to Topple Rural Poverty

Paul Virgo interviews YUKIKO OMURA, new vice president of the
International Fund for Agricultural Development
ROME, Mar 18 (IPS) Employees at the International Fund for Agricultural
Development (IFAD) may have cause to fear for their jobs after Yukiko
Omura was appointed vice president of the United Nations' rural
poverty agency in February.

The Japanese economist is not one of those ruthless job-slashing
executives that organisations bring in when they want to downsize to
efficiency though. But, she is a determined, capable woman who believes
that IFAD's mission is to help create a world where the agency is no
longer needed, by empowering rural people to haul themselves out of
poverty.

Omura, who joins the Rome-based agency after being head of the World
Bank's Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, and some 20 years in
the private sector as an investment banker before that, recognises that
this is a massive challenge, with around three-quarters of the
planet's 1.02 billion hungry people living in rural areas.

She believes a key component to meeting it is to tap the enterprising
spirit of women farmers in developing countries.

Q: Your previous job was as a senior executive at the World Bank,
a body that many non-governmental organisations blame for exacerbating the
poverty IFAD is trying to combat. Is this switch like changing sides from
the baddies to the good guys?
A: No. I did not leave the World Bank because it is a bad institution. I
left because I thought I could do something different to add more value to
development. I worked in political risk insurance, a very specific field
within the World Bank group. I wanted to do something that is even more
effective by getting involved in grants, loans and investments, reaching
out to the poorest of the poor and helping them become effective private
sector business people.

Q: How do you intend to do that?
A: I'm here to support the president [Kanayo Nwanze] to ensure we
become an even bigger contributor to assisting small-holder farmers
worldwide, increasing projects and becoming more flexible in terms of
satisfying our clients' demands by becoming more of an IFI
(international financial institution) than we are today. We are also going
to keep supporting women and women small-holder farmers because we firmly
believe, as do many development IFIs and agencies, that they are an
important part of economic development in any part of the world.

Q: What qualities do you bring to the job?
A: I bring both multilateral, development experience and private sector,
investment experience – in my view skills needed more and more in
international financial institutions. The private sector part is important
because we are here to promote private sector development by small-holders
in developing countries.

Q: As an economist, do you think we should stop seeing helping
small-holders, and the fight against hunger as a whole, as charity and
start seeing it as an opportunity for people with money to invest in
agriculture and, ultimately, make a profit?
A: Yes. I absolutely think we should change the way we look at this. We at
IFAD think small-holder farmers are the way to go because they are the
bulk of the population in the poorest countries. If they cannot produce
food those countries will not become self-sufficient. If we are
successful, these farmers will be more successful private sectors and they
won't need people or institutions like IFAD any more. That is
IFAD's goal.

Q: To put itself out of business?
A: Yes.

Q: Is empowering women in rural areas a big part of your new job?
A: I'm not here specifically to empower women – that is the
responsibility of all international organisations because it's
Millennium Development Goal Three. But I will absolutely help IFAD in that
movement. I just happen to be a woman

Q: Do women have entrepreneurial qualities that make them better
suited to transforming small farms into thriving operations?
A: I'm sure there'd be a lot of men who would disagree. I'm
open, but I'd say that if you look at women in small-holder farmer
areas, they grow crops, they buy seed, they sell crops, they cook food,
they raise children, they take responsibility of the money at home. So in
effect the woman is acting like the CEO, CFO and COO of a household and
that is the basis of the private sector. There is no way we should not
take advantage of that in the more expansive role of running a business.

Q: There seems to be growing consensus about the importance of
gender equality in the fight against poverty, but this message is still
frequently delivered by men. Is part of the problem that the majority of
policy-makers are still men?
A: At the Bank I think close to two-thirds of top senior management are
women. At the U.N. there are a lot of senior women. Even in the private
sector there are, so I'm not sure I agree with that statement. But it
is important to recognise that women are equally, if not more, important
in development. Fifty percent of the population is women, at the very
minimum. If you want a developed economy, you must involve that 50
percent.

Q: The challenges IFAD is trying to help the world meet are
enormous. Ending hunger and rural poverty in a sustainable way while
coping with the effects of climate change and increasing food production
to meet the demands of a rising global population and at the same time
achieving gender equality! Many would say the progress up to now has not
been great. How do you rate our chances for the future?
A: We have a lot of work to do in all the areas you mentioned. If we are
to meet the Millennium Development Goals we really have to push much more.
I think the recent (economic) crisis has woken us up a little, not just
people working in development directly, but the general population. We
cannot be complacent, we have to push forward. We have a long way to go.
They all go in tandem, whether it is climate change, empowerment of women,
food crises. You cannot solve one problem without affecting the others
positively. We have to work on all fronts.