President Barack Obama announced he will travel to Kenya in July to lead his annual entrepreneurship summit.

One important theme from the recent Global Entrepreneurship Congress in Milan – the importance of women entrepreneurs to economic growth whether in an African village or in the Valley.

One of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capital firms recently hit the news for reasons other than successful investment — a suit alleging gender discrimination in the workforce.

Alicia Robb, a Kauffman Foundation senior fellow and visiting scholar at UC-Berkeley, led an insightful discussion on high growth in women’s entrepreneurship earlier this month at the Global Entrepreneurship Congress examining problems of gender diversity within the ranks of startups. She was joined by Ruta Aidis, who leads Women’s Entrepreneurship Research Forum and suppors Dell Inc.’s efforts to better understand the unique challenges women entrepreneurs face in starting and scaling their businesses.

While the U.S. leads in global rankings of women’s entrepreneurship, the data points to a glaring absence of women founding new enterprises in the high-tech sector. This, is due to a variety of reasons but the root causes are structural and cultural.

Rebeca Hwang, the cofounder of Rivet Ventures, an early stage venture fund that backs startups targeting female-centric markets, is doing something about this and highlighting the huge yet largely untapped potential that female consumers represent. Even half a century since women entered the workforce, she said, we see many opportunities that male-dominated venture funds simply miss.

She explained that when entrepreneurs, male or female, target women consumers who represent more than half the U.S. market, they must first overcome the understandably male-oriented worldview of male-dominated venture funds.

Girls, she said, are just as talented as boys and that when given the same opportunities, women achieve at the same or higher rates than men. If there is a confidence gap, she said, it’s a reflection of upbringing, not an inherent distinction.

One African Minister who inspired many last week in Milan will be pleased about today’s news of the President’s decision to visit the continent to promote entrepreneurship.

“More than anything else we must create a good environment because the people of South Africa are very creative and industrious and they are able to make their living for themselves,” said Lindiwe Zulu, South Africa’s eloquent Minister of Small Business Development.

President Obama’s Administration is unlikely to need much prodding on including a focus on women’s entrepreneurship. Much of the work that the State Department and Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes have led on advancing entrepreneurship overseas has stressed women and youth.

Obama’s personal leadership of this summit offers a unique opportunity once and for all to ensure that those in charge of economic policy around the globe never again view entrepreneurs as merely a side ring at the circus but rather the most powerful driver of new jobs, economic prosperity and innovation and political stability for all.

Andres Velasco writes:  Consider the following scenario, one that has played out time and again in emerging-market countries. Local banks and firms go on a borrowing binge and pile up dollar-denominated debt – debt that pundits consider perfectly sustainable, as long as the local currency is strong. Suddenly, something (an increase in United States interest rates, a drop in commodity prices, a domestic political conflict) causes the local currency to drop in value against the dollar. The debt burden, measured in domestic currency, is now much higher. Some borrowers miss interest payments; others are unable to roll over principal. Financial mayhem ensues.

This is how the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, the Mexican Tequila crisis of 1994, the Asian debt crisis of 1997, and the Russian crisis of 1998 unfolded. It was also how the financial crisis of 2008-2009 transmitted itself to emerging markets. Every time, borrowers and lenders claimed to have learned their lesson.

Not only could it happen again today; it could happen on a much larger scale than in the past. Taking advantage of ultra-low interest rates in advanced countries, emerging-market banks and firms have been borrowing like never before. A recent paper by the Bank of International Settlements shows that since the global financial crisis, outstanding dollar credit to non-bank borrowers outside the US has risen by half, from $6 trillion to $9 trillion.

The bulk of that debt is in Asia, with China alone accounting for approximately $1 trillion. Other big dollar borrowers include Brazil (over $300 billion) and India ($125 billion). Countries such as Malaysia, South Africa, and Turkey, plus Latin America’s more financially open economies, also have rising foreign-currency debts.

Yes, the almighty dollar is not as mighty as it was before the US Federal Reserve surprised markets with a more-dovish-than-expected communiqué earlier this month. But, given the likely interest-rate differential between the US and other advanced economies (particularly the eurozone and Japan), together with a more robust US economic recovery, an era of dollar strength – and, almost by definition, weak emerging-market currencies – is here to stay.

This likely means trouble for the firm that borrowed in dollars to build a shopping mall in São Paulo or Kuala Lumpur, and now must devote a much larger share of its revenues in depreciated real or ringgit to service its debt.

How did we get here? Once upon a time, conventional wisdom maintained that curbing governments’ appetite for debt would put an end to over-borrowing, because private agents would know to act prudently and weigh the costs and benefits of one more dollar of debt.

Not even stern University of Chicago economists believe that anymore. The fiscal and debt position of many emerging economies (though not of Argentina, Venezuela, and other poster children for mismanagement) is much stronger than it once was. But private-sector CFOs seem determined to prove that they can borrow as lavishly as their public-sector colleagues once did.

Conventional wisdom also once held that dollar borrowing binges occur only in countries with fixed exchange rates, with the central bank de facto insuring borrowers against currency risk. Today, most emerging-market economies have (or at least pretend to have) floating exchange rates, and yet locals continue to borrow heavily in foreign currency.

This partly reflects borrowing-cost differentials. If the local interest rate is 17% per year and the dollar interest rate is 2%, it still makes sense to borrow in dollars as long as the domestic currency is expected to depreciate 15% or less.

The other part of the explanation follows from what the economists Guillermo Calvo and Carmen Reinhart call “fear of floating.” Many market participants know from past experience (recall 2008-2009, for example) that emerging economies’ central banks fear sharp depreciations, and that in moments of stress they tend to intervene, at least temporarily, to support the exchange rate, “smoothing” its decline. So a speculator who is quick on his feet can make a handsome profit and get out while the music is still playing.

How vulnerable are emerging economies because of all this dollar debt? Optimists like to point out that emerging markets have accumulated a huge stock of international reserves since 2010, enabling them to self-insure against a run on their currencies or their foreign debt. That is true, but only up to a point.

Having tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars in the central bank’s vault sounds reassuring until you realize that dollar debt coming due in the next 12 months may not be that much smaller. The data are not fully reliable or comparable across countries, but quick calculations reveal that there are many emerging markets where such short-term debt is 50% or more of the stock of international reserves.

And dollar debtors may not be alone in staking a claim on those reserves. In a squeeze, holders of domestic currency will want to exchange it for greenbacks. If the central bank is serious about floating, it will hike local interest rates to limit price increases, causing a painful recession. Alternatively, it may intervene and sell international reserves, reducing the stock available to repay dollar debt.

Optimists also argue that some local borrowers are naturally hedged. Yes, some export companies that borrow dollars also earn dollars. But they are in the minority, and even they can have problems, because depreciation reduces the dollar value of their domestic assets, causing breaches in loan covenants and potentially impairing access to credit.

There are risks even for banks that make the effort to match their dollar borrowing from abroad with dollar loans extended at home. There may be no obvious currency mismatch for the bank, but if the local borrowers’ revenues are only in domestic currency, they may become unable to service their debt. Risk eliminated by regulations in one place reappears somewhere else.

For the many emerging-market firms that borrowed in dollars to generate local-currency revenue, the recent depreciation is triggering plenty of financial trouble. How much trouble will ultimately depend on factors that are very hard to forecast, including markets’ responses to Fed tightening and political shocks (say, the scandal enveloping Petrobras in Brazil) that shake investors’ faith in local policies and markets. One can predict only one outcome with confidence: a bumpy ride.  Debt in Emerging Countries