A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [136]
As Barry herself put it, “Because of my pigheadedness, you actually had to be pigheaded to get your way.” Each person in the office had her own approach. Wanjiku Kibui, the regional coordinator for Africa, would call Barry out, in a way that Barry appreciated, when she was, as Barry put it later, “misbehaving.” Niki Armacost, the communications coordinator, would find a better time. “Ann would just stay,” Barry remembered. “She would stay and fight.” On the question of the coalition of microfinance organizations, she would not back down. In a series of long, uncomfortable meetings with Barry, Ann insisted that Women’s World Banking use its influence for a greater good. To do otherwise would be small-minded and selfish. “We have to be grown-ups now,” Barry remembered Ann saying, in effect. “She would have used language like that.” Intentionally or not, Ann made Barry feel guilty: “I don’t think she was ever mean-spirited or nasty, but she could not have been more direct about what was at stake and why it was the right thing.”
Eventually, Barry relented. In October 1993, Women’s World Banking joined two dozen other microfinance organizations to form the International Coalition on Women and Credit. Its aim was to influence the opinions of policy-makers at a series of regional conferences leading up to Beijing. Coalition members would hold workshops, publicize the successes of microfinance and microenterprise, make policy recommendations, and lobby delegates. Finally, they would all converge on Beijing. At Barry’s insistence, Women’s World Banking became the secretariat for the coalition. It fell to Ann, as the policy and research coordinator, to marshal the data needed to back the claims that the coalition would be making and to take the lead in dealing with the other organizations.
That was not simple. The organizations were not merely competitive, they also differed as to how best to deliver financial services and the type of clients it was most important to reach. Now they were expected to put aside their differences and support a common objective. “It became like an infiltration,” Barry recalled. “If you picture all these regional and global meetings put on by the UN for the year or two in preparation for Beijing—complete chaos, all of these NGO leaders, strident, doing their thing, not at all respectful. If I’m in health, I don’t want microfinance to get primacy. Ann got all these coalition members showing up to these regional meetings around the world and getting the health and education people saying one thing: ‘The poor woman has to have an income. Then she can pay for education.’ So that whole bottom-up approach, getting disparate players to act to common cause? She pulled it off.”
Ann believed in it, said Lawrence Yanovitch, director of policy and research at FINCA, also known as the Foundation for International Community Assistance, a leader in village banking in Latin America, who served on the executive committee with Ann. That was simply her nature: She had little ego, he said, and she cared about the issues first. Barry told me, “She could be kind of a fat lady with big hair and a bohemian, but she was trying to do the right thing for the right reasons. And she did it with great intelligence and very strong rigor in terms of preparation and methodology and thinking through strategy.”
At the same time, the secretary general for the Beijing conference asked Women’s World Banking to chair an “expert group” on women and finance, to be made up of forty representatives of microfinance networks, development banks, government leaders, and others. In addition to Barry and Ann, the group included Dick Patten, Ann’s friend and longtime colleague; Ela Bhatt from the Self Employed Women’s Association; Muhammad Yunus, the founder and managing director of Grameen Bank, who would win