There is an article in the  February 8 issue of Newsweek which should make interesting reading to one and all, but especially those who are immersed in the development of basic communities and sectors.

The article entitled “Hiring the Third Billion” and written by Velanne Verveer and Kim Azzarelli posits the long-accepted truism that investing in women pays dicidends.         The authors note that women more likely than men put their incomes back into their communities, driving GDP up and illiteracy and mortality down. They thus advanced the proposition that making women partners in business and I am sure most other endeavors at all levels will truly have a huge impact on global development.

Doing so, as the experts say, can be game changing. No less than the annual World Economic Forum in Davos recognized this development as it hosted a plenary session on “Women as the Way Forward”. I am excerpting part of the article in the hope that we will soon realize the importance of this most important initiative.

Here goes: On February 1, some of the most powerful companies in the United States (Accenture, Coca-Cola, Ernst and Young, Goldman Sachs, and others) are signing on to a worldwide campaign to bring women into the economic mainstream. The Third Billion Campaign is being launched by La Pietra Coalition -- an alliance including corporations, governments- and nonprofits - to enable one billion women to become members of the global economy by 2025. The campaign’s title comes from the notion that over the next decade the impact of women will be at least as significant as that of China’s and India’s respective one  billion plus population.           

Bringing women into businesses creates what Michael Porter and Mark Kramer of Harvard Business School call “shared value”. It helps companies while helping communities, too. Consumer product businesses have quickly understood the benefits  - for instance, bypassing retail and hiring women to build person-to-person distribution channels for everything from cosmetics to beverages. More recently, companies have found it especially effective when the purchaser needs to be educated on the product being sold, be it mobile sonorgram machine, an energy lantern, or a cookstone. Women can also be the best innovators of the products they use and sell sometimes transforming their communities with something as small as the knowledge of the optimal use of a household’s single electric light.

The rewards are clear. Avon, for example, gives more than 6 million women in more than 100 countries the opportunity to start their own businesses, these enterpreneurs serve as Avon’s main sales force, resulting in more than US$10 billion in revenue. Similarly, Unilever has invested in 45000 underprivileged Indian enterprneurs, mostly women, in more than 100000 villages through microfinance and training - a strategy that ccounts for five percent of the company’s total revenue in India...