Whilst women’s economic empowerment has been on the global development agenda for almost two decades, knowledge about female entrepreneurship has been fragmentary, and the business and economic cases have not been fully articulated. Our months’ long consultations in 2015 with thought leaders around the world sought to ramp up the trajectory towards eradicating extreme poverty by 2030. These consultations revealed that a key challenge is the persisting silos between the various actors working in this area, as well as the substantive components of women’s enterprise development including research, policy, finance, access to markets; and capacity building.

Women’s economic empowerment is not a matter for government policy, the private sector, or social change alone. All have critical roles to play. This is why we at the International Trade Centre have launched the “SheTrades” initiative, which seeks to connect one million women entrepreneurs to market by 2020. The initiative spells out seven global actions in which governments, the private sector, and civil society groups can make concrete pledges to remedy obstacles holding back women-owned businesses.
Meet the seven global actions below!

Kindly note that you can only make commitments under the global actions related to your type of institution.