Please note this version of the afternoon program conversation has been transcribed from a taped version. Instances where comments were found to be inaudible are noted in the text.

I'm going to sit here because I am not a speaker -- I'm a respondent. And I must say, that you've had one riproaring speech. And let me say how honored I am to share this stage with Mamphela. And also, how privileged I feel to hear her and to hear her cry for a vision and an action that is profound and important in the 21st century.

I want to just share with you that I've known Mamphela nearly 20 years. And I first met her in 1984, in South Africa. She was a researcher. She had gotten her medical degree, but you were researching issues of labor in South Africa at the University of Cape Town.

And I believe, three foundations were funding part of that activity. The name of the project was called SALRU -- South African Labor Research Unit. And Mamphela was one of the very important researchers at the time, in 1984. And I believe there was a Carnegie Report that you produced. The Carnegie Foundation of New York Carnegie Corporation.

Now, we didn't know she was going to the World Bank. That's another story. About ten years ago I had the pleasure of attending Mamphela's inauguration as the first South African black woman to head the University of Cape Town. And the world "celebration" doesn't come close to helping you understand what happened that day and that place, where both Nelson Mandela and a traditional praise singer shared the stage; and where two choruses -- I remember this very well -- got up and sang two different songs of praise.

One, let's call kind of western and white. And another, South African and black. And then all of us clapped. And then, something rather miraculous happened, metaphorically. The two choruses combined and they sang together. I want you to know that this is one of the heroines of our time. And I want you to join me in giving Mamphela another round of applause.

So, four points of response. The first is -- ditto and amen to everything that Mamphela said with regard to celebrating our achievements and being mindful of how much we've fallen short, how much the world has fallen short in terms of gender equity.

This is very important. It's important because big foundations like the Ford Foundation -- and I won't name other foundations, but certainly the Ford Foundation too often, in the past, has come through with very good intentions, and I think, even good experiences to share from the so-called global North to the global South.

And I think this often has been an attempt to build alliances, make partnerships. But there is a resource disparity and it's very important for us in philanthropy, anyway, to pay attention to helping resource-poor institutions and organizations learn from resource-richer institutions on their own terms.

So, for example, I was asked to talk about Mamphela's remarks from the philanthropic standpoint, I would say one very important point for me is to make sure that when you talk about building alliances across boundaries -- which I will now plug Mamphela's book, Across Boundaries -- that you really ask yourself the questions of power and powerlessness.

And it is very important for you to understand that we want to empower people closest to the problem. And for that reason, I want to just underscore the importance that collaborations are terrific, but we shouldn't forget that they are not always equal. And there are power relations between those collaborations.

The second point of Mamphela's that I just want to underscore too, is her remarkable ability to both celebrate success and also challenge us with, if not failure, certainly the lack of progress. For me, I call it the ultimate paradox of the women's movement, the second women's movement so far.

And that is that women are now more powerful in the world as political actors than ever before in human history. It is true. It is true that we are only 15 percent worldwide of parliaments, but that's up from almost any benchmark any of us know.

And that has to do, I think, with what is being called the growing gap between the world's wealthy and the rest of the world. And so, you can sit here and talk about glasses half full and glasses half empty, but I think it is a reminder to all of us that the question of women's power and how it is used to empower others is really our agenda.

Because there are more women college presidents. There are more women who are tenured. There are more women in parliaments. There are more women, not overall, but in state legislatures, in municipal governments. And yet, we don't see the kind of payoff we had all hoped for.

Maybe it's not such a surprise. Maybe political scientists have told us that that might have been the case. It's a worry. I just call it the paradox of power.

The third point is a little bit of a challenge and a little bit of a critique of Mamphela's otherwise remarkable speech. And it has to do with a phrase that she uses in the speech, and I guess I would ask her at some point maybe to elaborate. It's a phrase that I found when she was describing the World Bank.

I sort of, I didn't choke, but I sort of said to myself -- why is private sector-led development really the kind of successful development? As a Foundation, we are very active in China. China still is very much a planned economy. It is changing and liberalizing along economic dimensions, if not, political dimensions.

But it does beg the question for me about a question that comes up all the time at the Ford Foundation -- how do states regulate the abuses of the private sector in an era of globalization and corporatization? And I feel that's something we need to look at a little more closely.

It's not that we disregard the private sector in development. It's just that sometimes the unbridled private sector is problematic and I know she's going to answer that question, but at least I thought that I would put it out.

I guess I have an interesting problem with the concept of human security. I say that, because knowing I was going to be on this panel with Mamphela, I went back to that very important report that Sadako Ogata and Amartya Sen produced called "Human Security Now."

On the one hand human security, seems to me, the right banner for feminists to fly. Human security feels, it has all the right bells and whistles, as a theme that we can embrace together. After all, the question of security is not just about state security and threats from without. It's also about threats from within.

On the other hand, living in the U.S. in a post-9/11 world, security is a word that is being used in so many different ways, to mask and disguise so many, let's call it, challenges to democracy and challenges to freedom -- that I just wonder a little bit about the phraseology, "human security."

We will hear it in the next presidential election a lot, and it will be employed on all sides. And for me, it's an important phrase to untangle and understand better. Security is how people scare people. And that is one of the fears I have about an over-reliance on that phrase, much as I like all of the rhetoric and discourse behind it.

So let me end by saying two things. One is that I think, as a group of women interested in social progress and social justice, we have a lot to learn from each other. Not just about the successes we have had, but our failures. And also, learn something from our critics -- the people who are arrayed against us.

I think some of the best analyses I have seen of late, of the feminist movement in this country and whether it has stalled and why and what women's issues are going forward, interestingly enough, has come from the people who would never use the word "feminism" and wouldn't use the words "gender equality."

Thanks.

Conversation between Dr. Bernstein and Dr. Ramphele:
Return to start

Adaora Udoji : Before we open up to questions from the audience, I'm going to allow the Doctor to respond to what Dr. Bernstein said. But first, it should be brought up, not dealing with these many issues on a regular basis, one of my first thoughts when I read through is his -- what is human security and what does that mean? Is it culturally specific? Is it possible to make a generalization of what that means and how a structure exists to implement that in some way or another?

So if you could both respond to that, and then we will go on to the questions about the private-led sector.

Mamphela Ramphele: I think that the term clearly has been used in a very creative way by Amartya Sen in a way that only he can really do. I know this because we used to sit in the kitchen of the masters lodge in Cambridge and talk about this.

And so, there is value in turning that around and using it as a way of saying, in a way, national security is not possible unless you have the security of human beings who therefore have a stake in keeping the sovereign secure.

And people who have full security that their dignity is in tact, that they have a future that is bright -- are unlikely to go across and do damage to other people. So there is a sense in which the way to the roots to global security and national security and even security in the community is to have greater equity and greater sharing of the good things of life. So that's, I think, the way they came at it.

There is a danger of the use of the term "security" because why are people preoccupied with security? It becomes an obsession because quite frankly, there is nothing secure; nothing is certain. But to assume that you can actually make your nation secure . . . it's probably why Americans were so shocked when 9/11 happened.

Many of us who grew up knowing this -- there is nothing secure. Nothing certain. Yes, it was a shocking experience but the fact of the matter is that it was the first time people in this country actually came face to face with what the rest of the world has had to cope with.

And in some cases, your country was not innocent in what the rest of the world did to (inaudible) the violation of their security. So I feel the use of the term "security" because of its link to certainty, I think a little bit of insecurity is good for us. It makes you a bit vulnerable and therefore, willing to engage with others and to listen more carefully rather than be so sure that your point of view is a valid one.

And that, I think, would make us, as a global community, a lot more willing to hear other people's points of view. Much more willing to be tolerant of other people's cultures. Much more ready to learn from others. But I think the term "security" is a double-edged sword.

Alison Bernstein: I very much agree with everything Mamphela said about how the phrase came to be. I'd add one other interesting dimension to it. Mrs. Ogata, when she was at the U.N., was the High Commissioner for Refugees. And I think that's very important because one of the issues of security which I do understand and do feel we need to pay more attention to, is the migrations of people all over the world.

Are we feeling secure in this world of the two great powers, the Soviet Union and the United States? It was Sen and Ogata's and others' desire to say -- you cannot have a secure state externally if the people inside are in such dire circumstances. So I buy that. But I do agree with Mamphela, that security is a funny concept. And it can be manipulated in the most dangerous ways.

Mamphela Ramphele: And now let me answer for my sins. I clearly have been brainwashed by the Washington location. I think really, when you look at it, the phrase "private sector-led" doesn't mean that you are giving the private sector the entire waterfronts to do as it pleases.

Because in that same paragraph, I talk about in a context in which the government is creating and enabling framework, which includes the (inaudible) framework, the legal framework, the judicial system -- so that there is accountability. First, by the government to its people, to make sure that the human capital base of the society is growing.

This is much more of a holistic approach that looks at financial sustainability, social sustainability and environmental sustainability. That's the kind of private sector-led approach I'm talking about. But I also am saying this deliberately because in the part of the world that I come from, governments are trying to do what they have never been trained to do.

They have not been trained to govern, which is a risk. But they then try and run the telcom system, the power system, the road system. It's a mess. And part of it is simply that all bureaucracies, however well-educated the people that run them are, they tend to be very difficult and inflexible in a number of ways.

And so, if you have a division of labor with a government as the enabler, the regulator, the protector of the commonwealth of a society, then you have the private sector where people are willing and able to take the kind of risk that makes for entrepreneurship.

Whereas, if we had this approach and we nurtured it in a responsible way . . . and by private sector, that includes the woman who stands at the corner selling her cakes. She is also in the private sector. As is the man who is doing interesting baskets and other things.

But take that several steps out. And take two countries, Ghana and Korea. They were at the same level of development in the 1960s. Where is Korea today? And where is Ghana? The difference is not that the Ghanians are less intelligent than the Koreans, but what the Koreans did was to work it out. The job of the government is to improve the quality of the human capital. They built schools. They made sure that education was there and that it was of high quality.

They created the social infrastructure. At the same time, encouraged the private sector to develop. Obviously, not with the kind of political system I would have liked to live in, but nonetheless, they did. There are political systems in Africa that are not doing this but that are equally bad. So that's what happened. So that's what I mean. But I stand chastised.

Alison Bernstein: Can I jump in here and help her?

Mamphela Ramphele: Thank you.

Alison Bernstein: I would not, for a moment, think that the issue is private sector or nothing. And both Mamphela and I agree that the environment that government creates is key to how the private sector behaves. But just let me give you two examples, one from the United States and one from overseas, and Ford's work and probably many of you know it.

In the United States, about a decade ago, Ford entered into a partnership with a number of corporations to look at their work and employment practices and how they disadvantaged women. Corning was one. Xerox was another. I'm now forgetting -- there were about five all together. I think Lucent was in it as well.

You have women who have young children, and men, but still disproportionately childcare is dependent on women. To make a long story short, there was an initiative. My former colleague, June Zeitlin, at Ford was one of the key operators in it. People at Simmons College took the lead in trying to do the research.

And the bottom line of this was, and I think bottom lines are important when you are working with the private sector, is that if they could demonstrate that there was a win from an economic standpoint, that they were more than prepared to loosen up and be more flexible with regard to the practices and policies that have affected women and men, especially around child care.

The overseas example, and I'm glad Mamphela mentioned social entrepreneurship and the vendors on the street -- probably one of the singlemost successful development schemes that we know of, anyway, was the Gramine Bank. The Gramine Bank was an example of making very small loans to women in Bangladesh, and now around the world.

And the most important thing about that bank, and it is a bank, is that the women themselves run it. And the repay rates are something like 85 or 90 percent. So as someone who made this a little provocative to talk a little bit about that, I think there are examples where partnerships between philanthropy, the private sector, the big world donors -- have proven to be effective strategies with regard to women's empowerment. And I don't think we can dismiss any sector.

It's just, for me anyway, the question of the government's responsibility. The state's responsibility for social protection and human security is probably the most important single responsibility. And it is as important as its military might.

Adaora Udoji: Do you want the last word on that?

Mamphela Ramphele: Well, no. I think I will leave it to, unless you have a follow-up question.

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