Supermodel and fashion designer Iman spoke passionately Saturday about the extreme disparity between the funds that male- and female-owned businesses receive—and how the lack of investment in women hurts everyone.
“Supporting businesses owned by women means that everyone rises,” Iman said in her speech at the Global Citizen Festival, an annual event featuring musicians and activists encouraging people to act to end extreme poverty by 2030. More than 60,000 people swarmed New York City’s Central Park to attend the 2019 event.
Governments and companies spend trillions each year on products and services, but only 1 percent of that money goes to women-owned businesses, she added.
The effects of that figure are far-reaching, as research shows that when women do have money they reinvest it in their communities and families, said Iman, who last week was named the first-ever global advocate for CARE, an anti-poverty and humanitarian organization.
Iman expanded on that theme in an interview with Know Your Value contributor Daniela Pierre-Bravo, saying “empowering women is a way to get them out of poverty.”
“Listen to their voices and listen to their stories, because they have something to say about their conditions,” she added. “We’ve had a tendency for years and years to speak down to people, or to speak for them. We want to give them a voice so they can speak for themselves.”
Pierre-Bravo asked what women can do “on a micro-level” to enact change.
“It’s important that we, as women, empower each other,” Iman said. “We mentor the younger girls. We take them under our wing … On the elevator up, take some people with you.”
That’s the kind of action at the focus of Global Citizen, whose mission is to build a community of 100 million engaged citizens who tackle poverty-linked issues including the plight of girls and women around the globe, food and hunger, water and sanitation, health, education and more.









