Ivanka Trump's Women Entrepreneurs Fund Received $100 Million From Saudi Arabia and the UAE
During her first international trip to Germany in April, Ivanka Trump took her advocacy for working women to the international level when she announced her plans for the global Women Entrepreneurs Fund. Scheduled to launch in July, the $1 billion fund would be run by the World Bank and would allocate capital and networking resources for business-minded women around the world. Though the fund is still in its preliminary stages, Trump secured a major sum of money for women entrepreneurs over the weekend: a combined $100 million donation, courtesy of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
On Sunday Trump spoke at a round table on women's economic empowerment hosted by Princess Reema bint Bandar, an entrepreneur and member of the Saudi royal family, and was joined by a group of 15 accomplished women, including some who had been elected to government positions or were business leaders or entrepreneurs. The group was joined by just one man: World Bank President Jim Yong Kim.
“In every country, including the United States, women and girls face challenges,” Trump said, later citing the gender pay gap, rising cost of child care, and lack of paid family leave in the U.S. before addressing the obstacles women entrepreneurs face around the globe. “Saudi Arabia’s progress, especially in recent years, is very encouraging, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.”
Such progress includes a 2011 royal decree that gave women the right to vote and run for local office starting with the 2015 elections, as well as an order issued earlier this month that allows women, in some circumstances, to get an education and work outside the home without the permission of a male guardian. Still, Saudi Arabia ranked 141st out of the 144 countries included in the 2016 Global Gender Gap Study completed by the World Economic Forum. Though some aspects of the guardian system—which required women to obtain permission from their father, husband, brother, or other male family members to leave their homes—has been lessened to some degree, women must remain covered from head to toe when in public and are prohibited from things like driving or opening bank accounts.
Similarly, the U.S. State Department highlighted various human rights violations within Saudi Arabia in a recent international assessment, with problems including "citizens’ lack of the ability and legal means to choose their government; restrictions on universal rights, such as freedom of expression, including on the Internet, and the freedoms of assembly, association, movement, and religion; and pervasive gender discrimination and lack of equal rights that affected most aspects of women’s lives.”
The opening remarks of Ivanka's round table meeting, however, focused primarily on her and Princess Reema's career accomplishments, as well as praise for the entrepreneur fund (which Trump will not oversee). But as the Washington Post reports, "two female reporters present were not permitted to stay past the introductory remarks, a White House official later said they discussed segregation of men and women in the kingdom, guardianship laws, and the ban on women driving."
Ivanka's message—and the $100 million donation to the entrepreneur fund—have not been without criticism from both Saudi women and those back in the United States.
“All the women that Ivanka Trump met have a guardian,” Aziza al-Yousef, an activist who has long petitioned to ban the guardianship system, told the Washington Post. “All these achievements depend on whether you’re lucky to be born in a family where your guardian will be understanding, will help you. If Ivanka is interested in women empowerment and human rights, she should see activists, and not just officials.”
Others have lobbed criticism at President Donald Trump, saying that welcoming donations from Saudi Arabia to support his daughter's proposed entrepreneur fund is hypocritical. In June of 2016, Trump admonished Hillary Clinton on Facebook, writing, "Saudi Arabia and many of the countries that gave vast amounts of money to the Clinton Foundation want women as slaves and to kill gays. Hillary must return all money from such countries!"
He repeated a similar message during a presidential debate in October, saying, "Saudi Arabia giving $25 million, Qatar, all of these countries. You talk about women and women's rights? So these are people that push gays off business—off buildings. These are people that kill women and treat women horribly. And yet you take their money."
Ethics officials for both Barack Obama and George W. Bush weighed in on the donations and, as they told NPR, there should be no major conflicts as long as the donations are thoroughly vetted and there is total transparency.
"In my view foreign government donations to a fund run by a reputable international organization like the World Bank for a good cause are generally acceptable," Norm Eisen, who worked in the Obama administration, told the public radio network, adding, "Based on what we know, there's no reason to believe that those two things did not happen. That said, the hypocrisy is concerning, and the general miasma of corruption that surrounds all things Trump suggests some extra scrutiny here."
Richard Painter, an adviser to Bush, echoed Eisen's statements but highlighted the need for the fund to remain independent from the White House.
"I don't see this fund as a big problem if she does not solicit [donations] and it is entirely World Bank run," Palmer said. "But the Saudis could try letting women drive cars too. That would be good for entrepreneurship."
Glamour