Friday, May 27, 2011 - Hillary Clinton points out the role of girls and women in creating sustained economic development has been a cause of her lifetime, and again. The logic is compelling. Women and girls are a powerful engine for creating jobs and spurring economic growth. There are more than 200 million entrepreneurs who happen to be women worldwide today. And when a woman prospers, the benefits don't stop with her. We have reams of research which shows that women actually invest what they earn back into their families, and then the benefits multiply throughout her community and across generations.

Clinton laments that even after all the progress we have made, there are still many barriers that stand in the way of economic progress for women. Too few women can get a good education, find a job, own property, or open their own businesses in too many countries around the world. To study these barriers and identify solutions, the United States supported the launch of the OECD's Gender Initiative early this year.

The initiative will create indicators for measuring women's economic empowerment and create a toolbox of policy options for countries to unleash the potential of millions of women through education, employment, and entrepreneurship. And the OECD is piloting this approach with its Women's Business Network for the Middle East and North Africa, which is co-chaired by the United States and Jordan.

Today marks the first milestone in the initiative. We are receiving its interim report. And Clinton asks the readers of this blog to welcome the report, to affirm its statement that women's economic empowerment is critical to stronger, fairer economic growth, and to call on their government to take the measures necessary to help women.

There is one other step we should take. If we're going to improve outcomes for girls and women and make the best case for more investment, we'll need better data and we need to coordinate our efforts to make sure we get it. So Clinton calls on organizations focused on these issues to work together on a plan to make all the data that's collected on women more comparable and useful, and to identify a list of common indicators for future data collection. And Clinton is pleased to announce that the OECD, the World Bank, and UN Women have already agreed to collaborate on this project in time for the High Level Forum in Busan. Clinton hopes others will join them.

http://venitism.blogspot.com

ENDS

Basil Venitis maintains a free syndicated Greek column at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/capitalismforum on political affairs in Greece. He is a self-styled libertarian, running for office in Greece as a minority candidate, a member of a new party called LAOS.

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