International Trade Forum - Volume 2018, Issue 1, 2018

This is an incredible time for women’s empowerment. The movement to ensure equality for women and girls is influencing all facets of our daily lives. And trade is no exception. Still, there is much left to do if we are to attain Goal 5 – empower all women and girls – of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

In February 2018 International Trade Centre Executive Director Arancha González and her team entered a small building in a little village in Mandya, India, to see entrepreneurship at work.

In recent years free trade has come under criticism from populists who blame it for every lost factory job. In reality trade has been responsible for fewer job losses than automation, a technological force much harder to reverse. So while trade has made for a popular scapegoat, the truth is cross-border commerce has played an underappreciated role in producing the inclusive global prosperity we have enjoyed over the past 60 years.

The end of the Cold War was supposed to inaugurate Europe’s age of reconciliations, when the continent, finally at peace with itself, would be able to exist as a unified whole. However, reconciliation worked perhaps too well: the disappearance of the Iron Curtain also meant that Europe struggled to differentiate itself from the lands to the east. By expanding it might expand without limits; by retreating it might become an importer of instability.

The SheTrades initiative, which aims to connect one million women entrepreneurs to the market by 2020, was launched just over two years ago. It is the International Trade Centre’s (ITC) main vehicle to support Goal 5 of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, to empower all women and girls.

When the current Swedish government came into power in 2014, the first thing it did was to state it is a feminist government. As such it made a clear commitment to promoting gender equality in all policymaking.

We live in a world in which the nearubiquity of information and communication technology (ICT) and rapid advances in areas like robotics and artificial intelligence are shaping the evolution of just about every other economic sector.

The island nation of Vanuatu is surrounded by bright blue ocean, so it should come as no surprise that tourism makes a hefty contribution to the country’s economy. That model was disrupted in March 2015 when Cyclone Pam struck, devastating the country and its tourismdependent income. Its recovery from that natural disaster has been assisted in no small part by the hands of women whose livelihoods depend on tourism dollars.

Norway has a long history of dedicated policy for achieving gender equality in the workplace. Virke, the Enterprise Federation of Norway, is a strong supporter of this agenda and believes it should be duplicated in development policies. Paid work is an important part of transforming from the notion that women are somehow an economic burden to an equal contributor. Indeed, women’s participation in the workforce plays a crucial part in much-needed sustainable economic growth and welfare – in Norway and elsewhere.

Let us go back 12 years, to when the Aid for Trade Task Force was created. Gender was written into the initiative’s guiding principles: ‘Aid for trade should be rendered taking full account of the gender perspective. Donors and partner countries jointly commit to the harmonization of efforts on issues such as gender.’

Creating an inclusive economy is critical for making progress towards achieving Goal 5 of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development – empowering all women and girls. Yet, making real progress in this regard relies on creating more and better employment opportunities for women. Export potential data supplied by the International Trade Centre (ITC) serves to estimate potential job creation by gender across industries in order to guide policy actions that promise more employment opportunities for women towards specific sectors.

While entrepreneurs face challenges starting up businesses everywhere in the world, women often experience an extra layer of hurdles. These include regulatory and cultural biases, as well as lack of access to capital, market information, networks and technology. These barriers often mean missed opportunities to further raise growth rates and to create opportunities for more people.

Women often carry out a double shift, working as producers as well as bearing the lion’s share of responsibility for reproductive labour, through unpaid care and domestic work to sustain their families. This affects the way women participate in – and benefit from – economic growth.

Global trade is experiencing a major boost to easing movement of goods across borders. The implementation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) is driving the reduction of time and cost of cumbersome trade formalities. However, an equally powerful force expediting cross-border trade is the accelerating progress of the digital technology in areas spanning from trade logistics, automated processing and e-payments to immediate access and exchange of trade information and documentation.