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The ILO and the AFBD are co-organizing a regional forum to discuss the challenges and opportunities to promote women-owned enterprises in response to the financial crisis. This forum on Women’s Entrepreneurship Development is part of the implementation of the Global Jobs Pact in Africa. It is also part of the African Women In Business Initiative launched by AfDB in 2004 to promote the role of women in business and empower women entrepreneurs, in particular small and medium ones through better access to finance. The forum will offer a platform to African women entrepreneurs and various players involved in Women’s Entrepreneurship Development to discuss the challenges
and opportunities to growing and supporting sustainable women-owned enterprises in Africa in the context of the current global recession and beyond.
The forum aims to attain the following objectives:
- Give high visibility to African women entrepreneurs so that their voices are heard in the debates around recovery packages.
- Give high visibility to both the Global Jobs Pact and African Development Fund’s (AFDB) African Women In Business Initiative’s response to the global economic crisis
- Enhance and promote partnership for responding to women entrepreneurs’ needs.
- Share knowledge on effective monitoring of WED impact and contribution to women economic empowerment.
- Share knowledge and good practices on WED mainstreaming in recovery packages from Africa and elsewhere.
- Identify strategic orientations for strengthening future WED interventions and contribution to creating an enabling environment for WED enhancing women enterprises access to finance and linking WED to growth drivers in order to ensure women enterprise sustainability.
There will be three streams:
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Stream One : Promoting Sustainable Women Enterprises
This stream is about creating the conditions for developing growth-oriented women-owned enterprises.
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Stream Two : Monitoring of Women’s Entrepreneurship Development Impact
This stream is about ensuring that WED strategies, programmes, activities and tools are effectively implemented and provide the expected results.
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Stream Three : Partnering for WED in Africa
This stream is about the way the various players involved with WED can/should work together in order to create, expand and grow more sustainable women enterprises.
Background
At its 98th session (June 2009) the International Labour Conference highlighted the importance for ILO to extend programmes to foster women’s entrepreneurship
and economic development in the conclusions from the general discussion on gender equality. Further, at the ILO Summit on the Global jobs Crisis in June 2009, ILO constituents adopted the Global Jobs Pact which identifies the need to focus priority attention to protecting and growing employment through sustainable enterprises and to enhancing support to those people most hit by the crisis, the majority who are women. The Cairo Women’s Entrepreneurship Development Forum is part of the implementation
framework of the Global Jobs Pact, and is a preparation for the 1st African Decent Work Symposium on Recovering from the Crisis (Ouagadougou 30/11/2009 – 01/12/2009).
The Pact urges measures to retain persons in employment, to sustain enterprises and to accelerate employment creation and jobs recovery combined with social protection systems, in particular for the most vulnerable, integrating gender concerns on all measures. In this context, the AfDB had also the responsibility to respond very quickly with the notion that Africa’s marginal integration in global trade and the financial environment has not spared the continent from the contagious effects of the financial crisis, which is certainly not temporary. The crisis does not only add to existing vulnerabilities, it also requires sustained and concerted efforts to return to the path of growth. Working in concert with other development partners and adapting financial instruments make it possible to tackle the most important steps: fast-tracking support to eligible low-income countries, keeping trade moving, providing liquidity, helping the institution’s regional member countries (RMCs) stay the course of sound policy frameworks and filling financing gaps in key infrastructure projects.
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