ENGINEER SPOTLIGHT: Frannie Léautier - Woman
of the World
World Bank Institute head FrannieLéautier
gives new meaning to the word persistence. She had to
overcome incredible obstacles to get an engineering degree
in Tanzania. It wasn’t the kind of protest
that Frannie Léautier was used to. Sure, she
had had her share of negative reactions to the fact
that she was a female engineering student—the
only one in the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania—in
the early 1980s. Like some disgruntled classmates secretly
cutting off the leg of her chair, causing her to collapse
on the floor when she sat down, all because no girl
could get marks that high. But when she arrived on a
job site the summer after her third year in college,
the workers on the highway construction project came
up with a novel way to convey their displeasure. They
stripped off all their clothes. “They said they
would never work for a woman,” Léautier
recalls from her office at the World Bank in Washington,
D.C. “They thought they would shock me into leaving.”
They thought wrong. Léautier stayed on the job,
helped by a supervisor who insisted that since she was
qualified, she be given the right to work. When it came
time for her to return to school, all the men gave her
a big farewell party. “I guess they eventually
came to accept me,” she says.
Léautier has spent a lifetime marching to the
beat of her own drum, carving out a path that has taken
her from her rural roots on a coffee farm in the foothills
of Mount Kilimanjaro to the World Bank, where she is
a vice president and head of the World Bank Institute.
Born to an engineer father and a stay-at-home mother,
Léautier knew from a young age where her interests
lay. “For a long time, my father didn’t
have a son so I went around with him fixing things on
our farm, which I really enjoyed. I was never too keen
on dolls,” she adds. “I would make my own
toys like trucks or tools that did something. I learned
a lot living on the farm. My father designed a coffee
pulper, and I helped him with the riveting. I watched
all the mechanical movements and learned firsthand how
it was able to squeeze the skin and not the seed.”
Her marks in primary school were the highest in the
Tanga region of Tanzania and earned her a spot in the
top high school in the country. But her parents were
reluctant to let her go, figuring that being the only
girl in a school would be too difficult to handle for
a 13-year-old. Instead, she went to the Korogwe School
for Girls, where she studied math, biology, chemistry
and physics—as well as two classes that were deemed
more typical female vocations at the time: cookery and
needlework.
After graduation she enrolled in the civil engineering
program at the University of Dar es Salaam, where she
proved herself such a stellar student that one of her
professors hired her to teach one of his undergraduate
courses while he was away on sabbatical. Still, adverse
pressure from fellow students built up to such a point
that she went back home and told her parents that she
was leaving school. “They took me right back and
said to me, ‘You can do it. We’re here to
help.’ I don’t think I could have done it
without them.” Surprisingly, the whole experience
at Dar es Salaam didn’t leave a bitter taste in
Léautier’s mouth. “It made me tough,”
she admits. “I also had some professors who were
very supportive and realized how hard it was for me.
They would often ask how I was doing. It made a real
difference to me.”
Coming to America
When it came time for graduate school, Léautier
had her sights set on Oxford and a couple of other top
universities in Europe. A visiting NASA scientist from
the United States suggested that she apply to MIT. “Where
is that?” she asked. “I had heard of Harvard,
but that was about the only American university I knew.”
When he returned to the United States, he mailed her
an application. Léautier applied and was accepted.
The trouble was that her parents, with six other kids
to look after by this time, couldn’t afford to
contribute any money. Léautier hadn’t applied
for financial assistance from MIT—she didn’t
realize that she could—so she set about raising
the money herself. After eight months she had amassed
a grand total of $17. She spent every evening visiting
foreign embassies seeing if she could obtain any grants.
No luck. Her own country had declined her request, figuring
that she would probably never return once she obtained
her degree. Eventually someone from the United Nations
heard about her plight, and the organization agreed
to pay for her first two semesters’ tuition. Swiss
Air kicked in with a free flight.
Léautier flew to Boston with her $17. By the
time she had paid the cab from the airport, she was
down to $5. “For the first week I lived on chocolates
the Swiss had given me,” she says with a laugh.
Fortunately, a professor who was working on research
for the Federal Highway Authority (FHWA) in construction
and maintenance soon offered her a research position
based on the knowledge she had gained back in Tanzania.
“Our training back home was very practical,”
she notes. “We learned how to manage construction
labor camps, what well-mixed concrete should look like,
things like that. The theory we studied was theory you
could immediately translate into practice.”
Life in the United States was a huge culture shock.
“I couldn’t have imagined the difference
in wealth,” Léautier recalls. “But
the biggest shock was the freedom to learn. I could
take any subject I wanted. And the books! In the University
of Dar es Salaam I would queue for one book shared by
60 students. In the library at MIT there were multiple
copies of the same book. Books everywhere.” And
then there was her slide rule that she had used in her
courses back home. “I came to MIT and they had
one in a museum. It was like entering the space age.”
After completing a Master of Science in Transportation,
Léautier had planned to return to her homeland
to teach a new generation of engineers, but her adviser
urged her to stay at MIT and earn a Ph.D. She completed
the degree in Infrastructure Systems, the first woman
from Tanzania to earn a Ph.D. at the university. Her
degree combined economics, civil engineering and remote
sensing from electrical engineering. After graduating
she taught at the university. The World Bank came recruiting
and hired her on a consultant basis, then as a full-time
employee in 1992, specializing in infrastructure, a
vast and varied field that includes everything from
energy and water systems to transportation and dams.
From 1997 to 2000 she served as the sector director
for infrastructure in South Asia and also as director
for infrastructure for the World Bank Group. In December
2001, she was chosen to head the World Bank Institute,
the branch of the World Bank that deals with capacity
development: helping provide the knowledge, skills and
expertise to improve the conditions in developing countries,
which, after all, represent 5 billion of the 6 billion
people on the planet.
Léautier is aware, more than most, that simply
plying a country with lots of money offers no long-term
solution to its economic and social problems. “If
the money goes ahead and the skills and knowledge are
lagging, we don’t get sustainable results. You
can bring foreign companies to create the infrastructure
and leave nothing behind, and then maintenance and other
issues become problems.” This is a particularly
pressing problem in her home continent, which she admits
is never far from her mind. Africa has the least number
of scientists and engineers in the world—80 per
million as compared with 1,200 per million in advanced
countries.
“The type of scientific knowledge and technology
that can transform life immediately in areas like Africa
tends to be very high science,” she explains.
“People assume that simple problems need simple
solutions, but that’s not true in places like
Africa; it’s the opposite. You need complex science
to deal with problems like growing food in arid areas,
getting drinkable water and preserving food for long
periods without refrigeration.” The World Bank
brings a wealth of expertise to addressing these issues,
with 1,200 Ph.D.s among its staff of 10,000, including
economists, geologists, anthropologists, sociologists,
medical doctors and engineers. She lauds efforts by
the World Bank to create the African Virtual University,
which offers undergraduate courses through more than
57 learning centers in 27 African countries, linking
them with universities in Australia, Canada and the
United States.
With her ultrabusy schedule, Léautier, at the
age of 47, faces the challenges of many modern married
couples—balancing the demands of work and home.
“I’m very lucky. I have a very supportive
family,” she says. Léautier says that her
husband, who works as a risk management analyst for
an aluminum-producing company, takes a big role in the
raising of their two children, a son, 11, and a daughter,
9. Léautier says she also benefits from technology.
“When your business is global, where you are doesn’t
really make much difference any more. I can have a video
conference from home or my office connecting to people
in other countries.”
In her spare time, Léautier likes to hike and
mountain climb, although she admits, a little sheepishly,
that she is the only one of her siblings who hasn’t
scaled Africa’s highest peak, Mt. Kilimanjaro.
She also writes stories for her children, carrying on
a tradition that her father started when she was a child.
“Every birthday, he would compose songs for us.
He was a very talented musician, nationally known, so
we grew up with a fantastic array of original songs.”
She has also turned her talents to nonfiction writing,
having recently co-edited the book “Cities in
a Globalizing World: Governance, Performance and Sustainability.”
And when James Wolfensohn retired after 10 years at
the helm of the World Bank, Léautier surprised
him with a book that she had written on the concept
of time in different cultures. The book is typical of
the type of person Léautier is, says Wolfensohn
from his vacation home in Jackson Hole, Wyo. “She
is someone who spans many cultures, not only Western
and Eastern, but Southern as well. She has overcome
many obstacles but doesn’t see them.”
“The bank succeeds or fails by its ability to
empower people in developing countries,” Wolfensohn
adds. “Therefore, it needs to have a multinational,
multicultural workforce that can understand and support
and strengthen the cultures in those countries. Frannie
is a person with the capacity to compete with the very
best in the West but someone who has not lost her sensitivities
to the place she came from.”
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