Warsaw Process: Remarks from White House Senior Advisor Ivanka Trump
Transcript
Good morning, everyone. Happy Friday. My name is Morgan Ortagus, and I’m the Department of State spokesperson. It’s good to see you today, and I am very excited to introduce two distinguished guests, who also happen to be two very good friends of mine. Of course, this is today’s first session of the Warsaw Process Working Group on Human Rights. Brian Hook is the U.S. Special Representative for Iran. Prior to his appointment, he served as Director of the Policy Planning Staff from 2017 to 2018. From 2009 until 2017, he managed an international strategic consulting firm based in Washington. Brian held a number of senior positions in the Bush administration, including Assistant Secretary of State for international organizations, Senior Advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Special Assistant to the President for policy in the White House Chief of Staff’s office, and Counsel Office of Legal Policy at the Justice Department. He practiced corporate law at Hogan and Hartson in Washington from 1999 until 2003, before practicing law, he served as an advisor to Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, and to U.S. Congressman James Leech. Brian is just the best of the best, I’m so excited that he’s here today to speak to you, one of my favorite colleagues at the State Department. A woman who needs no introduction, who happens to be also the smartest and most beautiful woman in Washington is Ivanka Trump, advisor to the President. In her role, she focuses on education and economic empowerment of women and their families, as well as job creation and economic growth through workforce development, skills training, and entrepreneurship. Advisor Trump previously oversaw development and accusations of the Trump organization, leading some of the company’s largest and most complex transactions. Also and entrepreneur, she founded an eponymous lifestyle brand. Advisor Trump graduated from the Warton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. She’s the author of two New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling books, has been included in Fortune Magazine’s prestigious 40 Under 40 list, and was honored as a young global leader by the World Economic Forum. Most recently, Advisor Trump was featured in Time’s 100 Most Influential list, and Forbes’ list on the world’s 100 most powerful women. Thank you so much for being here this morning, and now, to Special Representative Hook and Advisor Trump, two of the best in Washington. Let’s get this started. (audience claps)
Thank you so much. That’s the step they warned us about. Hi everyone.
Good morning, and it’s good to be with a great crew here. This originally started in Warsaw, Poland last year, and we had a number of senior people from the Trump Administration, including Ivanka’s husband, so we had Jared there, and it was his first opportunity to start talking about the Middle East Peace Process in a fairly global setting, and then when we decided to create these working groups on human rights, we wanted to host it and we wanted to have Ivanka Trump talk about all the great work that she has been doing in her role from the White House, and so, maybe I can just start with the first question. The theme of this whole program is promoting peace and stability in the Middle East, and one of the areas that needs a great deal of focus and attention is the role that women play in creating peace and stability. And we’ve seen correlations between women who play a role in governments, in the economy, and also in the workplace, contributes to peace and stability. And so, you started, in February, this Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative. And so much, I think, of that work that you’ve done has great application in the Middle East, but maybe you could talk about how you came up with this idea, its connection to the work the U.N. Security Counsel had done in the past, and where we are now.
Great, well, thank you, Brian, and thank you Morgan for the incredible introduction, after that, I can assure you that Brian and I can only disappoint you.
That’s right.
You set the bar high. So WGDP was developed as a way to operationalize the President’s national security strategy, which explicitly states the critical and vital role women play in promoting peace and stability. Specifically their economic inclusion and empowerment. So, WGDP was launched after many, almost a year and half of development, talking with stakeholders, members of Congress who are deeply passionate about the issue, NGO’s, government leaders from across the world, and we took all of that feedback and synthesized it into “How can we most effectively, through the first ever all of government strategy, seek to empower women in the developing world?” We set a pretty ambitious goal of empowering 50 million women by 2025 through three specific metrics. The first is vocational eduction and job training, and this is where the public private partnerships really really come into play. So since the beginning of WGDP we’ve been fortunate to have so many private sector partners, from Mastercard, to Walmart, to Google, come and partner with us on the initiative because I think we’ve seen, time and time again, even in the best examples of job training programs, if there isn’t private sector demand for the skills that women are being trained for, then it’s a failure. Regardless of how successful the program, quote unquote may have been, so having that public private partnership on the vocational side is incredibly important. The other part of that, that’s often overlooked, is really fueling productivity of the existing work women are doing across the globe. So in many areas, women have been doing the same work for hundreds of years, so how do we enhance the productivity of that work, through new technologies and more sustainable methods, and so we’re doing a lot of great work on that front. The second pillar relates to promoting women’s entrepreneurship, so in Africa, just as an example, over 50% of new entrepreneurs are female. So how can we ensure equal access to capital, and to ensure access to markets, and to networks, and to mentorship. So that pillar has been very successful, and we’ve partnered with many in this room to really drive that forward in conjunction with the World Bank, with the launch of the WEFI Initiative, which seeks to really help follow the mission of this second pillar, and ensure women entrepreneurs in the developing world gain access to capital. The third, and most relevant to this discussion, pillar, is around legal reforms that promote stability and security by women’s inclusion in their local economies. We decided, rather than to go an inch deep and a mile wide, that we’d focus on five specific legal reforms that need to be made in many countries around the world, and we think are essential for not only social justice reasons, not only for economic reasons, but also for peace and security reasons. We know that countries that discriminate against women are more likely to be involved in intra-state conflict. This is a fact, we’ve seen this, and if you look at the gender for index discrimination, the countries that rank the lowest have, in fact, been involved in intra or inter-state conflict over the past two decades. So this has been well proven by the data, and so we wanted to think about “What are the specific laws that need to be reformed and that we should be working, either providing technical assistance, or as part of our discussion, when we’re providing development assistance.” Which we know is not an entitlement, but rather, a mechanism, we hope, whereby countries can ultimately achieve self-reliance and become a trading partner of the U.S. So the five reforms relate to women’s right to own and inherit property. In 40% of, in 40 countries, 75 countries around the world, 40% of the world, women, there’s at least one law preventing them from owning, or inheriting, or managing property the same way as men, the ability to travel freely, that’s passports, visas, and just basic mobility, the ability to work in the same industries as men, in 114 countries, 2.7 billion women are precluded from working in the same industries as men, the ability to access institutions, access courts of law in an equitable way, and lastly, the ability to access credit, which goes back to that second pillar of WGDP. So we are very excited about this initiative, we are very excited about the all of government engagement to achieve all three of the goals that are, I just articulated, and one of the elements, which we think is complimentary to our efforts with WGDP is our efforts on women’s peace and security legislation, which the President signed into law in 2017, making us the first country in the world to have signed a comprehensive women peace and security bill in accordance with the suggestions and the resolution from the U.N. over 20 years ago, I think it’s 13 20 by the same name. So we’re very excited about our leadership on this front, we, this past June, I was up on the hill unveiling our strategy for the implementation of women peace and security, and today on the government website, the metrics are live for how we’re gonna track it and monitor across the 10 different agencies that are part of this initiative. So we’re quite excited about all of these efforts, and I’m happy to expand on either of them a bit more.
So I think, what I like about the third pillar is it gets at the root causes of instability and conflict. And it’s, just some of the stats that you mentioned I think are unknown to a lot of people, but especially around access to finance, and also property rights, attaining leadership roles, especially in post-conflict situations, where women play a role in these areas after conflict, you have a more durable peace than you otherwise would, and where you have great gender inequality, it is one of the markers of instability and increase risk for conflict.
And the facts really bear that out, so based on an analysis of post-conflict negotiated peace outcomes, if women are at the table, those are much more likely to endure over a period of time, so they’re 35% more likely to endure an excess of 15 years. So it’s critically important, not only as part of reconstruction, which we very much cover through women peace and security, but also having women at the table during mediation, during conflict resolution negotiations, as we know that that will create a more sustainable outcome, and, of course, that’s logical, that 50% of any given population should have an equal voice in how those discussions go.
Yeah, we saw that in the context of the Northern Ireland peace process, with the role that women played there, and then you were also in Rwanda.
I was actually, I was in Africa quite recently for WGDP, I was in Ethiopia, and I was in Cote D’Ivoire, and actually, we were really excited, we worked very closely with MCC and the White House and the State Department on providing and working with the government of Cote D’Ivoire to offer technical assistance to change laws around inheritance, so that women could inherit property equally to male counterparts, and changing the, modifying the marriage act of 2012 in Cote D’Ivoire. It was a great success, and they were wonderful to work with, so it’s a great result of a really great trip to Africa.
Talk about the, could we just drill a little bit down on property rights, and what you see there, and you’ve done some grants, there’ll be more grants coming in different parts of the world, what is your sense of the role that property right play? In the United States, the right to property is just so essential, it’s so central to who we are as America, and it’s such an engine of our prosperity. And so what has been your sense of the gaps that we need to close in some countries, where women are disenfranchised?
Well, I think fundamentally, oftentimes property is the primary source of collateral, which allows women, or men, to be able to secure a loan, and to be able to start or grow a business, so if you don’t have property rights, if you don’t have clear title, you don’t really have wealth. So on a very fundamental level, and, you know, in a lot of the countries we were just about Cote D’Ivoire, in Cote D’Ivoire the primary export to the United States is cacao. The workforce, the labor force of, as part of cacao production is dominated by women, close to 80%, yet, and this is an agricultural product, of course, that’s reliant on land in order to grow in scale, and yet, women in Cote D’Ivoire, in part because of the law in place, and in part for cultural reasons, owns less than 8% of the countries land. Less than 8%. I think the continent average in Africa is only 15%, but it was quite dramatically below that continent average. So it’s essential in terms of building wealth, and building opportunity, but there is also a difference, I just came back from South America, three country tour, where we talked about this issue, some of it is cultural, some of it is legal, in other cases it’s implementation, so the experience you’ll have Ethiopia, for example, where there are no legal restrictions, when you leave the urban centers and you go into rural communities, there are cultural limitations, there’s a lack of awareness around the laws that exist that enable women to own and inherit property. So it becomes quite nuanced and quite complicated. So part of these grants are providing technical assistance, even in countries where laws are not an impediment, but ensuring that the implementation outside of the urban centers is on par with what you see in the cities.
I think you’ve tried to, quite smartly, take a wholistic approach, where you’re looking at the legal and the security and the social issues that together, can play such a role. I was interested in this example that I saw about the simple ability of a woman to pass along citizenship to her children in some of these contexts, and so, there’s the property right, there’s the status of the woman in the family that gets at the heart of this.
You know, I was just in Paraguay, and I met with a bunch of our amazing peace corps volunteers and the work these men and women do are just incredible, and they brought in some of the women that they were working with, and it was incredible to hear, one woman stood up, and she said “When I started to be able to formally earn, I started being visible within my community, and I was actually seen for the first time.” And, for sure, she was working very hard in an informal way beforehand, raising her family and providing for her family, and sustaining the family in terms of the farming she had been doing, but it was when she actually started to actually earn that she gained respect within her household and her community. And it was actually, it was an incredibly moving, and beautiful story, and the way she described it, which echoes similar remarks I’ve heard in all of my travels, but I do think it’s deeply meaningful from an identity standpoint as well.
There is this clear link between stability and gender equality, and we’ve seen a lot of evidence that shows that countries with higher rates of gender inequality are more likely to experience armed conflict, and so, what about, you talked about access to the courts, and being able to do that, as one area where, if women are able to actually get justice and, talk a little bit about that piece of it in the GDP.
Well, so, they way we’ve approached this initiative is every country is very different. So the solutions have to come up from a local level, so we’ve been working really, really closely with NGO’s on the ground in each of these countries, talking about their unique barriers. And even within this idea of accessing institutions, that looks very different across the globe, and even within a country, like I mentioned before, urban versus rural, it is very different, so there’s really country-specific strategies that are informed by local stakeholders. And a lot of that grants that we’ve been talking about to help us think through these legal challenges, and where we’re hoping to catalyze legal reforms are happening on this local level. We actually, the State department stood up our first visitor exchange program specific to WGDP, and we had 17 women and one man from across the globe, and they spent two weeks in America meeting with members of Congress on both sides of the aisle here in Washington, going out into the country, they visited multiple States and spoke to NGO’s and stakeholders, and they’re going to go back to their countries and work to secure the types of legal reforms that we talk about WGDP, and then come back to us with feedback on how we can support those efforts. So it really is so, it’s hard to talk about in a generic way, and that’s why we made the decision, let’s start with five legal reforms that we view as so foundational to women being able to thrive, and to peace and security around the globe. I should mention that, obviously, women peace and security, which is legislation the President signed, has the strong backing an involvement of not only State, but DOD as a primary stakeholder, and Lisa Hershman from the Department of Defense, the CMO helped unveil it with me up on the hill just a few month’s ago, and has been a great champion of it, but WGDP was actually signed by the President as a national security presidential memorandum, because too often these issues aren’t framed in that viewpoint, and this was only his 16th national security presidential memorandum, because we do know this correlation between women’s rights and peace and stability in countries across the globe, so we’re seeking to underscore and reinforce that message.
I think it’s a terrific insight about, sometimes national security exists in its own little space, and it often exists separate from even from economic considerations, where sometimes we have a hard time countries have a hard time integrating the national security and the economics, and even harder time integrating the piece about the role that women play, but it is the case that when women meaningfully participate in the peace process, the chances of success go up.
Substantially.
And so I think it’s very good that, cause if you do look at the data, it is fairly clear on that.
And during conflict as well, oftentimes it’s the women that sustaining the family, you talk about entrepreneurs, literally working and selling and do everything they can to be able to create incremental income for their family. It is remarkable what happens, and then in post-conflict situations oftentimes it’s on the shoulders of the women not only to continue to raise their families, but also to provide for those families. If the men aren’t present, or are still engaged in conflict elsewhere. So ensuring that women have access to these fundamental legal rights, ensuring that we continue our robust assistance in terms of leveling the playing field, and in closing this persistent gender credit gap, that exists in the Western Hemisphere as well, it’s a very real challenge in Central South America, and right here in the United States, and then, of course, the vocational education and training, to ensure that the jobs that are made available during recovery, following conflict, women are part of the workforce that is trained to fill them.
You know, when you look at the statistic that more than half of all peace agreements fail within five years, we need to be looking for ways to improve the odds of a peace process being durable, and there was one statistic that I came across, it was a study, when you include women in conflict resolution, it increases the chances of conflict ending within a year by 24%. And then, if they’re a big part of the peace process, and this means including women in the process and in civil society groups, it makes the resulting agreement 64% less likely to fail. So what is about, in terms of the role, I know what we talked about Northern Ireland a little bit earlier, women would raise the social and economic issues, and how do you integrate housing and education, so that you can, these communities are torn apart in the context of war, and how do you get these communities to reconcile and to recover? And when women play a role, it just changes the conversation in a way, talk a little bit about that, just given the conflicts we have in the Middle East, some at the front end, some on the back end, that post-conflict stabilization, what is the, sort of, advice you would give to various governments as they look to have a durable peace?
Well, it’s hard to have a durable peace if 50% of your population’s viewpoints aren’t represented. So, just on a basic level, it’s just, it’s a logical thing. Obviously women provide the vast majority of the world’s unpaid care for their children, and are raising that next generation and need to be able to provide for that next generation, are often on the forefront of ensuring that that next generation isn’t radicalized, in some cases, so it’s just obviously good economic policy and smart defense policy, there’s no other way around it, and in a very, sort of, live, real example, I was just in Columbia last month, and Columbia, as they consider their peace implication, signed the first ever women peace and security joint strategy with the United States, recognizing the critical role of women. We also have been, through the United States government, helping fund the inclusion of women, and the training of women, as part of their police force, as we know that, obviously, good policing needs to be inclusive and representative of the communities in which they’re going into. So increasing the number of women as part of the military there, and a part of the police force. So it’s just the right, smart thing to do.
One of the areas which, and I’ll make this my last question, cause I know we’ve got to keep you on schedule, women face a lot of barriers when they try to get into the workforce, stay in the workforce, and especially advance in the workforce, and I saw in a number of these countries, women can make up nearly half of the agricultural labor force, but they don’t have access, equal access, to training, certifications, women also often occupy the lowest paid roles, and men make up a disproportionate number in the higher wage, high growth occupations, especially in the STEM fields, so tell me about how this has been a focus for you.
And that’s something we’re focusing on domestically as well, how do we increase the inclusion of women, and minorities as well, in the high paying, fast growing fields of the future, and STEM fields being obviously being very relevant to that. And over the last two years we’ve made incredible strides, there’s been robust growth in that regard, we’re, we’ve introduced a lot of programming domestically to incentivize that. But no, it is critical, and the points you made are absolutely right, a lot of times it’s the women who are doing most of the value added part of the supply chain, but they’re not necessarily the ones bringing the product to market, and they’re not necessarily the ones being compensated for the work that they are doing the majority of. So fundamentally rethinking that, and ensuring, to the point before, that the training piece isn’t just training people with new skills, it’s training people to do the existing work that they’re doing more efficiently and more effectively. I’ve seen some great examples of a village savings and loans organizations, and through WGDP, we funded the expansion of many, where women come together and they create groups, and their collective yield, using cacao as the example, rather than being individual farmers, they’ll come together, two, 300 women, they’ll create an association, and they’ll bring that collective cacao to market, and have much better leverage, have much better access for trading opportunities and markets, and it yields just tremendous results. I also recently witnessed an unbelievable program in Argentina, very small loans, micro loans that U.S. aid funds with a local NGO, but these women come together once a month, they create their own group, they all have their own business plans, they get technical support and assistance each time they meet, they receive a loan, but if anyone defaults on the loan, the collective group comes together and repays it. So there’s an accountability to one another, and a support for one another, and it was such an unbelievable and beautiful thing to have seen, so, you know, women helping one another prosper and thrive, and, you know, these are just some basic examples, but we see this happening across the globe.
What I love about the WGDP initiative that Ivanka has launched is, it not only is funding projects around the world, but it’s also educating people, and you’ve done a very good job of helping people understand a lot of these barriers, and also to understand if we want to make progress in national security objectives, the critical role that women play. And so thank you for making us smarter on this subject, and thank you for what you’re doing to promote peace and stability in the Middle East.
It was an honor, and thank you all for coming, and I hope it’s a productive couple of days, so thank you. (audience claps)
Okay, wasn’t that great? So thank you very much to Special Representative Hook and Advisor Trump, we’re now gonna take a short break, and we’re gonna allow press and Civil Society colleagues to exit, and the remainder of today’s sessions are for government participants only. Thank you.