by Curlan Campbell
- ITC and UN Women Global Campaign on Gender-Responsive Public Procurement launched in March 2024
- ITC recommends allocation between 10–30% of government procurement contracts to women-owned businesses
- SheTrades Caribbean Hub provides women entrepreneurs in the region with access to knowledge, resources, and networks
Pamela Coke-Hamilton, Executive Director of the International Trade Centre (ITC), recommends that regional governments demonstrate their commitment to women’s empowerment by allocating between 10-30% of government procurement contracts to women-owned businesses.
She points out that the current statistics show that despite governments spending 12% of the global gross domestic product (GDP) on public procurement, with some developing countries reaching as high as 40%, only 1% of this spending goes to women-led or women-owned businesses.
The ITC’s Executive Director, who was interviewed in Antigua recently, stated that using public procurement to empower women economically requires governments to play a proactive role as policymakers, buyers, and contracting parties to ensure that the public and private sectors source from both women’s enterprises and gender-responsive enterprises. “If governments, [and] legislators are committed to ensuring that this can happen to changing women’s economic viability, this is one step they can take and basically achieve that objective in very real terms in tangible ways,” Coke-Hamilton said.
Her recommendation comes on the heels of the launch of the ITC and UN Women Global Campaign on Gender-Responsive Public Procurement in March 2024, as well as the launch of the SheTrades Caribbean Hub in 2023 with the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) being the host institution.
This initiative aims to provide market opportunities for women entrepreneurs, leveraging the region’s impressive track record of women’s economic participation. The announcement was made during the AfriCaribbean Trade and Investment Forum, where the ITC and CDB discussed their plans.
The Hub serves as a resource centre for women entrepreneurs in the region, offering
- Technical training and capacity building
- Networking, mentoring, and coaching
- Access to markets and investment opportunities
These initiatives unlock business and investment opportunities for women-led businesses and strengthen the region’s support ecosystem to promote women’s participation in intra-regional trade. The SheTrades Initiative is a flagship programme of the International Trade Centre (ITC) started in 2015 that supports women in trade. The SheTrades Caribbean Hub provides women entrepreneurs in the region with access to knowledge, resources, and networks, supports policymakers in inclusive reforms, and leverages partnerships to amplify impact.
Women-led and women-owned businesses in the CDB’s borrowing Member Countries, which include Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, The Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Turks and Caicos Islands, are encouraged to join the SheTrades Caribbean Hub, where they can access the tools and resources to support their businesses. So far, 1,200 women have signed on to benefit.
Apart from ensuring that women have access to financing, The SheTrades Initiative also assists women in the branding of their products, securing their SPS certifications, and has over 70 available courses online where women can increase their knowledge and capacity and make their products more viable on the international market.
As part of many success stories of SheTrades in 2021, the initiative brought 3 million women to the market. Coke-Hamilton highlighted success stories in the alternative energy sector. “We’ve also worked in the area of alternative energy, where there have been women who have gotten grants, and they have been able to translate that into actually getting in Zambia 9,000 households got electricity for the first time 60,000 people and that’s just drone investment of 250,000. So, we’re seeing changes everywhere,” she said.
Multilateral organisations consistently acknowledge that women-owned small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) are crucial in driving economic growth and reducing poverty. However, despite women constituting 50% of the population, they receive less than 10% of businesses worldwide.
The ITC’s Executive Director issued a special plea to Small Island Developing States (SIDS) to collaborate and find collective solutions to the unique problems of the region, particularly in the area of access to financing. “And so we have to begin to work jointly to figure out joint solutions to joint problems. The same is true for access to finance. How do we create a system where a bank, for example, may not want to invest or to loan to one, but they could loan to a collective, and you take the combined value of that collective as the collateral? So I just think that there are things that we need to start thinking about in the context of SIDS. Because we’re so small, that would not necessarily apply in bigger countries but would work for us because of our specific vulnerabilities,” she explained.
The SheTrades Caribbean Hub aims to form partnerships with other development banks worldwide to secure funding and to encourage the adoption of Gender-Responsive Public Procurement legislation as a policy priority in member territories.