women in getting a startup off the ground to do so it is 1000000000 euros earlier i spoke to katherine cole a representative for the european investment bank in nairobi i asked her why the he sees the need to support women on such a large scale. good afternoon i think when one live in africa and having lived in africa myself and being here i think one thing that is clearly obvious is that the women are the backbone of the economy so if one wants really to create a change that transformative change in africa one has to support women and this 1000000000 initiative she invest that was launched a couple of weeks ago by the a.b.a. is really the prolongation of a process that was started a couple of years in the bank where we 1st develop agenda strategy which would then after that was followed by in a kind of a building block phase is where we said the basie's by training staff raising awareness across staff so that in the end we would come with a business model with chaz a gender lens on everything that we do and now we have reached this point where we've announced that we would help mobilize th