- (Silence)

- Thank you and now we shoud to listening for the professor to Rania Said who speaks about women and economy.

- Ok, I have to apologise because I cannot speak Arabic so I will be doing it in English.

- First of all I am going just to summarize it by discussing the problems that were discussed and then the causes of the problems and the solutions that were proposed.

- The first problem discussed was actors to finance in order to give power to women.

- And the problem that the special programmes and existing banks for women do not really take into consideration the differences between high and low socio-economic classes.

- So they are not taking into consideration the gap between the upper class and the lower class when it comes up to women.

- The second problem that was discussed was the amount of women in board rooms, moving more women into board rooms.

- Some of the reasons for this problem that we discussed were not formal nomination that are usually made by men.

- So men do not really ever nominate women to take place to move into board rooms.

- COs are afraid to introduce women into the boards because they may introduce gender issues into the workplace.

- So they are afraid to have women represented into the boards because they believe that the women, by default, when they are in the board they were automatically bringing gender issues.

- Also another problem is inheritance.

- A lot of family businesses do not like to give the business to their daughters afraid that their in-laws might take control of the company.

- The solutions that we discussed for those two problems were education, education, education, education.

- To teach women financial skills, to teach women to have economic independence,

- to teach on capacity building, to give them IT education, to give them leadership education and to give importance to gender issues by increasing gender equality in governing and policy making bodies.

- So therefore increasing the women available in parliaments or any body that is making the policies to affect gender issues.

- And there is also a nice call that I think Doctor Ahelessay said:

- “Educating a man is like educating an individual, but educating a women is like educating a family.

- ”

- The second problem, or the third problem, actually, is the instability and inequality of ownership of wealth and wealth distribution in the global economy.

- The majority of the wealth, global wealth, is owned by a very small population in the world.

- Mostly in North America and Europe.

- Just a small population percentage-wide, they own approximately I think it was almost 70% of the global wealth.

- This problem indirectly causes a number of other problems including war in which the first victims are always women and children, a large number of sexual crimes against women.

- economic violence, violation of privacy, family violence, early marriage and trafficking, female genital mutilations and there was a number of other causes as well.

- Some of the strong points that were made during the discussion was there was always also brought up that what is possibly going to happen after the conference.

- We discussed making a long term plan with shorter term phase goals.

- To not talk about something that is going to happen the next year or the next two years, but to talk about something that we want to do in the next twenty years.

- And make different phases.

- So are long term goals in the next twenty years?

- Or we should finish this in the next two years and the next phase in the next two years after that.

- Also we discussed encouraging more youth involvement as well.

- One of the main issues that was also brought up was that there is no institutional support for economic participation of women.

- How is the Government supporting the family structure of the working woman?

- And how do you teach a woman to be economically independent when governments and policies don’t support them?