Thanks, Pam. It's very nice to see you, and thanks for this opportunity.

As I mentioned at the beginning of my comments, we're here at the United Nations talking about the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. With the increasing focus on the issues of people with disabilities and particularly women with disabilities, there is an interesting conversation happening about practices in different countries. A lot of it focuses on the real barriers that women face, so there is the beginning of a conversation about what innovations might be useful that we could build on.

Following the last speaker, I think one of the really interesting and growing areas of work is around women entrepreneurs. I think that women with disabilities in low-income countries often work in non-paid volunteer roles, and they are doing an enormous amount of work in their communities both as mothers and as women with disabilities.

What I think is really interesting is how we begin to invest in those kinds of things. How do you support entrepreneurship? How do you support the role that women play in transforming communities? It's more than a workshop where you have women making beads or something. It's much more about the role that women play in their communities in helping to make those communities better, because they, themselves, know and understand the nature of that community and the relationships in that community.

I think that on a public policy level, there are some excellent examples of good, inclusive child care, and there is probably not one speaker who is going to come before your committee and not talk about child care. Whether it's formal and supported through government or it's informal and created by women in communities to support each other, it is an enormous area.

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