Because microfinance is so manageable in terms of the size of the loan, people have made it the cornerstone to lifting women out of poverty. – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
In Nigeria, along with its West African neighbor Ghana, women are now starting businesses in greater numbers than men. – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
I don’t often think of Donald Trump, but his daughter is very smart. She’s a woman working in real estate, which is predominantly men, and she’s both savvy and articulate about her business and her business acumen. – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
What I learned at journalism school and at ABC – those skills are the same no matter where you are in the world. – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
My mother never asked me whether I wanted to go to college, but told me I was going – to the University of Maryland on an academic scholarship. – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
The women of Afghanistan have a voice, and it needs to be heard and not forgotten. – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
Microfinance does not require previous experience or loans to the same extent as a small-business loan, so it’s easier for women to enter the micro sector. – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
Educating girls just one year beyond the average fourth grade education increases their eventual earnings by 10 to 20 percent. Every additional year of secondary education can increase future wages by 15 to 25 percent. – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
In Afghanistan, life is so fragile; who knows what the next week will bring? That fragility really affects the way you’re able to report, and the kind of stories people will tell you. – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
I think for larger-scale entrepreneurship, it’s true – for men and women – that people who already have capital tend to do better. – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
When the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996 after a searing, four-year civil war, they immediately instituted laws which fit their utopic vision of the time of Islam’s founding more than 1,300 years earlier. Afghan women’s lives offered the most visible sign of the imagined past to which Afghanistan’s present was to be returned. – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
My mother worked at the telephone company during the day and sold Tupperware at night. Evenings, she took classes when she could at University of Maryland’s University College, bringing me along to do homework while she studied to get the degree she hoped would offer her and me greater opportunities. – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
I’m a really bad driver. When I’m in L.A. my husband always has to park the car for me, because I’m likely to hit something. – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
Educated mothers are 50 percent more likely to immunize their children than mothers with no schooling. – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
A social entrepreneur finds market-based solutions for change. Because without a market-based solution, without a sustainable solution, you go nowhere. – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
The one thing you learn from looking at places like Afghanistan is that the power of business to do good is enormous. – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
The draconian prohibitions of the Taliban years and the gains Afghan women have achieved since the Taliban government was overthrown in 2001 are now well known and often cited: Today, Afghans lucky enough to live in secure regions can go to school, women may work in offices, and the burqa is no longer mandatory. – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
When people can’t feed their children, nothing else positive happens. You don’t have to look farther than the United States to see that. – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
No one argues with the many benefits of breastfeeding for those women who choose it. – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
I think entrepreneurs are born and not created, and so I think you see a lot of similarities among entrepreneurs in different parts of the world. Their backdrop may be very different, but their drive to create a business and to create jobs remains very much the same, whether it’s in Silicon Valley or Kandahar or Kabul. – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
We are so used to seeing women as victims of war to be pitied rather than survivors of war to be respected. – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
It is high time to declare an end to the breastfeeding dictatorship that is drowning women in guilt and worry just when they most need support: after the birth of a child. – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
I think that sometimes people are frightened to take the risk of entrepreneurship. – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
No woman in Afghanistan is in business without support from either her husband or her father or her uncle, someone. – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
Entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone, and not everyone is going to be an entrepreneur, but women who turn to business, turn to economics, because there are people depending on them, I think that their creativity, their resilience, their spirit, embody what’s best about entrepreneurship. – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
