A senior figure from the IMF has called for the greater financial inclusion of women in financial institutions across the world, arguing that this would benefit economic performance.
David Lipton, IMF first deputy managing director, told an IMF and International Finance Corporation seminar on Saturday that discrimination is holding women back, from executives in boardrooms to women who seek education, access to financial services and employment opportunities.
He commented: “Many young women aspire to join our institutions from graduate programmes but the behaviour they face during their studies and early careers drives many away from our field. That drains our intellectual capital.”
“Greater diversity, he maintained, means “less group-think and better decision making”.
“Research shows that having more women in leadership positions leads to greater financial stability, lower levels of non-performing loans and higher profits. Banks with a higher share of women on their boards were more stable in 2008, when the global financial crisis hit.”
He noted that nearly one billion of the 1.7 billion people globally without access to banking services are women, but fewer than 20% of bank and supervisory board members across the world are female.
Only 2% of bank chief executives worldwide are women, he added.
Lipton said that, in the world’s financial institutions, Christine Lagarde,  IMF managing director, and Kristalina Georgieva, World Bank chief executive were exceptions to the rule of male dominance. While the IMF would be welcoming a third female executive director in a few weeks and its chief economist was a woman it could do much better – only two of its 24-person executive board were women and it had not yet reached its 2020 goal of 30% of management positions filled by women.
He told the delegates: “Women continue to face conscious and unconscious bias—cultural, religious, or just the propensity of men to hire people who are like themselves. In addition, studies have found that women are held to a higher standard of performance—with women of colour facing even bigger obstacles.”
Lipton applauded the American Economic Association for putting in place sanctions against harassment. He said that harassment and violence against women, added an ugly dimension to the problem and that a shockingly large number of women economists having reported being victims of sexual assault.
He commented: “At the economic level, it is very costly in terms of health and services, reduced productivity and lost opportunities. At the organisational level, sexual harassment cuts to the very soul of an institution. This is criminal behaviour we are talking about. I speak for everyone at the IMF when I say that we must confront sexual harassment and stop it.”

Love doesn’t have to look like BankyW and Adesua, It may not be as popular as Davido and Chioma.
Nobody needs to have a fat bank account, a perfect body, a wonderful shape to be loved.
Nobody has to have the perfect diction, nobody needs do be a poet, nobody needs class to find love.
Nobody finds love. Love finds you.
Just the way you are.
Oga Monday had been recommended by my guide in Etche, to do some petty farm work for me. Right from our first meet, I didn’t like him.
He was loud, arrogant, dirty, disrespectful, to mention a few.
He was stubborn as well.
Oga Monday and I quarelled when l asked him to stop blowing his cigarette fumes in my face.
We quarelled over the price of his labour.
We disagreed over his work-time.
We fought when he wasn’t getting the job right.
Oga Monday was a hard nut to crack.
I realised really late, that Oga Monday was a madman.
I’m not just saying, my guide told me so later that evening when we were done.
“Monday head no correct o. Sometimes e dey worse, em go comot cloth enter road. Sometimes, e dey normal. Like now,” he said.
I was pissed. How is it normal for a man to blow smoke in another man’s face, and be offended when corrected? How is normal to be told what to do, but you do it your way, and insist that you did good? Whether naked and out in the road, Or clothed and under a roof, Oga Monday was clearly mad. I argued.
This epistle isn’t about Monday. It’s about Koko Monday’s wife.
She’d followed him to the farm to help, Not without a bribe, boiled egg, which she carried with her.
Monday would stop abrupatly in his tracks, do some crazy dances. I saw it as too much drama, Koko would hold her belly and reel in laughter.
Everything l found annoying about Oga Monday, Koko loved. How? I don’t know.
“Shey I don get work, buy you egg to chop. Make you help me do the work o, so that this small oga go give us another one,” he’d say to her. She would smile, Looking at the egg in her hand, then she’d respectfully answer him, “OK nna’m”…
Contentment!
When Monday wasn’t getting the job right, and refused to be corrected, Koko interneved, she helped me explain my point, this angered Oga Monday. Why she was taking sides with me, he couldn’t understand. “Go house! You think say I no sabi your plan? Comot for here now”.
When I Intervened for Koko, Monday faced me. “Go find your own woman, this one na my own, no chuk mouth! Me and you business na your farm. Leave me and my wife business,” he warned.
Jealousy!
After some hours, they sat down to eat. Koko left the farm to find water and Monday didn’t wait. He opened the flask and began to swallow big lumps of garri.. Before Koko came back, the flask was empty. Koko was pained, a few drops of tears stood on her cheeks. He claimed he didn’t know the food was for two. Koko left the farm angrily. I blamed Monday for vexing her, she was my only hope of getting the job done correctly.
Williams -Jaja lives in Port Harcourt.
To be continued.

Christian Williams-Jaja

Some women in Ogoni land have accused the management of Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project (HYPREP) of complete failure, in the on-going Ogoni clean-up exercise.
In a one-day interactive session titled: ‘HYPREP’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) On The Ogoni Clean-Up’, organised by Ketbetkache Women Resource and Development Centre, last Monday, participants expressed dissatisfaction over the clean-up exercise.
They alleged that nothing significant has been implemented in regards to the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Emergency Measures and others.
The women regretted that the joy they had for having an Ogoni man to head the project has turned to nightmares as HYPREP Head, Marvin Dekil, and other Ogoni indigenes have remained calm watching the entire clean-up process yield no positive result.
Speaking to The Tide, Dr Patience Osarojiji recounted the ugly experiences she had with HYPREP, wondering why HYPREP professes that they practice an open and all – inclusive policy when in reality, the reverse is the case.
Osarojiji stressed that HYPREP has failed the people of Ogoni and as such, the women can no longer keep silent and allow the world believe in what is not on ground in Ogoniland, adding that the palliative measures expected to ameliorate the plight of the Ogoni people have been flawed.
She added that HYPREP ignored the recommendations in the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Emergency Measures such as the provision of short term potable sources of drinking water, health registry to ensure those that consumed water from the contaminated sources are tested and properly treated, the posting of signs in areas where hydrocarbons were observed on water surface to warn the people not to swim, play, bath or fish in such areas.
Osarojiji stressed that others were the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), the comprehensive debomission of oil facilities that fail, an asset integrity management plan, the setting up of an integrated contaminated soil management centre subdivided into four units namely: Incinerator, Themal Soil Washing and contaminated water units.
She maintained that what is on ground in terms of the Ogoni Clean-up is a total deviation from UNEP report recommendations. She called on the management of HYPREP to operate a true open policy by allowing people with good ideas and suggestions interface with them, instead of moving around the Ogoni area with heavily gadgeted military men.
Osarojiji stressed further that if HYPREP were sincere in the Ogoni clean-up exercise there would be no need for them to come to the area with heavy military men nor to even place military men all over their premises, adding that more money is rather being spent on security than the clean-up itself.
Also speaking, another woman activist, a councilor in Gokana Local Government Area, Hon Dorathy Korgbara, stated that it was disheartening to see HYPREP avoiding some major questions she asked during their last meeting with HYPREP, she promised to mobilise women in her area so as to ensure that HYPREP do the needful.
Korgbara regreted that it’s more than three years since the Federal Government flaged off the Ogoni Clean-up, yet nothing significant has been done, and quoted the Federal Government as saying: “ the implementation of the UNEP report recommendations on the Ogoni clean-up will be done holistically such that would ensure total accountability, transparency, true and sincere partnership, guarantee job creation for young people as well as agro-allied, proper representation of the people at the grass roots as well as putting in place industries needed for processing agricultural produce,” among others.
She emphasised that it is expected of HYPREP to build a modern industrial enterprise centre to drive the Clean-up process and employ hundreds of Ogoni people.
In his paper presentation, an environment expert, Dr Sam Kabari, stated that baselines study is key to success Indicator and KPIs, adding that it was regrettable that out of all the KPIs HYPREP only has baseline on environment which is a dangerous signal that would not lead to a successful actualization of the Ogoni Clean-up exercise.
Kabari, who works with the Centre for Environment, Human Rights and Development urged women from Ogoni areas to give their full support to HYPREP so as to ensure a huge success in the Ogoni clean-up exercise.
He urged women to understand that one of the mandates of HYPREP is livelihood restoration, charging the the women to know that they are the most impacted, hence should peacefully demand for their livelihood through advocacy and dialogue, among others.
Earlier, the executive director, Ketbetkache Women Development and Resource Centre, Madam Emem Okon, had noted that the event was strategic as it would create opportunity for women drawn from the local government areas in Ogoni land to engage and to deduced from HYPREP’s activities, the proper implementation of KPIs by HYPREP or not.
Emem also charged the Ogoni Women Development Initiative to draw up their programme of activities, noting that bringing them to the knowledge of the centre would give a faster response to some of their challenges saying: ‘we expect the women group to do more as people expect to hear from the women groups in the area’.
She emphasised that the women groups ensure that the KPIs were gender sensitive noting that as part of its contributions in ensuring a huge success in the Ogoni clean-up, CEHRD is ready to take inputs from the women groups at the end of the interactive session, to work with HYPREP so as to ensure a huge success in the Ogoni Clean-up exercise.

Susan Serekara-Nwikhana