Speeches

Statement by ITC Executive Director at the Women Entrepreneurship Conference

26 February 2016
ITC News
Statement delivered by ITC Executive Director Arancha González at the Women Entrepreneurship Conference
26 February 2016 - Istanbul, Turkey

Honourable Ibrahim Senel under secretary Ministry of economy, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Let me start by thanking our hosts, the Turkish Ministry of the Economy and KAGIDER, the Turkish Women Entrepreneurs Association for convening this important forum.

It gives me great pleasure to be here with you in Istanbul, a city that is a major hub for business and travellers, and has evoked images of trade between east and west for thousands of years past. This is a country that in 1934 was one of the first to grant women the right to vote and stand for election. In Turkey, as in many economies around the world, there remains much to be done to advance the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of women; however you can also draw pride from having been the first to establish, the Women 20 as an official engagement group during the Turkish Presidency of the G20 last year.

The organisation I lead, the International Trade Centre, was founded in 1964 as the joint agency of the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. Our mandate is to help small and medium-sized enterprises in developing countries connect to international markets, and we place a strong emphasis on the economic empowerment of women in all our work.

Why? The answer is simple. We are an organisation that supports the achievement of the Global Goals for Sustainable Development adopted by the United Nations last September. These ambitious Goals seek to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030, and place gender equality and women’s empowerment high on the agenda. At ITC, we believe that trade can be a powerful lever for economic resilience and transformation when women have the opportunity to fully participate.

The evidence of the potential gains from women’s integration in the global economy is compelling. There is a consistently positive correlation between countries that provide greater economic opportunities for women, and higher competitiveness and national income. The pressures and vulnerabilities created by the current migrant crisis, particularly in this region, where it is reported that the majority of refugees are women and children, should make the issue of economic participation of women a priority for every policy maker.

We know that if women participated in the economy on an equal footing as men, it could increase global GDP by an additional $28 trillion by 2025. Imagine for a moment the implications of this scenario for a country like Turkey, which has a female labour force participation of only 30%.

We also know that women exporters give rise to a disproportionate bonus in wages paid, people employed and productivity. A recent ITC publication, based on firm level surveys across 20 countries, had encouraging news in that women are branching in to non-traditional sectors such as computing and telecommunications. But there are also areas for concern: women own only one in five exporting companies.

Moving from the theory to practice, at ITC we have seen our targeted interventions reap rewards. Just two weeks ago, we supported women coffee producer associations with over 660 members from East and Central Africa meet international buyers, and sell 220 tonnes of specialty coffee at a high premium of close to $6 per kilo at the African Fine Coffees Association annual conference. In addition these women secured a deal to provide Starbucks with a limited edition line of coffees for an upcoming promotion.

Together with Parsons the New School of Design in New York we have delivered tailor made assistance to business women in the textiles and apparel sector from Palestine, Peru, India, Mongolia, Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea. The companies received expert coaching to develop capsule collections that enabled them to enter new export markets. One of the highlights of this work has been the co-development of a training curriculum for women in the textiles and apparel sector which will soon be available in ITC’s SME academy as an e-learning course.

Connecting SMEs to international markets is complicated. The type of results I’m talking about come from a set of carefully orchestrated interventions that draw together a diverse range of stakeholders. The path to success for the women coffee producers began with ITC’s work at the policy level, working with the government of Uganda to analyse the participation of women in the coffee value chain and develop a national export strategy that sought to address obstacles and open up opportunities. Our work revealed that women did 90% of the field work but received less than 10% of the pay, and that they were largely excluded from the provision of agricultural inputs and training.

Next came an intervention at the institutional level. We worked with the International Women’s Coffee Alliance to establish national chapters; through these associations ITC is able to facilitate the provision of capacity building services and other inputs to help informal women producers aggregate and market their produce to international buyers.

The ability of women entrepreneurs to trade extends beyond possessing the right skills and the right product. Goldman Sachs estimates a financing gap of between $260 billion and $320 billion a year for women owned businesses. Without this capital, critical to maintaining an adequate level of working assets and to grow, women cannot fulfil their entrepreneurial ambitions. This is why ITC and Barclays Bank have agreed to work together to combine trade related assistance with access to vital financial services – together we will support 10,000 women entrepreneurs over the next five years.

Surprisingly, the most frequently cited challenge by the corporations we work with, many of which have targets and commitments on sourcing from women entrepreneurs, is their inability to identify eligible women owned businesses as new suppliers. To address this issue, ITC launched the SheTrades platform – a web and mobile app – to connect women owned businesses to markets. I encourage you to check it out at www.shetrades.com.

SheTrades is part of a larger initiative to bring one million women to market by 2020. Drawing on the shared experiences of ITC and our partners in the private sector, government, women’s associations and others, we put together a Call to Action that sets out the eight issues that collectively, we need to address in order to unlock markets for women. We incorporated experiences such as those of our partner "Women Impacting Public Policy" which, with American Express, developed a capacity building programme for women entrepreneurs to ensure that the US law inviting the federal government to source at least 5% of its procurement from women-owned small businesses did not remain in the statute boxes. We drew insights from companies like IBM, which has for decades prioritised diversity and inclusion initiatives, including connecting with smaller companies as tier two and tier three suppliers.

ITC is proud to have a phenomenal supporter of the Call to Action in KAGIDER. We applaud your efforts at supporting Turkish women entrepreneurs and thank you for partnering with ITC to host the 2016 Women Vendors and Exhibition Forum, the premier global event for women in trade,

On 1-2 September women entrepreneurs, large corporations, policy makers and leaders from around the world will convene here in Istanbul to expand their networks, exchange knowledge and experience and do business. Women from over 60 countries, starting with this region but also beyond, will participate and meet with major corporations. We will be analyzing progress in addressing the factors that help and hinder women's economic empowerment. But we also hope to have hundreds of women entrepreneurs do businesses.

I want to thank the government of Turkey for their support. I want to encourage business in Turkey and around the world to help us make this edition of the WVEF a real success..

I encourage you to visit our website, www.intracen.org and apply to attend, and hope to see you again in September.

Thank you for your attention.