Good morning and welcome. My name is Kathleen Coogan and I am the Senior Gender Advisor at the U.S. Department of State, Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, INL. We are delighted to have attracted a full house to discuss empowering women in countries with mixed legal systems. Today we will explore the challenges and opportunities that women face in countries with mixed legal systems. The conversations that we will have today offer a rare but much needed opportunity for policy makers, academics and practitioners to come together and talk about the nuances of our work. Collaboration is critical to better promote the safeguarding of women's rights. I would like to thank INL Partner, the Rule of Law Collaborative, at the University of South Carolina, which has made today's event possible. With support from INL, the Rule of Law Collaborative implements the Justice Sector Training, Research and Coordination Program. JustTrack. JustTrack is a five-year multifaceted program that aims to increase the expertise and coordination of individuals designing, managing and implementing justice sector programs. Today is the first symposium of many to come under JustTrack. The importance of the issue of empowering women in countries with mixed legal systems. Is highlighted by the fact that it is being addressed at this first symposium. An inter-agency steering committee, including representatives from the Department of State, USAID, the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce and Treasury provides guidance and feedback on JustTrack's activities and functions as a mechanism for improved coordination and collaboration. Before I introduce our keynote speaker, I would like to thank our host today, the United States Institute of Peace, and in particular the Center for Gender and Peace Building. It was here just over a year ago that INL released its first two programmatic guides, the INL programmatic guides to justice sector assistance and to gender in the criminal justice system. Since the release of the gender guide, which highlights ways INL has been integrating gender into its programming and its other initiatives, INL has hired a dedicated senior gender advisor, incorporated a gender assessment into its bureau strategy, and embedded an updated module on promoting gender perspectives into its pre-deployment training. In expanding our attention to weaving gender into the work of our bureau, INL works closely with the Office of the Ambassador at Large for Global Women's Issues, Kathy Russell. Ambassador Russell's key priorities are ending gender-based violence, promoting women's full participation in society, including peace and security sectors, and advancing the status of adolescent girls. As a lawyer by training, Ambassador Russell is acutely aware of the importance of women's meaningful participation in justice systems. Prior to her appointment by President Obama in 2013, she served as Chief of Staff to Dr. Jill Biden for four years. She helped draft the Violence Against Women Act in 1994 as a staff director to then-Senator Joe Biden. Without further ado, let's welcome Ambassador Russell. Thanks, Kathleen. I really appreciate it. It's so nice to see you over here. It's so nice to be back at USIP. I feel like I'm almost living here. I'm here so often. I really appreciate that great collaboration. So to the rule of law collaborative at the University of South Carolina, I really want to thank you also for bringing together so many different groups to discuss this important issue. My colleagues at INL are just invaluable, and as you can see from what Kathleen said, they've truly integrated gender into their work, and they're great, great colleagues and partners to us, and I really appreciate that, so thank you so much. In my position, every day, I get to see the range of challenges facing women around the world, and there are many, as you can imagine. And what's very clear to me is that we can't make much progress in addressing these challenges if we do it in a piecemeal fashion. So I think our goal is to try to have, obviously, lasting and real peace, and the way to do that is to try to address the issues in a comprehensive way. That means that girls and women need access to healthcare, education, and economic opportunities.  We need police officers, doctors, and lawyers to be properly trained to respond to issues like gender-based violence, and we need laws and systems supporting those laws that give women and girls equal access to justice. These are key pieces of the puzzle. So today, as we talk about mixed legal systems and what they mean for women, I'd like to keep in mind that this is one of several components in an effort to achieve gender equality. So let's start by taking a look at what happens when women do have access to justice and when a system can and really does work for them. As Kathleen mentioned, in 1994, I worked on the Violence Against Women Act. At that point, there were an estimated 2.1 million incidences of intimate partner violence here in the United States every year. That year, Senator Biden, who I worked for, we worked on an omnibus crime bill, and the Violence Against Women Act was a key part of that. That landmark piece of legislation dramatically improved federal, state, and local responses to domestic violence. And it established that violence against women never should be, wasn't a private family matter, but a crime. And that was really a watershed in our criminal justice system. By 2010, 16 years after the law passed, intimate partner violence dropped by more than 1 million incidences a year. Clearly, it's still a problem here. I say that every time I talk about this issue in another country. It's not that we've solved the problem. We have a lot of work to do. But I think we've shown that if you address it in a comprehensive way, you really can have an impact on the issue. We made clear that laws can be powerful tools to protect and empower women. But as we all know, it takes a lot more than just having a law in place. And this, again, is something I see when I travel. Sometimes people, you know, they'll say, well, Trump, Trump had a big law that they have. And I'm like, okay, you actually have to enforce it, implement it. That's kind of the next step. So women's leadership and participation are also obviously critically important to achieving gender equality. Justice Sonia Sotomayor is one of my personal heroes. And she said that diversity and experience can really help inform sound legal judgments. I think there's a lot of truth in that. So when a judiciary represents diverse perspectives, that diversity will make for stronger decisions. Ones that are reflective not just of some people, but of all people in the society. So for example, we've seen women in the United States enter the legal profession in much greater numbers. As their numbers have grown, so has understanding of issues like harassment and discrimination. These are some bright spots as we look at the law and women's empowerment. But there are many cases that offer different stories, stories that make it clear that women don't enjoy and practice what they have on paper. So let's take one global example. It's illegal in India right now to sell acid without a license. And the reason for that is that there's a young woman Lakshmi who we honored at the State Department last year that she got and received the Secretary's International Women of Courage Award. She is one of the most inspiring people I've ever met. And she's a tiny slip of a woman, really but incredibly powerful in her demeanor and in what she did. When she was 16, a friend's brother wanted to date her.  And she was permanently disfigured. She also has really very difficult health consequences as a result of the acid. So in addition to the disfigurement, she really has a lot of challenges that she has to face. She is so amazing and inspiring to me. And once this happened to her, I think my instinct would have been to hide someplace, but she doesn't do that. She lives her life in the most powerful way and she pursued her path to justice by advocating to restrict the sale of acid. And she was successful in that. But the new regulation she fought for should have been as valuable to her and to other women living the threat of that acid violence as the Violence Against Women Act was to activists and women here in the United States. But as of late last year, very few states in India had implemented the restrictions on acid sales and they weren't providing the mandatory compensation to the survivors either. So today you can still walk into a store and buy a liter of acid, which can just be a horrific weapon. And you can do that for less than a few pennies. So India is just one example. The rest of the world, including the United States, has a long way to go. High levels of impunity for gender-based violence can be found around the world, reinforcing cycles of violence, discrimination, and instability. And gender-based violence is just one issue, one example of the many ways the justice system can let women down. From property and inheritance laws to biased judges and prosecutors, often the system doesn't protect women and it doesn't empower them either. So we're here today because we know that legal systems, customary mixed or exclusively formal, often don't work for women. But we also know that justice, when it does work, lays the foundation for women to fully participate in their societies, which brings me to a really important point. We need to empower women in whatever way we can today. But we also need to work for change as we envision for tomorrow. And there are three things that I think we can do to help do this more effectively. First, we need to be persistent. And we see this, I mean women inspire me constantly in this regard because they never give up. And I meet women all the time who've been working for five, 10, 15, 20 years to affect change in their countries. It won't happen overnight. It takes time. And we just have to continue to push really hard for change. We've seen this in Afghanistan where women and their allies worked really hard to advocate for the law and the elimination of violence against women. After that law by presidential decree in 2009 was a huge victory and a much needed legal protection for the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan. But while the law offers a legal framework, implementation has moved slowly. Women still face endemic violence and barriers to pursuing full justice in their cases. The good news is that the government of Afghanistan has publicly committed to ensuring the law is implemented as envisioned. That's a critical step. But there's more to be done to bring awareness among men and women to strengthening implementation around law. And it will take everyone to make it happen. The international community, civil society, the justice sector, and the security sectors all working at the local, provincial, and national levels together. So reforming justice and legal systems is an important tool to empower women, one we can't ignore in this conversation, but it won't be easy and it will take a long-term commitment. Second, and this is really critical, is to focus on local solutions. The problems facing women around the world are complex and deeply rooted in cultural norms. Women's participation in any and every part of society is far from equal to that of their status as 50% of the population. Often this is because of entrenched issues like discrimination, gender-based violence, and lack of education for girls and particularly adolescent girls. There's no easier, quick solution to these problems. If we're going to make real lasting progress, we have to be smart and creative as we approach solutions on the ground. The good news is this is already happening in some places and we have a few great examples. In the DRC, the State Department funds mobile courts that work to bring justice to survivors of sexual and gender-based violence, and I'm sure you've read how horrific that problem is there, even in the most rural parts of the country. By increasing the reach of the criminal justice system, these efforts are eroding impunity and encouraging confidence in the law is absolutely critical. I've met so many women in the DRC who talk about almost accepting that they will never have any justice for the horrible things that have happened to them, and that acceptance is really corrosive to a society and something that we have to fight very hard to combat. But we're not only working in the formal system, we're also supporting creative solutions to expand access to the traditional justice system. My colleague Susan Markin is here from USAID, so she may talk about this in a little bit more depth later, but USAID is working at the grassroots level to empower women in local courts in Eastern DRC. These councils are a critical force for stability and justice. They settle border disputes and establish water sanitation and hygiene programs. They mediate cases of gender-based violence and encourage birth and marriage registrations, which, as you all know, is really important and something that is, again, a consistent issue when I travel about girls and women who don't have documents and the impact of that issue on them in the legal system, where they're almost not recognized as participants in the society and as a real challenge. The impact of gender equality is clear. Today, there is more shared household management, more equality of gender roles, and a noticeable reduction in physical violence. All of which are incredibly important. This is true in other parts of the world as well. Empowering women to promote progressive change from within traditional justice systems has improved Pashtun Jurgas and similar local councils from Bangladesh to Burundi. They're really critically important and they're an opportunity, a lot of times because they're local and smaller for women to play a bigger role. We're seeing change within both the formal and traditional judicial systems, and I think it's clear how powerful this innovative two-track approach really is because it's not only enabling access to justice for women. It's also helping to build infrastructure needed so that both sectors coexist in harmony. The third and final point I want to make is that we really need to trust women. Around the world, we've seen that women are very justice-saddy. They know which systems will better address their needs. We need to be sensitive to their perceptions of justice and their preferences for seeking it through customary means. If allowed, women will choose a system that suits them best, and if they're confident in that system, we'll see a stronger foundation for stability, rule of law, and representative governance. Just as we should trust women to choose the systems that work for them, we should also trust women to be more powerful players in those systems. Earlier this year, I met another woman, another one of our women of courage awardees. Those women, I hope all of you come to that ceremony at the State Department, although the last two years, we've been snowed out, but next year, I'm optimistic that that'll not be the case. But this year, we had a woman, her name was Tabasim Adnan, and she received the award in part of the Women Only Jurga in the Swat Valley. And for those of you who know about the Swat Valley, that is truly an impressive accomplishment. Her council meets every week to address issues that matter to women in the community. And Tabasim is very well respected in this traditional forum, so much so that she was invited to join the Grand Male Jurga to prosecute some suspects in a child rape case. And that was unprecedented to have a woman join that. She's one of countless women who are powerful leaders in the change and the various legal systems in the world. And she reminds us that there's nothing wrong with the mixed legal system, so long as it respects and makes room for women like Tabasim to be a part of it. So no matter what kind of forum it is, any system that values women's leadership, their participation, and their perspectives is going to bring the world closer to full gender equality. So I'm really glad to be at a room with so many people who are dedicated to not just understanding this, but trying to fix these issues. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to be here. And I encourage you to have a great day. I'm sure you will. And thanks so much for your work. Thank you, Ambassador Russell. And we want to thank you for all of your support over the years and the work that you've been doing. And in particular, with the Violence Against Women Act, when that came out, or VAWA, I was a federal prosecutor at the time. And so I had the honor of prosecuting the first case in Nevada. So thank you. I didn't make that connection until we were sitting here. And also, I'd like to thank Kathleen Coogan and the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Bureau for all of their work, their tireless work in integrating women's issues and issues of gender in all of their activities. It's been an honor to work with INL over the years and we look forward to that partnership. My name is Colette Roush, and I am the Acting Vice President for Governance Law and Society at USIP. And I'd like to welcome everybody here to our home. And it's your home. And it's our US government home and the people of America's home for peace building and for the ideal of a world without violent conflict. So thank you. Also, while I'm thanking people, I would like to thank Hamid Khan and the University of South Carolina, Rule of Law Collaborative, for organizing this and working with INL and giving us the honor of being able to host this very important series of discussions this afternoon. And thank you to Kathleen Kienast, our very own champion of gender and women's issues. She works very tirelessly to make sure that gender is a very important priority and that it's reflected in all the work that we do here at USIP and is through her efforts over the many, many years that that has even been possible. And it's reflected in all of our programming and will continue to be. So thank you, Kathleen, to her team with the Gender and Peace Building Program here at USIP. You know, as we all know, when I talked about the Institute's mission being to work with others and partners around the world in our own country for a country and a world without violent conflict, we know that the most important thing is establishing the rule of law. And a critical component of establishing the rule of law is the role of women. And we know that when women are empowered, when women are engaged, when women are given that platform and opportunity, then the ability to build rule of law and peace can build in a way that's not possible without women being available and at the table. And not only being at the table, but being active participants. And we know from experience that nations are more successful when women are successful and when women are empowered, when families are therefore healthier and communities are better off, then the entire countries are more prosperous. And we know that a prosperous country can often help to prevent violent conflict. And it's through conversations such as these that you're going to be having throughout the day that we can gain a better understanding of not just what we do, but specifically how we do it. We know that process is very important. So that when we approach our work in the field of women's empowerment and seeking women's empowerment when we're working on rule of law in mixed systems or in any scope of rule of law work, we need to do that with versatility. And it's very critical that we look at versatility in our approach, how we conceive it, how we implement it. And then of course after implementation, how we evaluate that work. What lessons do we learn? How can we look at this critically at what we're doing and say, what can we do better? What do we need to change? And not just check the box of evaluation, but use it as a tool for exploring how we can make things better. And also when we look at that, we realize that each of us, when we're devising programs, whether it's here or we're assisting in a program overseas, it's critical. We know that we ask those, as Ambassador Russell said, who are there every day and who work at this and who know the situation. It's not a situation where we can come with preconceived ideas or prepackaged solutions or something that we think works in one place that can be done there. We need to ask the women in that country, whether it's DRC or wherever we are, how can we help what is useful? And also how can we not do harm? What will work here? And then above all, we have to remember that at the end of the day, the end game for all of the work is to help women realize their full potential in all areas of their lives and in all ways that that potential can be realized to help build rule of law, justice, security and peace in their own communities. So with that, I would like to get it started by turning it over to Hamid Khan who is now with the rule of law collaborative at University of South Carolina, but I just want to put in a little plug.  Thank you. Now, if I could only convince the security staff that I was formerly a USIPer. That would be good. First of all, welcome. Thank you all for joining us on a Friday. I know we're a little bit formal for Friday in Washington and we're a bit early, but the topic is worth our attention. First of all, I'd like to show my gratitude to now acting Vice President Roush at the United States Institute of Peace, formerly my boss and mentor here at the United States Institute of Peace and of course to Ambassador Russell who took her time out of her busy schedule to join us in this very important discussion about women's empowerment. This is the first and the inaugural symposium of JustTrack, a collaboration between the INL and the University of South Carolina, the rule of law collaborative, which I am the Deputy Director. This promises to be the first of many different discussions and symposia that will involve very important areas of discussion, policy, academia and study. We hope that this endeavor, a multi-year endeavor, will be a fruitful one for all those involved. And so what would be more fitting than a symposium that would bring together academics, policymakers and practitioners, those from the academy, those who articulate policy and those who are in the field. With all of them together and with all the discussion that will take place, we hope that the best discussion will not be had by those up here on the dais, but rather from the discussion in intercourse of those who are here before us and we are all grateful for your involvement. Just a few scheduling issues. We hope to limit the panels and the remarks so that everyone will have a chance not only to offer their remarks but so that we can solicit questions and learn from audience members about their perspectives. We promise that the discussion will be fruitful, that the events that will take place will be highlighted and recorded as we have this now live web streaming courtesy of USIP. There's also a bit of a regret that Dr. Shaw will not be joining us today for the case study. Unfortunately or fortunately in the life of women's empowerment she just gave birth to a child and motherly duties take precedence than being here in Washington. In addition, I'd like to articulate some of the objectives of the symposium. The purpose of the symposium and the objective is to discuss both the challenges that women face in what we call mixed legal systems. Those systems are considered where at a formal level the application of common civil customary religious or tribal law predominates. The reason why we take this endeavor on is because we understand fully and foremost that no legal system is pure. No legal system comes disaggregated from its tradition and no system is without its multiplicity. That however does not mean that there aren't pathways for empowerment and that we combine from our different perspectives can offer those pathways. I would encourage all of those here to take place in the discussion and that we will continue the discussion as part of the University of South Carolina in this important area. I want to note that as a crew cut man saying in front of you that the issue of women's empowerment is not an issue just for women alone. While we're all very interested in telling stories one story that comes to mind is of a little girl who lived in a village in northern Pakistan who at five years old lost her father. At the right age of seven decided that because she had three brothers she was looking for her to stay at home and do the household duties with her widowed mother. And then at the right age of 14 just have to be forced or engaged into a arranged marriage and then at 16 have her first child. By 17 years of age she would actually be a business owner. Now the reason why that's relevant is because now she has one for sons, one daughter and one of them stands in front of you today. So the issues about women's empowerment are more than just the issues that affect women and affect society. It also affects young boys. It affects the men in those societies and to the extent that we can bring to bear the discussion and that we can create fruitful pathways for women know that all of the generations both men and women will benefit from it. So with that let's turn over to the first panel and I thank you for joining us here today. Thank you. I think we just made a group decision to sit here and speak from the panel rather than speaking from the podium. Well first of all, thanks very much to USIP and the INL Bureau and to Hamid for including me in this important conversation. I could not be more thrilled to be here today because of the subject we're going to discuss but also because of the remarkable people including this panel that you've managed to attract to this conversation. My name is Angelique Young and I work for an organization called the Institute for Inclusive Security and two years ago we launched an initiative to address the gap between the promise of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and waning global commitment to its implementation. Through our work we aimed to increase the number of national action plans which are high impact strategies that facilitate the extraordinary ability of women to present, resolve and stabilize after deadly conflicts. When most people think of Resolution 1325 they focus on participation more women at the peace table more women in government more women in the security sector and so forth and that is very important but it is equally important if not foundational to address the need to improve society's perception of women and to engage more champions in advancing women's inclusion even more critical we must work to remove social, economic and legal barriers to women's empowerment and ensure that women have the knowledge the skills, the ability and the space to actually exercise their rights. In this session we'll identify and prioritize the challenges of women's legal systems. We'll impact the language a little bit hopefully some of the assumptions that we all worked with and we'll aim to pave the way for the rest of the day to have an honest discussion about practical actionable ideas that generate action on this very important topic. There are so many challenges dysfunctional legal structures that fail to harmonize or link formal and customary systems both women and practitioners of knowledge or awareness of laws and procedures particularly new laws even when those new laws are meant to benefit women. There may be no strategy for addressing war or related violence. Police interventions are often ineffective at best and disruptive sometimes at their worst. The cost for women to engage in the legal system may be burdensome the distance for them to travel to access those resources too far and the process may be too convoluted for them to think it is worthwhile. The list of challenges is endless. It should be clear which cases for women are tracked to formal or customary systems and how they will interact those systems but it is usually not. Communities should be engaged as partners to spread knowledge and build support for women but they usually aren't. Strategies for tackling this issue should be comprehensive addressing all of the barriers including social and economic barriers the ability to access the legal sphere impacts literally every aspect of women and men's lives and that's why this conversation is so important to have and I'm excited to share with you the enormous expertise of the panelists that we have here. So I'm going to introduce each of them first and then I'll turn it over to them. Each panelist has 15 minutes after that we'll go to questions. So first of all I'm assuming that you have some of the bios with you so I'm just going to share my favorite highlights of each of these individuals which could get a little long because their experience is so extraordinary. Susan Markham is the USA Senior Coordinator for Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment. She works to improve the lives of citizens around the world by advancing equality and empowering women and girls to participate fully and benefit from the development of their societies. She served as the Director of Political Participation at NDI. She previously directed the Emily's List Campaign Corps program and later the Political Opportunity Program to recruit, train and support women candidates running for statewide legislative and local offices in 35 U.S. states. She served as the Director of Senate Services at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and her work has taken her to over 35 countries around the world where she's conducted trainings, facilitated working groups, political parties and civil society organizations, and in her free time addressed numerous conferences on the importance and best practices of increasing women's involvement in the political process. We're very pleased to have her here. Paola Shakakar is the Senior Program Officer for Religion and Peace Building at the U.S. Institute of Peace. She also served four years at the Asia Foundation where she was the Afghanistan Director for Women's Empowerment and Development. She led the Gender Mainstreaming Society Unit in the United Nations Development Program's Afghanistan Sub-National Governance Program managing a small grants program for Afghanistan's Civil Society initiatives. She's also served as the Program Manager for Gender Studies at Kabul University. An Afghan American, she has enormous experience teaching and researching religion, gender, security, local governance and all the easy subjects. She has published Research Regarding Women's Participation Governance, Pashtun Wali, Afghan Customary Law, Afghan Women's Identity and Social Spaces in Afghanistan and her research has also taken her to numerous countries including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Syria. Danielle Angel works for my favorite organization at the Department of State the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs in the Office of Afghanistan and Pakistan U.S. Department of State where she oversees INL's Gender Justice Program in Afghanistan. She previously worked on INL's legal education access to justice and justice sector development programs. Before joining INL in 2012 she worked at Al Arabiya News and several law firms in New York. She also brings remarkable experience and all three of these panelists I think are going to tell us a lot about the challenges. So with that Susan, I turn it over to you. Thank you so much and thank you to USAIP and the University of South Carolina for putting this event together today. I'm just going to have a few remarks. I think as indicated earlier that I think a lot of the vibrant discussion that goes on is after we give our remarks and we really get to interact and share stories that everyone in this room and lessons learned that we can all benefit from. So I'm going to give a brief overview of mixed systems and some of the work that USAID citizens learned there. So mixed systems, you know, particularly those with formal and customary law present both opportunities and challenges to citizens seeking justice. So I think sometimes we look so much on the challenges and don't look at the opportunities so I'm going to address both today. On the one hand they offer additional venues for women and girls to pursue their rights, but on the other hand, and they might be the most accessible for women in a lot of instances, but on the other hand they might not be the most egalitarian. And a lot of the work that we do, whether it's on land issues or on family issues such as marriage, divorce and custody, it's really an uneven system. But these informal systems are significant. For example, in the area of land customary tenure is thought to cover as much as 90% of the land in most sub-Saharan African countries. So we cannot ignore them. Similarly, although extremely diverse, informal justice systems are commonly distinguished from state justice systems, and then they frequently aim to resolve disputes through local mediation or arbitration. And so that is very powerful in a lot of the communities where we work. So depending on existing social, cultural and religious norms this most often emphasizes the communities' existing ideas on justice and holding community harmony over individual rights, which can obviously be very uneven. So when we look at the barriers to accessing the formal justice system, I actually think of it in a way that I think a lot of the work that we do with regard to women's rights and equality is that we need to look at three levels and we need to look at the individual level. So individual women and their capacity and skills and confidence to take part in these systems. At the second level, we need to look at the institutional level. You know, what institutions exist, both formal and informal, and how can women access them? And then finally looking at the environmental level, what are the attitudes, what are the cultural norms that support these systems or act as barriers to women having access to the system. So in the individual level, even in places where women have rights according to the legal system, they may not know those rights themselves, or they might not have access to power to enforce those rights. As previously said, they often lack the resources or the time to participate in justice process. The education, there might be a social stigma to going to the formal legal sector. And we can't forget the fear of violence or family pressure to not take these private issues into the formal sector. And as I previously said, a lack of confidence in these institutions themselves. Because at the institutional level, we know there are lots of barriers. If you look at the staffing, who works in these institutions? Just over a quarter of judges and prosecutors are only one out of every eight police officers in Sub-Saharan Africa is female. In some instances, the laws providing rights for women are contradictory, even within the legal, in the formal legal sector. So on the one hand, you might have an equality clause in the Constitution, the laws for women's equal rights to land, marriage and inheritance laws might provide for equality. But while at the same time, their marriage laws or other laws might contradict these. Also at the institution level, there is a gap between law and practice has been said before. Just having a law on the books does not mean equal implementation. And so it's a risk to go into the formal sector because you're not really sure how that law is going to be implemented. And then at the environmental level, at the attitude level, both in the formal and informal justice systems, some gender specific crimes or crimes that we think more likely to affect women such as rape, domestic violence and other things might not be considered major offenses and they might be downplayed. And so changing attitudes, men and women's attitudes about what's appropriate for women's roles in public life need to be addressed in these legal ways. So looking at some of the best practices and opportunities, over the last 30 years, the international donor community has invested heavily and implemented programs to improve the rule of law globally. On average, USAID conducts approximately $200 million in rule of law projects, many of which include components designed to enhance access to justice. So while we have best practices, women's experiences in the justice system are more important than women's experiences in the justice system. What we want is that it's complex and there's no one answer to how we empower women to better access and more fairly access formal justice systems. One important point that I want to reiterate that Ambassador Russell made is that we need to trust women and we need to ask them, what does justice mean for you? We can't come in with our questions on the programs that we have. Also, when designing programs, we shouldn't look at the formal and informal justice systems as distinct and separate. They often work off one another and it's difficult to separate one from another completely. For example, USAID is working to strengthen the capacity of customary justice systems in Ethiopia and Zambia to ensure that women and men have equal access to justice, meet the standards and reflect that in the informal justice systems that's there. We also need to think broadly, outside so that we work with non-legal organizations that can help empower women, especially those with regard to economic empowerment, income generation, land rights, protection from violence, even food security and resilience issues. These all interact with the way women encounter the legal and structural change. For example, at USAID, we had a program on radio journalism in Senegal. And through this program, we were obviously focused on a much different issue in empowering women to use public media to engage other women in a wide range of issues. But some of the beneficiaries of that program decided to request additional community lands for their homesteads and went the legal path through a broader process. And this is the most often effective when there are two conditions are met. One when these programs are supported and owned by the women and men in the target communities, not imposed from outside. And when women and men in the communities work together, make the change that they want to see, it both has the short-term impact of changing the legal systems, but also men and women get used to working together and they have to be part of that program. The USAID land project in Rwanda is working with civil society organizations to encourage men and boys to be part of these changes and become proud champions of fairness and equal rights. The other aspect is we work both from the top and the bottom levels of legal change. So we want to make sure that national top-down reforms to ensure domestic laws and regulations promote gender equality and gender equality led efforts to reform discriminatory practices. So when men and women are working both at the higher level and the lower, they put the pressure on the customary justice systems to better protect basic rights and they are very much founded in the community, but they also know that there's an international framework that supports this work and that the government is going to keep an eye out on those things. A couple of other things. We have the rule of law and stability program which works to strengthen Afghanistan's traditional justice sector and align it with the Afghan constitution. So instead of going and said we want to try to figure out a way to get rid of this, we are actually trying to understand it but help those who are involved in the traditional justice sector understand what the new constitution is safeguarding with regard to the traditional justice system. We have the rule of law and stability program working with elders and specifically a group of wise women, older women who play, they might not be standing at the front when you talk about what negotiations or other discussions are going on between communities but they are respected and can often lay the groundwork for far reaching change in their communities. And then we also do more formal discussions that specifically focused on justice for victims of gender based violence and helping them access the courts and get those cases all the way through trial. So it's a variety of programs but I think overall like a lot of the work that we do, the more we do these programs, the more we understand the complexity of them and the importance of local ownership. Thank you. Thank you very much for those questions. Thank you very much. I'd like to first thank the University of South Carolina and INL for this really important initiative on empowering women in mixed legal systems. I think this is often overlooked and I'm really glad that there's a whole symposium dedicated to this very important issue. I'd also like to thank my former colleague Hamid Khan as we are cohorts in this issue, particularly as it relates to empowering women in mixed legal systems and something that we've been working on for many years together even though I wasn't here at the U.S. Institute of Peace. And in fact, what I'd like to start with is a program that Hamid Khan took a very big initiative in starting along with my colleague Kathleen Kinast and Manal Omar. And it was back in 2013 that we had this very amazing working group at the U.S. Islamic World Forum in Doha where we're talking about the very issue of how to protect women's rights and empower women when you have constitutions that have a very strong Islamic identity. And so it's working between both the formal legal system and the Sharia law or the Islamic law system in different countries. And I think this is a very pertinent issue. My work relates, and my experience comes from Afghanistan since that's where I've spent the last 10 years before joining U.S. Institute of Peace where in the Constitution it specifically states in Article 3 that no law can go against the tenants of Islam. And this came to a head when the Elimination of Violence Against Women Law came to Parliament in May 2013, so exactly this month. And basically the parliamentarians said, well, this law is un-Islamic and gave many reasons for being un-Islamic and luckily instead of it being voted on it was taken off the agenda and so ever since then it's been under review and reform. But I'd like to take us down a notch even though this is a national debate that's happening in Afghanistan and people are working on this. And it's very important that the different sectors are included and we're trying to work with both the religious leaders and scholars, the women's rights activists and the legal advocates the three pillar approach. The same time what it actually comes down to is how people are on the user and actually interacting with it. How are people on the ground, how are women on the ground really accessing these laws. And I think it's very interesting to note that we talk a lot about getting it right on paper and then thinking about implementation rather than thinking about it as a process of trying to build the community support to get it right on paper and it seems sort of backwards and I think in Afghanistan this is something that we've learned has been a challenge that actually there wasn't enough ground support for this law and it happened to get it on paper right without this so that there wasn't this enabling environment. And so if we look on the ground I'd like to bring in some statistics from the Asia Foundation survey of the Afghan people the latest one. I think it's very interesting to note that when women were asked if they had household family problems who would they ask to resolve it, who would they seek to resolve it. It was 29% of women said that they would seek help from family and friends followed by elders and the local Jirga so they would go to the informal justice sector first. This is women would go to the informal justice sector first and then after that the Malik Khan who is the village head or the local tribal leader again informal sector so it seems like it's a very high amount of women would choose the informal sector over the formal justice sector and then it's only 16% out of those who said they had a case a dispute or a case within the past two years that they actually went to a court to resolve it and for women those cases were family or divorce issues. Now my experience in the field I've seen that when it comes to inheritance for women or land rights for women the first place they will go is the Mullah the religious leader because that's actually the place where they feel that they can get the most traction for their case because according to Islamic Sharia law and it's in the Quran women have inheritance rights and rights to land and as Ambassador Russell mentioned women are very justice savvy they can choose between the best justice systems to meet their needs so we do see that they go to the religious leaders for leverage versus the Jirga and Shura where in the informal justice sector that is related to tribal or traditional justice it's actually a bad thing for women to seek their inheritance rights it's condemned it's looked down upon but let me get back to this national process so in the national level we're looking at how can we pass a law in parliament and support the implementation of the law on the ground that's related to the elimination of violence against women and in doing this not only do we have to integrate and we're working with the ministry of justice and the legal scholars there but we're also working with political activists, women's rights activists and the legal scholars and I think what's really important at that level is that to get when we get those people on board who have that grassroots support whether it's the civil society activists or whether it's the religious leaders that's really where we're able to bring in a lot of ownership of the local level into the law and support for sustainability and the long term implementation but one of the assumptions that often a lot of people come to in Afghanistan particularly related to this law is that the initial assumption is that Islam doesn't support women's rights and often times that is the assumption that religious leaders are so conservative and Islam doesn't support women's rights but what we've found is that in fact at the grassroots level there are many religious leaders who are advocating for the implementation of the elimination of violence against women law and it is through their lobbying and working with women's rights activists at the national level that there's really been some movement on the explanation of this law and light of Islamic Sharia law and really building support for this at the national level to get passed one other thing I'd just like to discuss is the issue of divorce as I mentioned family problems or divorce they're often more often likely to take them to the formal justice sector and at the same time I'd like to tell you a story about a woman who I met in Nangahar and this is in the eastern province in the Pashtun area she was seeking divorce because of domestic abuse and violence and her mother was very supportive of her and her father's family and first they worked with the elders in their family so it started with the family it says here as well supported by Asia Foundation's survey that it actually starts in the family and the discussion was between the heads of the different households and then when that didn't work they went to the religious leader and the jerga and when that wasn't working they threatened to go to the formal courts and it was that threat of taking this case to the formal courts that actually made them work out this case within the village because they didn't want that stigma attached to taking this case to the formal courts that actually proved helpful that being said there are places in Afghanistan I think this translates to other countries as well where there is this intersection of formal and informal that come together and particularly related to these cases very difficult cases of violence against women we've seen that it's been very helpful to have the tribal elders the jerga members come together with the judges and sit to discuss the cases and in that case it seems that the community members these tribal elders are then held accountable to the formal justice sector by coming up with a joint decision where the judges often will put their sample of approval but then it will be implemented by the community by the elders of the community so that it will be upheld both in the court of law and by the informal justice sector and we're seeing this as a way that this accountability and sustainability can actually happen both by acknowledging the informal justice sector and working with them and also holding them accountable to the laws of the land and with that I would like to end Thank you, the stories that you share I think really illuminate this important issue in a very helpful way Danielle, over to you Sure, I'm also going to talk about Afghanistan as that's my area of expertise but I think my remarks really complement what Paul Washa mentioned and what Ambassador Russell briefly mentioned earlier so I hope that you guys don't get sick of Afghanistan and before I dive into that first of course I'd like to add my thanks to the University of South Carolina USIP, INL Cap, Hamid and everyone involved in organizing this event it's really a pleasure and an honor for me not just to participate but to listen and learn from these critical discussions so most people have heard about the atrocities affecting the rights and rules of women in Afghanistan and when I talk to my family and my friends about my job and what I do, quite frankly most of them think it's pretty hopeless and I won't deny that Afghan women face huge hurdles but what's interesting to note and what you can tell the importance of because Paul Washa and Ambassador Russell and I have all brought this up is that Afghanistan has surprisingly progressive protections against gender-based violence and so this elimination of violence against women law which I'll refer to as the Ival Law because it's kind of a mouthful this Ival Law that we've all mentioned criminalizes a variety of acts of violence against women ranging from battery to sexual assault to forced suicide and even publication of the identity of a gender-based violence survivor so with this Ival Law on the books and these really strong legal protections why do we still hear these horror stories well Ambassador Russell and Paul Washa both talked to this but I'll add my perspective and as with everything in Afghanistan the answer is pretty complicated there are cultural obstacles Afghanistan is a patriarchal society and women are generally speaking reliant on male family members for financial support there's also a focus on family and community over the individual so if you think practically about what that means if you're a woman with an abusive husband and you're considering filing criminal charges you face public censure for airing your problems probable backlash from your in-laws who may even be in the same home as you plus the obstacle of surviving while your financial support system is imprisoned and when he's released there's no guarantee that his behavior will have been reformed so then there's the issue of civil charges and if you put yourself back in that same scenario but you decide to file for divorce rather than filing a criminal complaint you still face the possibility of losing your home as you've probably moved in with your husband's family you could lose custody of your children you'll often lose standing in your community and again opportunities for financial security for single women in Afghanistan are quite rare to the extent that they exist at all so with these social, cultural and financial considerations it's not really surprising that survivors of gender-based violence tend to prefer mediation which emphasizes reconciliation among the family the UN released a report last week which stated that 65% of women's cases sampled went through mediation rather than formal court proceedings and of those cases that went through mediation about half went to formal eval law institutions about 20% went to traditional dispute resolution bodies and the unit that I found the most interesting is about 15% went to joint mediation so mediation sessions that were conducted by both Afghan government authorities and traditional dispute resolution actors so this could mean that you have a lawyer and a mullah sitting at the same table helping you resolve your case many of you have probably heard a story that my former boss Karen Hall likes to tell about two Afghan men from the same small village during the civil war and who were as close as brothers so when one man had a baby girl and the other had a baby boy it seemed only natural to arrange a marriage to seal the family's affection but as time went on the two families fate diverged so the young girls family moved to the city where they were economically successful the young girl had access to education and the boys family did not fare as well with poor access to services and education and less financial luck but despite that the boys family continued to send bride gifts to the girls family over the years so when the two came to marriage age the girls family wanted to break the engagement but the boys family was pretty heavily invested so the two families called in a village elder who also happened to be a lawyer in the formal justice system and that elder sat down with the boys family and he offered up three options to adjudicate the case. Pashtunwali which as has been mentioned already today is the traditional honor code that governs cultural norms in much of Afghanistan Afghan law or Sharia the boys family initially chose Pashtunwali so the lawyer said the village elder said aren't you good Muslims why wouldn't you want to go under why wouldn't you want to proceed under Sharia to which the boys family acquiesced so the lawyer said well under Sharia under Sharia law a woman has the right to choose her own husband so the girls family has no obligation to you so unsurprisingly the boys family asked about other options and the lawyer told them that in Afghanistan no law can contravene Islamic law so the girls family still has no obligation to you and she can still choose her own husband ultimately they went forward under a mixed agreement which was based heavily in Pashtunwali wherein the boys family agreed to break the engagement in return for repayment of the value of all of the brides gifts they had sent over the years now there's a few things that I want to highlight from that story there are three sources for resolving conflict in Afghanistan Pashtunwali, the formal legal system and Sharia and as several others on the panel have mentioned the boundaries between these systems are really fluid and the choice of which system or systems to use to adjudicate your case is really a rational decision so I should note this trend of blending of the formal and informal justice systems or what is effectively hedging one's bets is not unique to women's issues in Afghanistan my teammates and I have also been tracking the Asia Foundation survey of the Afghan people for several years and there's one statistic that we always follow which is the use of formal and informal justice mechanisms over time in the first few years that the study was released use of the informal justice system was more common than use of the formal system and we saw that flip in 2011 but in 2013 for the first time there was a major spike in use of both informal and formal systems on each case on an individual case unfortunately I couldn't find that data point in the 2014 survey but I'd be really interested to see it particularly as we're talking about mixed legal systems through a gender lens because 2014 was a really significant year for women's rights and access to justice in Afghanistan for example, Afghanistan has specialized prosecution units dedicated to trying cases of violence against women these elimination of violence against women units or EVA units expanded their presence from 8 provinces at the end of 2013 to 19 provinces today and that UN report that I mentioned earlier highlights these EVA units as quote, a contributing factor towards encouraging women survivors of violence to register their cases here's another example this fall the Kabul primary court convicted a religious figure sexually assaulting a young girl and the court imposed one of the most severe sentences handed down since the EVA law went into effect in 2009 now the prosecutor who tried the case is a member of the Kabul EVA unit which I mentioned earlier and which I should note receives training and mentoring through INL programming and both he and one of the judges who ruled on the case have completed INL funded continuing legal education training and INL funded civil society and INL supported civil society organization provided the victim temporary shelter, access to medical services and legal representation and when the ruling was upheld on appeal two of the appellate judges had benefited from INL training improving women's access to and quality of justice in the afghan legal system requires a cultural change and that's going to take generations but I think that case really demonstrates that we're starting to see sustained efforts pay off as another example of that pay off I'll leave you with one last story earlier this year a 27 year old woman in Kabul named Farkunda was attacked and slain I'll spare you through gruesome details because they're pretty horrific but in short Farkunda was falsely accused of burning pages of the Quran and she was subsequently beaten and burned by a mob the attack sparked huge protests across Afghanistan and women in an unprecedented moved served as pallbearers at her funeral Farkunda's brother changed his name to his second name to memorialize his slain sister and the New York Times reported just earlier this week that the afghan government had arrested had charged 49 suspects in connection with the murder including police who had been at the scene and merely looked on men have joined women across the country to demand women's rights in the wake of this case I could not have imagined that reaction a year ago so in closing I'll say legal protections for afghan women are growing and with sustained programs the social and cultural shifts are increasing advancing the ways when social when laws reflect societal norms Thanks very much for those remarks and those stories I love stories the best I think they help to illustrate these issues in a way that's easier to understand and connect to now we're going to turn it over to the audience for questions in a second but I'm going to go ahead and abuse my position here and pose my own questions first and Paul Walsh I know you have some time limitations I think so I'm going to ask you first because your experience working at multiple levels within Afghanistan I think is particularly unique and you mentioned several times throughout your remarks the importance of grassroots organizations and I'm wondering if you can share I think we all recognize that it is important to work with grassroots organizations but for practitioners I think it can be difficult both to identify the right organization but also understand how to work with them in a way that actually empowers the organization rather than overshadows them so I wonder if you could offer any suggestions on how to do that effectively. Thank you so yeah I think on the one hand it's very important that we find the right organizations to work with at the grassroots level as you were saying and so how do I identify the right organizations to work with often times what I talk about doing and what I've done in the past is some sort of a mapping of the community or the area, the local area to really get a sense of who are the players there who are the organizations and the individuals that support the agenda particularly if we're dealing with the protection of women's rights and then those who are spoilers, who are often who often come out as speaking against women's rights issues and then in that mix trying to understand who are the people on the ground who are already advocating for this who are already doing this work protecting women's rights providing perhaps legal aid working with the various levels of community members whether it be the religious leaders or creating those informal groups of women to support as a place where they can actually come out of concerns that can then be taken up to higher levels so it's really understanding who on the ground is doing that work and then working through them and some of it may be more far fetched like well there's nobody actually working on legal services and there's nobody actually working particularly in this area but there is a group that is has stated maybe in their charter that this is something that they want to do and that they have the right connections around so basically they are part they have the key stakeholders in their network and those are places that I think are good places to start and working with communities but in terms of overshadowing I totally agree I mean I think oftentimes donors come in with a certain agenda and a certain strategy and they want to implement that and it can overshadow the agency and the ownership that the local partners have and I think it's really important that even when we do come in with a strategy and an idea that we really bring them into the process and for them to be able to describe their concerns listen to their concerns and build programs that would reach the same goals that we have but that they have ownership and local agency in actually implementing on the ground Thanks very much for that Susan if I might ask you maybe a challenging question one of the tools that we often work with and some of you in the audience know I'm obsessed with national action plans and other national strategies but as government donors we tend to work at the national level and sometimes it seems that the frameworks we work with are a little bit challenging when you're dealing with local issues in the intersections and I'm wondering if you could maybe talk about how national policies or national instruments can be used to empower women at a local level Thanks so much I think it is a challenge whether it's the U.S. National Action Plan for Women, Peace and Security or those that we support other countries as they create them in their countries it is a challenge but it's often what we use all international protocols for so whether it's a national action plan or CDaw or 1325 finding the parts of that that are relevant for that specific community and really working with those who work with it every day I mean for instance I was in Côte d'Ivoire a few years ago and we were talking about the presidential elections and some of the violence that occurred there and we were talking about how the peace process and there was still a lot of questions about how the peace process would go forward and they said well you need to go in on 1325 so the first day we go in we met with the group that had been put together by the government to kind of create a formal dialogue and there were many steps over months and they had never heard of 1325 and I was slightly frightened but it was good material and we looked at their plan and helped integrate gender across all their plan and then the next day we were set to meet with civil society and of course they knew all about 1325 they've been working for years on implementing it but no one had connected the groups and these they had been to international conferences they had been following what had been going on but they didn't have the entry point and so often times that's what we find I've never been in a country without a shortage of strong, smart ready to go activists, men and women who want to fight for gender equality empowerment but often they work in a system that is very separate from the formal political system and even when women choose to leave that and run for office then they are then cut off from the women and the men that they used to work with all the time so connecting those not just using the international frameworks to encourage the government because they've often times signed on and made statements on these but also connecting them with the folks in those communities and countries that know these issues and know the context and can quickly if connected in the right way move the agenda forward Thank you. I think continuing with that theme because it seems like there is something to the power of individuals you've all shared stories of individual persons who've done remarkable things and Danielle I wonder if maybe I could ask you to think about how we can amplify the effect of you know those champions, those individuals that you meet on the ground who who are doing good things to to carry that to other individuals to spread that well I think it's important of course to recognize the importance of the individual but I think it's also important to I think that the importance of the individual is that it can be a watershed to change the larger environment and so the individual Farkunda which I mentioned in my remarks earlier was a regular regular woman who was studying Islamic studies and she became this lightning rod for women's rights because unfortunately something atrocious happened to her and she was so relatable that it was infuriating the fact that this could happen to a regular intelligent educated woman so I think that amplifying the stories of individuals can really be useful in changing larger attitudes I think that on a lighter note there are plenty of individuals who become well known and renowned for advocacy and great things that they're doing and so I think that giving a platform to women who are advocating for rights in their own communities is it certainly means more than if I were to go to Afghanistan or to any other country and say you're women this way it's more effective for it to be an internal or indigenous or native idea and I think that individual advocates can couch it in terms that are more meaningful for their own society and they understand the constraints and the appropriate ways to engage I don't know if that that's a great answer the stories are important okay so questions from the audience do we have great I saw your hand up first the lady in red oh thank you usually I don't need this okay good morning I'm Suzanne and thank you all very much for being here so I'll stick on the topic of individuals as champions and I'll stick with Afghanistan for a moment since we've headed down that road already we all know well at least you three do share who's the prosecutor in the west in the Harat province and she's had tremendous success bringing to bear prosecution for divorce law, property law violence against women she has the highest prosecution rate in the country so my question is scale how do we move that up through other provinces even to other countries thank you let's take a couple of questions and then the panelists yes I am Wade Channel with USAID and thanks to the panel not only for what you said but what you do we appreciate it and I have to do what everyone else is doing and go back to Afghanistan for my question I was interviewing a group of business women in Afghanistan a year or so ago and had this wonderful comment where one of the women said we really want to thank you for teaching us about our rights it's really been very important to us would you please talk to our husbands I would like for the panel to address how do we more effectively engage men to ensure that it's conversation that can move forward not just with men's acquiescence but perhaps with men's support thank you okay who would like to start and you can choose your question or answer them both I'll go first just because I was thinking about this issue of the reality of women's and men's lives with regard to these issues and definitely the definitions of masculinity and how men are perceived both in the informal and formal lives that they lead specifically in the if there's going to be a judgment against them with regard to marriage or divorce or custody of their children in the DRC one of the programs that we do with regard to justice is a support group for men that talks about what is the definition of a good man starting from does a good man hit his wife does a good man have sex with her against her wishes does he take her paycheck when she walks in the door and he makes all the decisions and within this group of men they decide well what's an example of a good man and so it's very much driven privately within them but in talking with one of the men I asked him I said but what made you go to your first meeting because that is a huge step forward and so he was talking about the circumstances there but I said what's the hardest thing on a daily basis and he said my mother I want to work with my wife I want to be a good man I want to be a good partner she sees me discussing these issues she says you're the man you decide why are you talking to your wife about these issues so it's the realities and how we engage men and women to see that it's not just a women's issue that it makes their partnerships and their lives and their families stronger and that folds over to their communities and hopefully their country is in the long run and so going to what the realities of their lives are that then you get to these bigger legal issues and we move from the everyday lives to the theoretical I loved your comment about the paper to reality and we should go the other way around I think that's a great point and I would add to that very much from the developing programs perspective that gender issues and women's issues in particular should not solely be addressed through gender specific programs I and L we look at gender as a cross cutting issue and so when we are developing programs that don't seem at all related to the gender sphere we try to address well how is gender and gender norms how do they play into this and how can we counter that so even when we're building for example legal education programs or justice sector development programs which don't inherently have a gender angle to them we think about well what will this do for gender politics and how can we try to incorporate women and make men in these programs aware of women's issues without making it a gender program I will go to the program level because that's where I have the experience and when I was working with the Asia foundation we worked very much with men tribal leaders and elders what we called the gatekeepers of women rights at the local level because those are the decision makers at the local level who often would resolve cases locally and in the north we found and somewhat in the west we found that it was effective to work with religious leaders so by having religious leaders develop a curriculum that really states the responsibilities and moral obligations of men to protect and uphold women's rights in their communities according to Sharia law and according to the Afghan laws seemed to work very effectively but in areas that were predominantly Pashtun Wali tribal systems that didn't work very well because there was the Pashtun Wali was so entrenched and often times the religious leaders were answerable to the Pashtun tribal elders and so in that sense the approach had to be very different and we found it difficult to work with the Islamic law framework but definitely that opening up of spaces I mean we've seen in Afghanistan that when women are told of their rights and understand their rights and there is no outlet for them to actually achieve their rights we've seen a spike in suicide rates and so it's very important it's imperative that men in the communities that the society that there is public space to talk about women's rights and places to access women's rights and not just pushing on women to understand women's rights but really men in society to understand women's rights and another piece to that is to have places like the pulpit be used as not used I say to be engaged as a space to talk about this and so we've also worked with religious leaders who give the sermons the Khatibs to not be shy they originally say it's you know we're shameful it's shy to talk about some of these things but really not be shy and to take a stand on domestic violence issues and really talk about it from the place of the khutbah the sermons and be open and create that public debate in that public space for this conversation to be had on the issue of scaling up I really want to point to the support that INL has given to the elimination of violence against women committees and units in Afghanistan I think that's really been imperative in scaling up very well so it's not just an individual judge or a particular prosecutor or a court but it's actually a system and scaling up a system at a larger level in the country has been very successful and it has been these eval units and the eval committees where the informal and the formal justice sector has been able to work together very sustainably and effectively at the grassroots to implement and protect women's rights I'm sorry just a quick thing to add first of all thank you for the shout out secondly also to add to Pawash's answer to the question on scaling up I think this gets back to the earlier discussion of individual versus larger systemic change or support and I think that Pawash a very well addressed sort of the larger systemic but to get at sort of the individual component I think that as we continue to see women appointed to high level posts and to meaningful posts not just symbolic posts but to posts where they can actually make changes in culture at different organizations we'll really see this expand exponentially I agree okay I think I saw your hand and then I saw actually I saw you first and then you and then you okay one two three okay I thought it was someone behind me I was sincere and I have a question sort of cutting across if you could give me more context about the stigma or shaming associated with trying to access state based rule of law systems where does that come from and how is that implemented my project but I want to ask one question about sort of the elephant in the room issue one of the common assumptions that we talk about when we talk about programs that are cross cutting or that focus directly on gender is resources because one of the constants is a debate about a scramble for a scarcity of resources and one question then remains will these empowerment endeavors or the empowerment of women continue without adequate resources and if not what then let's go ahead and take one more question and then I'll come back to you and to you and sorry for saying you I can't read your name thanks from here my name is Irfan Hussein and I would like to introduce myself we here are on the GBV leadership program in US we are a team of 8% 4 from India and 4 from Pakistan actually I belong to the hometown of Malala Yusufzai Swat Valley and also the honorable ambassador mentioned the name of Tabasumad Naan she's my sister and we together formed that women Jirga in Swat actually my question is more related to Pakistan that things are going on in Afghanistan we do have similar system of alternate dispute resolution and Jirga system and Prashtunwali in Pakistan also to all the panelists is that do you have any plans or programs that are facing similar issues in Pakistan also okay who would like to start first to address the question about programs in Pakistan I have to confess that that is not my area of expertise but there are some really smart people in my office who are working on who work on INL issues in Pakistan so if you don't mind just coming to chat with me afterwards I'd be happy to give you a little bit more information and hopefully put you in touch I think Hamid asked the question that we are always pondering and which is as he mentioned always the elephant in the room and that's the question of sustainability and I think it's I mean it's tough it's definitely tough because of the civil society organizations that we're working with as much as they may have plans for sustainability it's a really difficult issue particularly when we're looking at legal aid programs and protective shelter programs but I think that there are some things that we're doing to try and get at this question and a lot of this is about developing local ownership and local capacity so for example this is a sort of related but not exactly answering the question but issue about capacity we as the federal government have some pretty intense reporting requirements and they're not always easy for someone who looks at them fairly often let alone for someone who is working for a small NGO in another country and isn't as familiar with them and so the ability to one, help our partners understand some of the paperwork and administrative issues about running a program not just with our budget requirements but you know what else is what your own government's issues are and what you have to do to get funding from your own government or where how you can do outreach and get support in your own community and get support from your own community is a big piece of how we talk about it to add on to that I also think with the sustainability is what you referenced before is that we don't build a lot of stand-alone programs focused on gender empowerment more and more we are going towards if you do have a stand-alone program with only women beneficiaries are just focused on gender equality why everything from energy to Ebola to resilience and infrastructure work especially with regard to legal issues that men and women have to deal with these issues just in the course of evaluating their legal system and how it works and that leads to the long term I think sustainability of these programs just a quick reference on the stigma issue it wasn't that long ago in the US that when a woman was being having physical violence in her home and she went to a religious leader or a police officer they quietly escorted her back to her home and said you guys take care of this just you know do you as the woman do more of this do less of this make sure he's happy and then maybe it will calm down it wasn't that long ago and so having those situations where people have not been talking about intimate violence or partner with violence in their homes you know that's a huge cultural shift for a lot of countries the other aspect of it is this family versus individual rights is the value of the family within your community more powerful than your life and in places where that the family and also not just the family but the community the coexistence of these families within a community overpowers the right of the individual that's where we have the clashes because we in the US often come in with this individual rights is the most important thing and that is a direct culture clash in a lot of the places that we work so it's just an added stigma to you know once again going back to the issues of defining masculinity as the head of household and all these issues but also more culturally and that not only he would be embarrassed but his parents and his brothers and her brothers would be really having to deal with these issues so I think that you know it's good to be reminded but social stigma particularly in the context of Afghanistan is very high in fact families when often times divorce happens particularly the man and the family but also the family feels that they don't have face in the community and will move to another community because of it because they feel that they've been so dishonored by it and that they're they're seen as lower their honor is seen as being blemished and people don't trust them in the community as much both on the woman's side probably more so on the woman's side than the man's side so she's taking a bigger risk to actually have a divorce but it's on both sides of the family and we've seen that happen to me to your question about resources and sustainability I think it's imperative that that's something that is talked about from the beginning of programs and you know how I feel about this issue and that sustainability is built in as a core component of the programs and that it's something like I said something that's indigenous that's seen as people are already doing this to scale it up but to scale it up to a point where it is already part of a process already part of a program whether it's state whether it's community and that that be integrated into existing structures and not something that stand alone brought in from the outside dropped in and then and then pulled away so that those systems don't don't exist and we've seen that unfortunately happened too many times to my brother Hussein said right now the programs that I'm working on don't work in Pakistan but in the past when I was working with the Asia Foundation we had a program that was I believe it was supported by DRL by State Department and it was on women's rights in Islamic in Islamic Sharia law and it was across three different countries so Afghanistan Pakistan and Bangladesh actually and in Bangladesh we work with the Imam Training Academy and in Pakistan we work with the International Islamic University and the Dean of the Sharia department Professor Zia was working with us on this and training people particularly teachers in the madrasas both male madrasas and female madrasas and they did get as far as SWAT Valley but it was particularly focused on working with the madrasa systems and training teachers in the madrasas to make sure that the students in the madrasas both girls and boys were trained on women's rights in Islamic Sharia law I'm going to offer my own comment on sustainability and resources before I move to two more questions I've refrained from mentioning Afghanistan but I have to do it now because I was actually the police program manager in INL for the Afghanistan program from 2001 to 2006 and when I look back during that period of time and I look back at the sustained programs the programs that INL was running at the time that have had the most impact and the longest running capacity they are actually I think personally in my opinion the justice sector programs and I think in part that is actually because they were smaller and they were more targeted and I think when you look at programs we are constantly looking for ways to scale up and scaling up is good to a point but if you want to be able to effectively work with local organization and grassroots you don't want to scale to the point that they can no longer reasonably absorb the resistance that you are giving them and use it effectively so I just offer that cautionary note on sustainability that sometimes smaller and slower is better in the long run so now there are two questions that were outstanding the gentleman in the tan suit with the red tie and then the woman I can't see her name in the red shirt with the black jacket so that gentlemen you are right next to him there you go good morning and I want to thank everybody wonderful forum I'm Lazarus from Cameroon and I'm a member of a non-governmental organization tan global foundation here in high real Maryland we are an organization fighting for humanitarian activities peace and human rights we focus in Africa Latin America Asia and America itself I'm very impressed with the panelist observations and I want to draw my observation back home from Cameroon where I come from I thought women's right in Cameroon was very advanced but from the discussions I've got here I discover that we are very far behind when it comes to gender equality because back home in my country we still have certain positions in government that from independence up to now no woman has ever been appointed to and we have I thought we are advanced because we have created a ministry for women and the family but then I have discovered that we still have much to do when it comes to gender equality because we most of our women still refer back to the customs when there are disputes and they always feel that the man has is the head has a hopper and that is always right and that stems from the culture but in recent times because of that culture I believe their rights are being encouraged and there's much violation and we now have women women are more in population than we the men and I think that if the women are empowered they will be able to do more contributions and I think that we will be able to have an enabling environment for peace and development so what I want to find out is what contributions can the institutions that we have in place and the international community do to make this meaningful change to some of our third world countries like Cameroon and others where gender equality is still very far behind especially appointment of women to certain positions of power where they can make and implement the meaningful change that is required thank you hi I'm Nazi I work for PAE Incorporated I'm here with my colleague Lynn Holland as well we are currently implementing a justice sector support program it's actually from INL which Danielle is very much well aware of it's the largest justice program actually in Afghanistan so I wanted to just ask a couple of questions Danielle you mentioned earlier that legal protections for women there is growth in that and I guess my question is what are some indicators of that just because of the fact that we've seen the incident with Farkunda and as Paul Washa mentioned there is a spike in suicide rates so what are the can you elaborate on what indicators there are that show that it is actually improving and possibly in terms of monitoring and evaluation do we see any new ways of measuring thanks so much since we're almost out of time I'm going to ask as you respond to get some closing remarks and I'm sure you'll all have a great opportunity to discuss to the rest of the day any questions you didn't get to ask right we're just laying the groundwork so I am not particularly familiar with Cameroon but just with regard to appointing ministry of women's empowerment or what the specific that it's called I would say two things first of all having that ministry can be very important for the rest of the government if it gets funded and has quality staff and has a system to reach into all the other ministries often times we find that they are under staffed underfunded and completely segregated from the way that a whole rest of the government works so making that it's a great first step but making sure that that within the system representatives from the ministry have impact on the other ministries and then the second part is appointing of women in non-traditional positions so the head of the ministry of domestic affairs or defense or finance and or natural resources all of these that we aren't just having women as the charge of health, education and women's issues my favorite sports my favorite for South Africa was women, youth and sports but really engaging women across the whole government and then with regard to customs and what form of law you choose to engage in sometimes the known is more comforting than the unknown and often times with formal legal systems as they are new or very formal or outside even your geographic region so you just don't know the people that you would be going to speak to it is very intimidating and so for both men and women they might want to engage and the great example of you know the outcome you might not be so assured that it's going to be positive in your way but at least you know the people or who are deciding it so you have some relationship with them and so it's all I think in both men and women sometimes although you might not think the customary law might be the best theoretically but in your everyday life it might be the most accessible and the most understandable and the most thing that you think will both be both fair but also accepted by your communities so kind of takes us back around to where we started so well first I just want to backtrack to the sustainability question because hearing what others on the panel were saying sort of jogged a few things in my mind first I'd like to really reiterate the point that Angelique made which is throwing more money at something doesn't necessarily mean that you're effectively scaling up so I think that when designing programs and when looking at expanding programs you have to be really responsible and we have to be really responsible about doing so in a way that will be more effective as opposed to that will just be bigger and I think this is something that we think about from the outset at least from the IELL perspective we build sustainability into our programs we have sustainability plans for our programs and we've seen a move towards capacity building programs so rather than giving for you know rather than figuratively giving people a fish we teach people how to fish so I just wanted to make sure I added that piece Netsi you've raised some really interesting questions and they actually reminded me of some other things that I really wanted to make a point of bringing up so to specifically to address indicators of growth of women's protections I think that we've seen a real increase in Afghanistan specifically we've seen a real increase in cases that are tried under the EVA law specifically and so for example in the 8 EVA units that IELL has a strong engagement with and strong support for in 2014 alone those 8 EVA units registered almost 1800 cases and over 1300 of those were under the EVA law so it's not just that the laws exist but that they're being appropriately applied and I think that sort of the question of M&E raises this tension working on women's issues and particularly on women's legal rights where there is a tension between wanting to do proper monitoring and oversight of the program and wanting to respect the right to confidentiality of the beneficiaries and I think that's a really tough line to walk and it's something that we try to be very careful about that we ask the information that we need to in order to effectively and responsibly oversee our programs without breaching someone's rights the last thing that I want to raise is I think we have to acknowledge responsibly what we know and what we don't know and what we can do and what we can't do so coming from the IELL perspective our mandate is criminal justice working with criminal justice systems so we don't have purview into civil law or into land rights issues or into the informal justice system and so we work very closely with our partners at USAID and others to try and keep an eye on the fuller picture but if a large percentage of women's cases are civil law issues and it's about divorce or land rights we don't have full purview over that and we have to acknowledge that we don't have eyes on the full system and I guess in closing I'd say that I think a theme of the day will probably be the importance of geographically specific and geographically relevant programming and I think it's important to be really flexible when you know there's this tension between wanting to have a very clear work plan and M&E plan and wanting to have it all laid out at the beginning so we can have a responsible program and responsible oversight of the program but I think there should also be some flexibility to the extent that we can so that we can figure out what we don't know and what we have to adjust for so in the Afghan context specifically we did not or I did not necessarily know when we when I first came into this I didn't think about restrictions around women's travel and so we would talk about how we want to get all these stakeholders together in the capital to talk about women's issues but it's not easy for women from the provinces to get to Kabul and so we had to then make some adjustments and make sure that we had appropriate budgeting and appropriate support for male escorts and that was one thing that we had to be a little bit flexible on so I think just keeping in mind that you don't know everything going in and leaving enough room for flexibility to adapt. I know we're a bit over but I'm just going to offer two closing thoughts and I promise that they're quick one is that even though by training I'm a lawyer I always specialized in police assistance programs and I did so for a reason because I don't think you can have an effective criminal justice system if only one part of it is working and so I encourage you throughout the rest of the day to think about how you bring law enforcement and other parts of the justice sector into this conversation to ensure they can actually interact in a way that is positively reinforcing each other and the other is that to the extent that these issues we're talking about and I think on your point Danielle it's not just about the legal system it's also about social empowerment economic empowerment and all these other pictures I genuinely do believe that national policies like national action plans are potentially an effective tool for elevating women's legal empowerment but doing so in a way that also reflects issues like national support of their ability to travel and access the legal system do they have the access to the education to understand their rights and know how to effectively use the tools at their disposal so I encourage you to think of those tools as you engage in your conversations and thanks so very much for your attention this was a great discussion thanks just to say thank you all and thank you for making it look good for picking the right people just a quick note please make sure that as you look into the back of the program there's an evaluation sheet and part of the way that we improve our symposia and can improve in other ways is to please fill that out I know that many of you have busy schedules and you'll be in and out so please take a moment as you can to to complete that and we will move on to the next panel very promptly thank you first panel that's fine that's the point I need you it's fine it's the way you see it how can we access the power of money but many of you will see what's going on I don't know I want to say next slide are you good with the next slide next slide yeah just make sure thank you thank you let's hope so it's not true it's not true yeah yeah travel it's very important yes all easier is to be yes we talked about I'm not sure. I suppose it's good. I'm not sure. I guess we'll just take the rest of the room. I'm just going to hold on very much. I'll be right back. I feel like I have to do this. I don't think so. I don't know. I'm not sure. I'm just going to make my room. I'm just going to make my room. I'm just going to make my room. I'm just going to have a bite with that. I was sort of trying to find a place to be. I've got an app that wrote to your page. Oh yeah! I'm going to get back to you this afternoon. Only because we've been sitting for an hour and a half or so, but you have to digest what we've heard a little bit and sort of come back in. My name is Wade Channel. I'm a senior economic growth advisor for gender in the Office of Women's Empowerment and Gender Equality at USAID. It is privileged to be here. I'm thankful to our sponsors and to our multiple participants and for all of you who are here to discuss and engage issues that late in life I have become very passionate about.  I did indeed have a silver spoon. My wife likes to remind me of that. I don't remember it being in my mouth, but yes, I had a silver spoon. And I grew up on the wrong side of every social movement in America. It's been a long journey and it is a journey that takes time for many, but I know from my own experience that changes are possible and significant ones are possible. So it's wonderful to be here in this context. We have an official name for this panel, but I'm going to give you the way I see the panel. It's really about the promise and limits of law for women's empowerment. We're focusing a bit more about economic empowerment on this particular panel. We know those of us who have spent much time in this know that economic empowerment cannot be separated from social empowerment, political empowerment, cultural empowerment, educational empowerment. If there's a realm of empowerment, they are intertwined inextricably. And sometimes we run a danger of focusing on only one aspect, but I think we also must focus individually on these aspects, and we will be looking more at economic this morning. Let me introduce my panel. I will first introduce by saying, unfortunately, Lele Muni was not able to be with us. The reality of life often trumps the plans in life and she could not make it, so we're sorry not to have her with us, but I have come to the conclusion that having more time for existing panelists is never a bad thing. So I'm very pleased that we'll be starting off with a pretty broad view of law and women through Sarah Iqbal, who's the manager of the Women Business and the Law Program at the World Bank after many years with the Doing Business Project. To me, perhaps the greatest set of rule of law indicators in the development world. Most people think that doing business is economic. There's not a single economic indicator in the whole list. It's all about rule of law, empowerment, governance, etc. And now she and others at the bank have recognized that there was a gap. It was not gender-aware, and it was explicitly recognized as not gender-aware. So Sarah and others have led to remarkable development of women business and the law, looking this year at the full 189 economies covered by the World Bank's other research units. After her, we have the pleasure of Elisa Scalise, who is a land law expert, land and not only law, but the customary side. She's worked in 10 rather markedly customary countries on these issues. If you can check, I'm not going to read the bios to you. I think most of you are already doing that, and I'd rather have them talk or steal a little time for myself, I guess. But Elisa is going to go very specific and look at land rights and how women are able to claim, enforce, enjoy, or not the rights that law may have given them and that custom may have compromised. So with that, let me turn to Sarah. Thank you so much, Wade, for that great introduction. And perhaps I can go a little bit more into depth about sort of the genesis of the women business and the law project, because as Wade mentioned, it does really spring from an acknowledgement that the doing business indicators are not gender-aware. And really that acknowledgement came in about 2008 when we started the women business and law work. The idea at the time was to incorporate gender or rather to see how gender could be incorporated within the doing business indicators. And what we saw really when we included some gender questions in about six of the doing business indicators was that when you cycle through the business environment, when you look at how SMEs go through the rule of law environment, it really doesn't affect women or men differently. The process is, for example, inserting a business and employing workers and sort of closing a business, dealing with bankruptcy, all of that. It should not affect whether a woman is running that SME. But rather the problem for women is another area of law that actually prevents them from getting to that level. So as a former boss of mine used to like to present it, basically if you think of a monopoly board, there is another set of laws that may prevent women from actually getting past go to opening up an SME to sort of moving forward in the business environment side. And really that's the areas that we look at. So for example, are there restrictions in family law? Are there restrictions in property law? Is there another set of personal law that may prevent women from actually participating in the business environment? What are the obstacles that women face as women when it comes to participating in rule of law activities? And how do we measure that? How do we look at that sort of across all of the 189 economies that the World Bank covers? So we started with a smaller set of economies. Over the past six years, we've been increasing these measurements. And so what women business and the law does is really look at the laws and regulations that prevent women from participating in economic activity. And so sort of on the next slide, you should be able to see the indicators that we cover. And right now we have seven indicator areas that have been sort of designed to measure the impediments or incentives that women have when it comes to accessing the legal environment and to look at linkages between that and economic outcomes. So for example, in accessing institutions, we look at basic legal capacity issues. You know, can women start a business in the same way as men? Can they interact with public authorities? To get into USIP this morning, I needed to show my driver's license. Well, we look at things like national identity cards. Can men and women get them in the same way? Because a national identity card is a precursor to almost everything, and this is in the formal environment, but also in the informal environment. You need these kind of proofs of identification. We look at travel restrictions on the basis of gender. Do women need their husband's permission to get a passport? To do, you know, really sort of things that you would do in the normal course of business, but also in the normal course of living your life. In terms of registering your kids at school, getting access to the health system, all of these precursor issues. In using property, we also look at women's ability to own, manage, control, and inherit property. And it's kind of looking at women's access to the bundle of rights around property. And this is something that Elisa will speak to, I think, more in-depth. In getting a job, we look at restrictions on women's work, prohibitions on working at night or in certain industries, but also at maternity, paternity, parental leave regimes, retirement ages, whether they're gender disaggregated in terms of the age that women can retire or their pension benefits. In providing incentives to work, we look at personal income tax liabilities, taking into account tax deductions and credits that are available on the basis of gender. And then we also look at processes that can help SMEs because women have been identified to be, women-owned businesses, rather, have been identified to be more likely to be home-based, more likely to be smaller, more likely to be informal. So we look at other ways that women can build their credit histories because they have less access to property. And in developing countries, in particular, sort of banks look at ownership of property for collateral purposes. And because women have less access to property, we look at other ways that they may be able to build up credit histories, including through the rules of private credit bureaus and public credit registries. And then we look at sort of access to justice issues through a narrow lens, looking at the availability and access to small claims courts. We also look at whether customary courts exist in a particular jurisdiction or personal law courts. And then we had a new pilot indicator on protecting women from violence, looking at the laws and regulations around domestic violence and sexual harassment. And that indicator will be scaled up in the next iteration of the dataset, which will be coming out this September. And in the next slide, you'll see the data, the global data that I'm presenting is from our last iteration, which came out in 2013. But the dataset updates every two years, and the next one will be coming out in a few months, actually. So you'll see that women still face challenges across all of these areas. And in the 143 economies that we've previously covered, almost 90% had at least one legal difference under the formal legal system restricting women's economic opportunities. And this was across developing and developed economies, although among the 28 economies that had 10 or more of these restrictions, 25 were in the Middle East and North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa slide. So this is an interesting slide. It shows some of the actions that married women legally cannot take in the same way as married men in some economies. And essentially, the way that we disaggregate this data is we look at the situation of married women contrasted with married men and single women contrasted with single men. And essentially, there's almost no economy that we cover where single women have less rights than single men. But we find in the act of getting married what happens is women give up a lot of their legal rights to their husband. The number one restriction we see is being head of household, and that was discussed a little bit in the last panel. But what's interesting, and I do want to flag this for you, is essentially the head of household requirement in a lot of countries actually has a lot of other requirements that are attached to it. So certain tax deductions, for example, can only go to the head of household.  You'll end up paying higher income taxes on the same amount of income. In certain economies, there are subsidies from the government that go to the head of household. So for example, in Indonesia, there's a subsidy on rights that goes to the head of household.  There's also pension rights that go with that. You know, there's a lot of downstream things that people don't often look at. Choosing where to live is another requirement sort of that married women can't legally do in the same way. Conferring citizenship on children, that's actually a big issue in a lot of Middle Eastern and North African economies, because if you look at it, the biggest employer in those economies is the public sector. And one of the requirements in a lot of economies to be employed in the public sector is to be a citizen.  All of those kids, their citizenship will flow from their father. They won't be able to get jobs in the public sector. And there are a lot of women's groups in the Middle Eastern and North Africa who actually advocate on this issue to be able to grant citizenship to their children because for them it's a core economic issue. It also relates to, for example, getting access to certain schooling, access to health benefits. And one of the things that we try to educate our colleagues at the bank about is the fact that if you don't look at these aggregate restrictions on a sort of macro level, you won't realize that the beneficiaries you're trying to target in your program design may not be targeted at all because they're just blocked out of that because of these larger issues that you're not taking into account. So on the next slide, you'll see something called a marital authorization letter. And this is actually from a business registry in Congo DRC. So a colleague of mine was working on a project in DRC and she went down to the business registry. And essentially, because of some of these family law restrictions that I was talking about in Congo DRC, married women can't register a business. They also can't register property and do, you know, open a bank account, all of these things without permission from their husband. So this letter is basically allowing a married woman to register a business based on the authorization of her husband. And it's part of the record of the registry.  So that's next slide, please. So one of the things that we did, and this is I think particularly relevant in the context of cultural and customary restrictions that we were talking about earlier, is we actually measured restrictions over 50 years. So we developed a time series of data going from 2060 to 2010, looking at the reform of restrictions in two areas. Legal capacity and property rights in 100 countries. And this graph demonstrates sort of how these have been reformed over the past 50 years since 1960. And what was particularly interesting for me is the level of reform that's happened over the past half century. So you'll see these types of restrictions were actually fairly prevalent in OECD high-income economies. They were prevalent in Latin America and the Caribbean. They were prevalent in Sub-Saharan Africa. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the level of restrictions has gone down by 50%. That's huge. In OECD high-income economies, it's gone down completely. And I do want to flag this for you because a lot of times people will say, well, these types of restrictions, they're very culturally sensitive and they are culturally sensitive. And they'll say, this is part of our culture, but quite frankly, it was part of the culture in France, in Switzerland, in Germany, in the United States. These things have been reformed over time. But in France, husbands were the head of household. They could allow or disallow their wives from working until the early 70s. In Spain, it was until the 80s where husbands could control basically any economic action that their wives did. This was reformed after, actually, the fall of the Franco regime. And what happened in Latin America is you saw these restrictions being removed throughout the 80s after the Spanish law changed. So you could almost map it on a timeline, and we have done so, in fact, where you saw restrictions being removed in Argentina, in Brazil, in Uruguay, in Paraguay, after the colonial regimes changed their own restrictions. In Switzerland, these were actually reformed very, very late into the game. And Switzerland is held as an exemplar of a lot of human rights issues. But actually, women's rights changed, I would say, in the early 80s when they started removing some of these restrictions. And it's not an area that we look at, for example, voting rights. But if you look at the history of women's voting rights, I believe Switzerland was the last developed economy to grant women voting rights at the Canton level. And that was in the 80s. I have colleagues who are Swiss, and they'll talk about their moms needing permission from their dads to do basic economic activities. So it's not just a cultural issue, and these things do change. And they've changed relatively recently over time. And what's interesting is I've worked on technical assistance programs in Sub-Saharan Africa. I've spoken to colleagues sort of in West Africa. And you mentioned earlier your question about Cameroon, about sort of head of household requirements and things like that. We've seen in the case of Cote d'Ivoire, we've seen in Togo, we've seen in DRC, some of these restrictions were actually not present prior to the colonial regime coming in. So you can almost map it against the French codes. The French brought in this legal system, they left, they reformed their own laws, but a lot of the family law in West Africa is actually verbatim from the Code Napoleon. And you can, the numbers of the provisions are the same, the language is the same. I actually think customary law in Sub-Saharan Africa was a lot more fluid on women's rights. But when the formal systems were locked in, the colonial systems were not that great on women's rights, and those provisions have actually remained on the books. So it may not be a question of culture going back that long, but it may be a question of imported culture that was codified and removed the fluidity of some of the customary regimes that were in place before. And that's actually, I think that's quite enlightening for a lot of people who don't know the history of the legal systems and sort of the legal sources. And when you talk to women's rights groups on the ground in Sub-Saharan Africa, they're actually very familiar with this. But maybe some of the formal regimes aren't that aware because women's rights issues are not at the forefront in a lot of sort of domestic policy issues. So on the next slide, you'll see just some basic, sort of, we did some interesting associations with other economic outcomes. So gender-based legal restrictions are associated with lower female participation in the ownership of firms. So essentially, the more restrictions you have on women's economic activity, the less women you'll have owning firms, which actually makes a lot of sense. And you'll see on the next slide, so in addition to measuring the restrictions on women's economic activity, we also measure incentives. So where economies have put in place, for example, quotas on women's participation in parliaments, quotas on women's participation in things like corporate boards, also paternity leave, maternity leave, breastfeeding breaks for mothers, where women are allowed to come back to their jobs after maternity leave, non-discrimination, hiring practices. And this is just an interesting relationship. The economies that provide greater incentives, sorry, rather the economies that have more restrictions on women's legal rights also tend to provide fewer incentives. So not only are they restricting women from participating in economic activity, they're also not encouraging them from doing so. And that we found actually pretty interesting. On the next slide, you'll see the relationship between women having more incentives to participate in an economic activity, where women have greater incentives, there's also greater income equality for the economy as a whole. And that, I think, also makes intuitive sense where you're encouraging women to work, i.e. where you're opening it up for the whole population. You also have greater income equality as a whole. And on the next slide, I just want to talk a little bit about customary law. And I do want to take this with a grain of salt. So where we measure customary law, we don't measure what the customary law is, because it's not really feasible to measure customary law in that way, but rather we look at the recognition of customary law under the constitutional regime. So, for example, does the Constitution recognize customary law? And this is for Sub-Saharan Africa, this graph in particular. And if the Constitution recognizes customary law, is it exempt from non-discrimination based on gender within the constitutional framework? i.e. sort of most and actually all constitutions in Sub-Saharan Africa recognize principles, broader principles of non-discrimination or equality that's very common language in constitutions. However, some of them exempt customary law from broader principles of non-discrimination. And the question is, if customary law is exempted, what is the recourse? What is the recourse for women? Can you bring strategic impact litigation? There are all these downstream sort of applications from the exemption or non-exemption of customary law from non-discrimination. And countries that recognize customary law is prevailing in areas such as marriage, property inherent and exempted from non-discrimination provisions include Botswana, Lesotho, Gambia, Ghana, Mauritius, Zambia, Zimbabwe. There are a lot of them, but it is changing. So, for example, in Kenya that used to be the case, but with its new constitution in 2010, they actually brought customary law within the purview of constitutional non-discrimination provisions. And on the next slide, you'll see approximately half of the constitutions in sub-Saharan Africa formally recognize customary law and about a third of them recognize religious law. And a third of these constitutions specifically exempt customary law from principles of non-discrimination in areas of family law. And also land law is a particular issue that Alisa will speak more about, but I just wanted to point out that over 80% of land in Zambia is customary land and that falls outside the scope of statutory inheritance laws. So even where statutory laws may be better for women, it's not necessarily the case that they will have recourse to the system if customary law is exempt or outside of the constitutional framework of non-discrimination. And on the next slide, I just want to talk a little bit about case law. It can be positive or negative for women depending on the system and depending sort of on how case law is decided. So for example, the Afani Dhu case in 2010 in Swaziland. So married women, married in community of property which is generally better, is a better property framework. They can now jointly register joint property in their name. The discriminatory statute was declared unconstitutional but it can go both ways. For example, the 2004 case in Nigeria, the Mojaku case, where customary law favored male heirs, it was appalled and the Supreme Court held that customary law could not be rejected just because it did not recognize a role for women. And then I just want to talk a little bit about how reform can happen. What are good strategies for reform? And a lot of the reform that we've seen on the next slide, sorry, if you could go back one, is essentially on the basis of women's rights campaigns. So we've seen collective actions by women's networks actually work on changing the law in Kenya and Ethiopia. Also shadow reports to the CDOC committee. Strategic impact litigation is actually very big in some economies in Sub-Saharan Africa. I want to point out Botswana, which has two key cases. The Unity Dao case in 1995 that had to do with nationality rights for women being able to confer them on their children. Unity Dao is actually a landmark case. And the Mu Mu Si case, which just came out a few years ago on Botswana was on inheritance rights as well. So courts have been a major driver in this effort. And then on the next slide, I just want to talk about two things that we have seen that help catalyze reform. And this we saw with the time series that we built over 50 years. The questions were, what are the major drivers of reform? And there were really two major drivers of reform that we saw. One was actually human rights law. So CDOC, the convention eliminating discrimination against women helped catalyze reforms. Sort of rates of reform doubled within five years of a country ratifying CDOC. So that was a major driver. And the next slide will show the other major driver we saw, which is really women legislatures. Women legislators raised the probability of reforms across the board. So the constraints lessened where you started seeing greater women in power. And we've seen country level as well at the local level. The same thing happens. There's some studies that came out of India demonstrating the effect of women coming into power at the local level, at the Punjab level, where they started focusing on issues that were more relevant towards women. And finally, on the next slide, I want to talk about some of the economic outcomes that really come from improving these legal provisions for women. So there's a recent research paper that came out in the Journal of Feminist Economics that shows a strong positive relationship between having legislation on non-discrimination and hiring on the basis of gender and women's employment relative to men. We've seen in India after the reform of the Hindu Succession Act that it actually led to greater investment in girls' education, higher rates of female bank account ownership, and actually a greater likelihood of having a sanitary latrine in the home. And essentially, it's a question of better reflecting women's preferences when you give them greater agency in the household decision making. And in Ethiopia, we saw with the reform of the family law where they removed the provision where the husband could basically control his wife's employment. And that's a provision that we see in family law in a lot of places where a husband can stop a wife from working outside the home if he believes it's not in the wife's interest. He can actually get her fired if he feels that's not in the interest of the family. In Ethiopia, they also introduced joint titling and a few other provisions as well. And it increased female labor force participation and resulted in more women working outside the home and in more productive sectors. Actually, there are a lot of linkages between legal empowerment for women and outcomes on voice, outcomes on agency. The IMF has done some recent work lately looking at women's labor force participation and actually the linkage between better laws, more equal laws for women and sort of macroeconomic outcomes for the economy as a whole. And there's a whole body of research that's growing in these areas. And I think it's great to have the data available to do this research. And the last slide is just our website. So all of this data is available on our website at WBL.worldbank.org. And as Wade said, we are increasing the size of the data set to look at more economies and that will be coming out in September. Thank you. Thank you, Sarah. And I'd like to just move immediately to Elisa, who I did not mention. Not only is she a lawyer as are we all up here. Actually, how many are lawyers in this room? Yeah, you can feel it. Good. She is a co-founder and head of resource equity, NGO that's not NGO, but a company that is doing work to advance women's rights to land and natural resources. So very well positioned to talk about this next topic from having gone through these broad range of restrictions or constraints to women's empowerment to land. Take her away. Yes, Wade and Sarah. I'm going to speak about strengthening land rights for women in legally pluralistic settings and I'll do this by reference to some of our work in Uganda and try to weave in some examples throughout the presentation. I'm glad to hear that land rights have come up so much in other presentations this morning and in what Sarah was just mentioning and also that there are some similar themes and hopefully you're human me getting into the weeds a little bit as we kind of dig into land rights for women in these contexts. Legal pluralism is pertinent for when considering land rights and women's land rights. And this is because land rights generally exist in legally pluralistic settings, usually because of the history of colonisation where statutory and often foreign property rights systems were imposed over customary systems that pre-existed them and also most major political reforms include major land tenure reforms and they're not always completely successful at replacing what went before them. Today, as Sarah mentioned there's also a trend to recognise customary land tenure in statutes without really reconciling some of the inconsistencies with other laws and that kind of creates an internal plurality. When you're looking specifically at women's land rights they tend to be at the intersection of customary, sometimes religious and statutory law. And this is because customary law at its core is family law, it's how families and communities behave toward one another and family law has the biggest impact on women's land rights. So men tend to have rights to land by birth and women tend to have rights to land that relate to life events such as marriage, death of a spouse or bearing children. And at the same time statutory laws governing family are often the site of change in property rights in that it's in those laws that you'll find provisions that grant women rights that they may not have had under customs, so marital property regimes and inheritance laws as an example. And customary laws as we've heard earlier this morning tend to have a strong imbalance in favour of men but can be more relevant and legitimate than statutory law. And although statutory law offers improvements that aim for equality for men and women implemented or influential. So if we look at Northern Uganda where we worked on a project that I'll speak a little bit more about customary land tenure rules in Northern Uganda statutory institutions exist but they're very weak. And under customary law superior rights to land are held by the clan and the clan grants perpetual rights to use and manage parcels of land to male members of the lineage. Those rights can be inherited by sons. Women gain rights to use land through a relationship with a male member of the lineage. So that's through their husbands if they're married through their fathers when they're unmarried and sometimes by virtue of having children who are members of the lineage. But their use rights are linked to the relationships so their rights can end and change as those relationships end and change. Compare that to the statutory situation in Uganda where the constitution prohibits discrimination between men and women. Customary land tenure and distribution law provides for equal inheritance between male and female children and some inheritance rights for spouses though they're largely insufficient. And to further colour the picture the new land policy in Uganda seeks to both further protect customary land tenure and to address discrimination against women on land matters so it creates a clash. The Uganda example is a good one to start with because it helps show a key point that I want to make I think other people have made it too. And that is that it's important to recognise the pluralist system but it's also important to understand that no one system is necessarily better than the other when it comes to strengthening land rights and that each system presents problems and also offers solutions. For example as I said the customary system in Northern Uganda is unbalanced in favour of men and can leave women destitute if they're widowed or abandoned. But it has very strong local legitimacy and it's directly relevant to the day-to-day women who live there. On the other hand the statutory system offers stronger rights for women, rights that would leave women much less vulnerable in the event of divorce or if their husband died but it's not implemented in the area where we worked. So if we take this situation of different systems each with problems and gaps and opportunities I think it begs the question how can you strengthen land rights for women how can you capitalise on those gaps and opportunities so that it actually works to make a difference for women. So here's another question that I posed for you all by presenting a framework for women's land tenure security which we developed, tested and evaluated in Northern Uganda and subsequently in other places as well. I'll start by showing the framework and then use the Northern Uganda project to show how it applied in practice. The framework takes a holistic view of the social, cultural and legal factors that underpin land tenure security. It includes women's land rights it has subjective and objective elements and can be used to assess, design implement, monitor and evaluate interventions. And this matters for legally pluralistic context be