May 14, 2018
From the article:
American dollars are now finding their way into the hands of female entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka, Yemen, Nigeria, and Mali, among other countries, to be used to expand their businesses, improve their lives, and aid their countries’ development. This is happening with high-level international cooperation. It is happening with the instrumental help of the World Bank. It is happening on the advice of some of the world’s best development experts. It is benefiting some of the world’s poorest people. And it is in no small part thanks to the Trump administration.
The creation of the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative—better known as We-Fi, or the “Ivanka Fund”—is one of the stranger policy achievements of President Donald Trump’s first year and change in office. The president is, after all, known for his skepticism of foreign aid and his distaste for soft power and sotto-voce diplomacy. He is also well known for his aversion to poorer places, reportedly describing African nations as “shithole countries” and grumbling that Haitians have AIDS. Then, there are the numerous sexual-harassment accusations against him, and the reality of his administration’s chaos-heavy, technocracy-light time in office.
...In the first funding round, announced at the World Bank’s spring meetings, held last month, the Asian Development Bank won $12.6 million to support female entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka; the Islamic Development Bank got $32 million for its Business Resilience Assistance for Value-Adding Enterprises for Women (“BRAVE Women”) program, which works in Mali, among other countries; and the World Bank Group got $75 million, with much of the money directed to private-sector interventions in fragile and conflict-ridden states. “The response from stakeholders in both emerging and advanced markets has been enthusiastic and immediate, clearly demonstrating the urgent need to scale up efforts to help women entrepreneurs,” said the World Bank’s Priya Basu. “We-Fi fills a critically important gap. It’s the first significant fund committed to tackling the full range of barriers facing women entrepreneurs.”
Policy experts said its design made sense, and predicted that it would end up being a cost-effective way of shunting money to female entrepreneurs around the world. “It’s really not a bad idea,” said Scott Morris of the Center for Global Development, a nonpartisan Washington-based think tank. “These trust funds can be duplicative and wasteful, but I look at this one and it’s pretty good. It’s the World Bank inviting other institutions to participate in a competitive way. I’m actually very pleased with the way it’s gone.”