Interview: Gender equality, women empowerment at center stage of UN development agenda: ANZ banker

Creating circumstances that allow every man, woman and child to explore their true potential is a key aim of global socio-economic development agenda crafted at a meeting of more than a hundred heads of state and government at United Nations (UN) headquarters in New York over the past week.

At the gathering, the leaders bid good-bye to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and welcomed its successor, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which is set to drive the global development agenda for 2015-2013 in the face of greater uncertainties, including the impact of climate change.

A truth was increasingly evident during the deliberations in New York: efforts of women in all spheres of public life, including key organizational leadership roles, will be essential to creating a world where people, communities, nations and global society and economy can achieve full potential.

This was echoed by one business leader in Laos, Tammy Medard, who now heads the first foreign-owned commercial bank based in Vientiane.

Medard is the CEO of Vientiane-based ANZ Bank (Laos) Limited, a subsidiary of the Australia-based bank first established in 1835.

A mother of two with a career that has taken her from New York to Australia and now to Southeast Asia, Medard is passionate about creating environments that would allow women to fulfill their potentials in both their professional and personal lives.

In an interview with Xinhua's Vientiane Bureau before a trip for New York, Medard said that they now have a "gender balance" in the bank that she heads. "At ANZ Laos we have 65 percent female membership of our executive team and we have roughly the same ratio throughout our entire business here," Medard said.

Medard was proud to point out that in ANZ Laos, they don't just have diversity in workforce but also in nationalities.

"We speak over ten languages in ANZ Laos. The executive committee is made up of about seven different nationalities, so while I think gender is important I think diversity and also your background is important as well," she said.

Medard also cited the human resource development of the ANZ Laos, adding that the bank has started a graduate program. She said the bank has reached out to local universities as well as the countries that are providing foreign scholarships such as Singapore and Australia.

"We are looking at really building and growing talent from within," she said, adding that in more developed markets one can actually buy that talent on the market, which is not possible in Laos, where international banking is only seven years old.

According to Medard, in terms of hard infrastructure, one of the things that set Laos apart in a global scale is the access to hydropower and what that means for the cost of electricity.

She said multinational corporations are catching up on the power sector, adding that there are now investments, particularly in Savannakhet where there is a special economic zone that offers 24 hour access to electricity at 8 cents a kilowatt hour.

Medard also said that Laos needs to improve its national payments system if it is really going to be a key member of the ASEAN Economic Community.

"One of the AEC goals is about ease of capital flows among the ten ASEAN countries and ASEAN countries are committed to deploy a specific real time settlements system by 2020," she said.

On women's empowerment, Medard said that at ANZ Laos they are going to broaden their maternity leave to be parental leave where husbands can take time off to spend and bond with their child in the first 12 month period.

"This also gives women the ability to come back to work knowing that their child is being looked after by the other parent. So I think there is a big role for the private sector to play to catapult across some of these barriers," she said. Endi