A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [134]
Business trips became field trips. When Ann and Nayar traveled together, it was Nayar’s job to make sure Ann could get coffee at five a.m., as soon as she got up. In Jakarta, Ann took Nayar into the kampungs and in pursuit of the best street food: “Oh my God, my taste buds have finally come alive!” Nayar remembered her saying. In other cities, there were outings to anthropological museums and art museums and shops specializing in silver jewelry: “I will have to starve for the rest of the month, but I had to get this silver and turquoise thing,” Ann would say, according to Nayar. “Isn’t it magnificent?” Several younger colleagues suggested to Ann that they should all live together in Bali. “We talked about Alice Dewey’s house, so we said, ‘Ann, why don’t you set up a house for us in Bali and we’ll come there and do our dissertations together?’” Nayar recalled. “‘You can be one of our readers. We’ll take care of you and you can take care of our dissertations.’ She thought it was a brilliant idea.” Ann was a mentor to several younger women, but she had her limits. On the elevator one day, Brinley Bruton, who had been trying her hand at fiction, asked Ann if she would read one of her stories. “Which was, in fact, ‘I want you to read this story and tell me it’s wonderful,’” Bruton remembered. Unapologetically, Ann declined. “I came out of it feeling a little hurt,” Bruton told me. “But in retrospect, I have respect for her. She wasn’t going to pretend.”
Ann arrived at Women’s World Banking during the long lead-up to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, which was to be held in Beijing in September 1995. To organizations like Women’s World Banking, the conference offered an opportunity to promote their agenda. Discussions of the status of women had tended to focus on matters like health, education, and reproductive rights. But women made up the majority of the economically active poor in the world. Over the previous two decades, institutions had begun offering financial services for low-income women producers and entrepreneurs. As a result, their enterprises had flourished and the role of women in the economy had grown. Yet even the leading microfinance institutions were reaching only a tiny fraction of the women who could benefit. Women’s World Banking saw the conference, and a parallel forum for nongovernmental organizations, as a chance to change the policies of governments, banks, and donors so that financial services to the poor could grow. Ann made the case to Barry that Women’s World Banking ought to play a role in organizing many of the disparate microfinance institutions into a movement. If a coalition of organizations could agree on an agenda and demonstrate the contributions of low-income women to economic development, it could catapult the issue of microfinance into a prominent place in the “platform of action” that would eventually be endorsed by the nearly two hundred countries expected to be represented in Beijing.
Barry was skeptical about Ann’s suggestion of a coalition. She saw the other organizations as competitors vying for the favor of a finite number of donors. Women’s World Banking had worked hard in its early years to differentiate itself from the others, defining itself in part by what it was not. That is, it was not like Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, one of the largest and most successful financial intermediaries focused on the rural poor; it was not like ACCION International, another microfinance organization with a network of lending partners. Barry, who had been on the board of Women’s World Banking during those early years, had been influenced by what she later called “that kind of insular, go-it-alone, we-are-the-best, we-are-different mentality.” She doubted that some groups would be willing to collaborate. She worried that time would be wasted trying to bring together organizations