Who runs the world?
The most powerful women you’ve never heard of
Helen Clark, New Zealand
UN Development Program administrator As New Zealand’s prime minister, Helen Clark oversaw a decade of economic growth and won three straight terms in her post after a long career as a Labor Party legislator and Cabinet minister. Less than a year following her departure as Kiwi prime minister, however, Clark turned to a much larger—and more challenging—stage: Since 2009, she has led the UN Development Program (UNDP), the arm of the United Nations charged with confronting the world’s worst problems, from global poverty to corrupt governance to health and environmental crises. Clark, 62, now oversees the UNDP’S nearly $5 billion annual budget and more than 8,000 employees operating in 177 countries. Cholera in Haiti and famine in Somalia may be far from daily life for many New
Zealanders, but Clark appears undaunted. Her top goal as administrator, she said last fall, is no less than to eradicate extreme poverty around the world.
——————
Liu Yandong, China
Politburo councilor Although they hold up “half the sky,” as Mao Zedong famously said, women make up just over 20 percent of the delegates in China’s national legislature. Former chemist Liu Yandong is the outlier: the only woman in the Politburo, the 25member elite decision-making body at the top of the Communist Party pyramid. Considered a close ally of President Hu Jintao, she has a good chance of ascending this fall to become one of the small handful in the Politburo Standing Committee, the true ruling council at the center of the system. As with everyone in China’s opaque Politburo, little is known about how Liu’s politics differ from those of her colleagues, though some analysts think she favors increasing China’s contacts with the outside world; the 66-year-old Liu has an honorary PH.D. from the State
University of New York at Stony Brook and spoke at Yale University in 2009. She would be the first woman in Chinese history to make it to the Standing Committee.
————— Ngozi Okonjo-iweala, Nigeria Finance minister In March, the governments of South Africa, Angola, and Nigeria nominated Ngozi Okonjo-iweala, a former World Bank managing director, to succeed Robert Zoellick as president of the bank. By tradition, the position has been held by an American chosen by the U.S. government, but Okonjo-iweala thinks it’s time for a change. “The balance of power in the world has shifted,” she said following her nomination, arguing that developing countries “need to be given a voice in running things.” For the time being, she is more or less running things in Nigeria, where she is in her second term as finance minister. In her first term, the Harvard- and Mit-educated economist received plaudits for negotiating billions of dollars in debt forgiveness with Nigeria’s international creditors and launching a high-profile campaign against corruption. This time her task is made all the more difficult by a campaign of terror by al-qaeda-affiliated Boko Haram militants. Nonetheless, the 57year-old Okonjo-iweala is determined to make Nigeria an attractive place for international companies, a big challenge of the kind she is known for tackling.
————— Fatou Bensouda, Gambia Incoming chief prosecutor, International Criminal Court
When Fatou Bensouda becomes the second chief prosecutor of the 10-year-old International Criminal Court (ICC) in June, look for her to raise its still-young profile. Over the course of her nine-year term, she will oversee cases against the likes of Ivory Coast’s Laurent Gbagbo, Sudan’s Omar Hassan al-bashir, and the fugitive Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony. All are notable not only for the scale of their atrocities but also for where they were perpetrated: Each of the court’s 15 cases so far has involved incidents in Africa, which, by Bensouda’s reckoning, has led to a perception of the ICC as a “Western court” targeting her home continent. A native of Gambia, where she has held multiple Cabinet positions, the 51-year-old Bensouda was educated in Nigeria and rose to the international stage when she worked in the prosecution of leaders of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Now she’s vowing to pursue the world’s worst perpetrators—with equal fervor, “in Africa or outside Africa.”
————— Valerie Amos, Britain UN emergency relief coordinator Valerie Amos doesn’t quite fit the mold of a baroness. The 58-year-old Briton, born in the former British colony of Guyana, was the first black leader of the House of Lords and the first black woman appointed to a cabinet position. As a British minister, Amos focused on efforts to alleviate poverty in Africa through debt relief and private investment initiatives. In her role as the UN undersecretarygeneral for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, Amos over the past two years has increasingly started showing up as a player in the world’s conflict zones. She has spearheaded relief efforts in earthquake-stricken Haiti, seen to the needs of Libyan refugees along the border with Tunisia, and visited war-torn Somalia as it struggled with a devastating famine. In March, she was the first international official allowed to visit the obliterated neighborhood of Baba Amr in the Syrian city of Homs, the symbol of President Bashar al-assad’s brutal crackdown. “I was devastated by what I saw,” she said. “That part of Homs is totally destroyed. There are no people left.”
————— Atifete Jahjaga, Republic of Kosovo President When Atifete Jahjaga was sworn in as Kosovo’s president last year, the 35-year-old deputy director of the national police was not a member of a political party and had never run for political office. (The election of the previous president had been ruled unconstitutional months earlier, and Jahjaga had emerged as a compromise candidate before easily winning a consensus vote in the parliament.) With the fresh perspective of an outsider, she has brought a determined optimism to the historically volatile politics of the Balkans, where she is the region’s first female president. While pledging to crack down on crime and pushing for her country’s entry into the European Union and United Nations, Jahjaga has also reached out to Serbia to begin healing the wounds from years of bloody conflict. “Our two neighboring countries have been forced to share a past,” she said last year, “and will be forced to share a future.”
————— Lubna Al-qasimi, United Arab Emirates Minister for foreign trade Sheikha Lubna al-qasimi has become a standard-bearer for gender equality in one of the world’s most conservative societies. The California-- educated daughter of Emirati royalty is the UAE’S first female minister, and even more impressively, she has come to wield real power. She’s charged with finding new markets for the country’s $260 billion exportdependent economy. It’s not only through shattering the glass ceiling that the 50-year-old Qasimi, whose background is in information technology, has brought the UAE into the 21st Century. In 2000, she founded the Middle East’s first business-tobusiness e-marketplace, called Tejari, which is Arabic for “commerce.” Qasimi credits the oil-fueled economic boom in the Gulf for the advancement of women. “I’m not here for decoration,” she told Der Spiegel. “I stand for something—for growth, for a solid market economy, that things are done properly. That’s what we’ve given the region: know-how.”
————— Sri Mulyani Indrawati, Indonesia Former finance minister Indonesia, long the punch line of jokes about Third World corruption, boasts an economy that is much cleaner, stronger and more promising than it was in 2005, when Sri Mulyani Indrawati took the reins of its finance ministry. A former IMF executive director, the 49-year-old University of Illinois PH.D. instituted a wideranging ministry housekeeping, sacking corrupt tax and customs officials. Indonesia weathered the global financial crisis better than most, chalking up an average of roughly 6 percent in annual GDP growth since 2005, while increasing its rolls of income-tax payers from just over 4 million to nearly 16 million in five years. Now a managing
director at the World Bank, Indrawati has often been mentioned as a possible head of the institution—if, that is, the United States were ever to allow a non-american to take the helm.
————— Fayza Abul Naga, Egypt Minister of international cooperation
A holdover from the regime of deposed President Hosni Mubarak thought to be close to the toppled first lady, Fayza Abul Naga, 61, has become the unlikely face of the growing rift between Egypt and the United States. She rose through the ranks of Egypt’s foreign service and served as Mubarak’s chief negotiator in the long battles with U.S. diplomats over how much control Cairo could have in disbursing billions of dollars in U.S. aid. Now, more than a year after the revolution, she still wields real power and appears to be exceeding even the directives of Egypt’s new military rulers to press the prosecution of 19 American NGO workers in Egypt—part of a larger case against U.S. and Egyptian NGOS for allegedly being the “foreign hands” leading the country astray. The crisis put the $1.5 billion in annual U.S. aid to Egypt at risk, but Abul Naga has refused to back down, insisting that Egypt could do without U.S. assistance. If she keeps this up, it may have to.
————— Hanan Ashrawi, West Bank Member, PLO executive committee
Hanan Ashrawi was present at the creation of the “peace process,” serving as the official spokesperson for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the Israelis and Palestinians made the first tentative steps toward a two-state solution. Now, after more than two decades of endless process but little peace, she is ready to declare the talks a dead end and is helping to lead the charge for a new strategy to forge an independent Palestinian state. As a member of the PLO’S executive committee, the 65-year-old Ashrawi is a close ally of Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and also has the ear of President Mahmoud Abbas. She has thrown her support behind attempts to isolate Israel diplomatically, most notably by pushing the case for Palestinian statehood at the United Nations and dangling the possibility that the PLO could revoke its recognition of Israel “should all other avenues fail.”
————— Valentina Matviyenko, Russia Speaker, Federation Council Could Valentina Matviyenko become Russia’s answer to Germany’s Angela Merkel? It may not be likely, but Matviyenko is a scientist turned politician like Merkel, and as speaker of Russia’s upper house of parliament she is now effectively the third-most senior politician in Russia after Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev. She’s arguably also the most powerful woman to have emerged in post-soviet politics. Trained as a chemist, the 63-year-old Matviyenko rose quickly through the political ranks during the turbulent days of perestroika. In 2003 she was elected governor of St. Petersburg in a vote widely criticized as orchestrated by Putin. She went on to run his hometown for nine years and was credited with building up the city’s infrastructure and presiding over a period of unprecedented wealth while being criticized for marginalizing the political opposition and bullying the media. When Putin’s party seemed weak in St. Petersburg elections last fall, Matviyenko was promoted right out of town.
————— Viviane Reding, Luxembourg European commissioner for justice, fundamental rights, and citizenship
The EU’S critics charge that it’s an inhuman and undemocratic bureaucracy, with little accountability to individual citizens. Viviane Reding is doing her best to change this. The former journalist has been speaking truth to power since becoming the EU’S top human rights enforcer. Reding, 60, who served as commissioner for education and culture as well as for information and media before her current position, has accused Google of breaking the law with its too-lax privacy policies, proposed legislation to create quotas for women on corporate boards, and publicly feuded with the Netherlands’ controversial antiimmigrant Freedom Party. Reding attacked the French government for its expulsion of Roma in 2010, comparing the move to the large-scale arrests of Jews in Vichy France. (The comment earned Reding a rebuke from the French government.) With European politicians increasingly pandering to far-right xenophobes and abandoning the open-borders policies that have defined the EU since its inception, Reding has established herself as a defender worth reckoning with.