The speakers at the panel discussion by the Women’s Parliamentary Caucus on Tuesday said in order to ensure holistic and inclusive growth and economic development it was critical to ensure women empowerment through innovative and skill-based interventions to meet modern challenges. The panel discussion titled “Inclusive Economic Growth and Empowerment of Women” under the Roundtable of Political Parties on Women’s Manifesto. The discussion was chaired by Member National Assembly (MNA) Kishwer Zehra. Former Minister of State for Investment and senior economist, Haroon Sharif opening the discussion said there was a matter of mindset that needed a change to ensure economic empowerment of women. He said there were tonnes of researches and policy papers by international organisations on empowerment and status of women of Pakistan. The financial and economic crisis of the country had no short-term solution but rather required sequencing of different aspects of economy and social structure to achieve desired dividends, he added. “Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Muhammad told me that it took 12 years for him to improve economy in his country,” Sharif said. The country’s gross domestic product (GDP) production has declined and remained 5 times less than its competitors in the region whereas its value addition of production had also depleted drastically, he added. Haroon Sharif added that it was not possible without mainstreaming women in productive participation in the value addition chains. He added that Asia in general had less women participation and in Pakistan in particular as it made only 20% of the total workforce. The future of the jobs was not in labour but rather in operating machines based on advanced techs, he said, adding, “Bangladesh and Thailand banks have dedicated finance for women alone to promote female entrepreneurship that Pakistan also need to replicate.” He suggested that there was a need to lobby for an investment fund managed by experts alone for women to ensure equity and transparency. “The abundance of labour is getting irrelevant as there is need to match skills with the challenges emerging in the present day market. The alternate skills should be imparted to women through training programmes being organised in educational institutions that become idle in the evening after its regular operations.” “We are more accountable to media than our constituency. We should look at triggers for effective interventions to get desired outcomes. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has transformed Hafar al-Batin into a market place where women are selling camels and others. The government should come out of patronage mindset but rather opt for endowment,” he said. Tahira Raza, a career banker said the mindset discussed earlier played a big role but there are other important factors that add to the crisis to women marginalisation. The low representation in the electoral process should also be changed for making a collective voice, he added. He said there was a need to push for making a 50% women share in the total workforce of the country. However, she said lack of security for women was another factor hampering their empowerment as it was evident from what happened to women in power to not raise their voice. She also underlined that no asset or financial backup also hampered freedom of raising voice alongwith a weak implementation of laws further added more to the crisis. Moreover, she added that the women working in the field lacked networking skills which needed to be scaled up and women must be trained to overcome their barrier. Prof Dr Aliya H. Khan, former Director QAU School of Economics and Ex-Dean of Social Sciences provided a detailed statistical account of female labour force in the country