Participants at the ITCILO training in Turin. (Photo: ITCILO)
As many previous CIPE blog pieces have pointed out, empowering women entrepreneurs leads to inclusive economic growth around the world. This point was further explored in a recent McKinsey report, The power of parity: How advancing women’s equality can add $12 trillion to global growth:
“We consider a “full-potential” scenario in which women participate in the economy identically to men, and find that it would add up to $28 trillion, or 26 percent, to annual global GDP in 2025 compared with a business-as-usual scenario.”
One way to increase the number of women entrepreneurs is by addressing the bottlenecks that prevent women from becoming business owners or circumstances that prevent them from expanding their businesses. And this can be done through policy reforms via business associations and chambers. To this end, CIPE and the International Training Centre of the International Labour Organization (ITC-ILO) held a joint week-long training-of-trainers session “Women Empowerment through Business Member Organizations (BMOs)” at the ITC-ILO campus in Turin.
The program was delivered in order to support BMOs seeking to create an entrepreneurship ecosystem supportive of women in their own country. Twenty BMO participants from CIPE and ITC-ILO’s global networks – spanning from Fiji to Zambia to Montenegro – were in attendance. This diverse group of participants (both male and female attendees) had different backgrounds: some were full-time staff with only 6 months of experience with an association; others had 10+ years of experience with BMOs and select few were board members. But they all one common belief: that women entrepreneurs need better representation in their societies.
For one week, they came together in Turin and learned best practices in business association management, policy advocacy, as well as training facilitation techniques. They learned about strategic planning, coalition building, communication strategies, advocacy, organizational governance, and training techniques for trainers (adult learning). All topics included a focus on how to integrate more women entrepreneurs or how to develop products with women end users in mind. In addition, guest speakers from the Dutch Employers’ Cooperation Programme (DECP), UN, and the World Bank discussed trends in women’s empowerment and business, including the World Bank’s latest Women, Law and Business report.
In addition to the content that CIPE and ITC-ILO provided, the program was also an opportunity for the participants to learn from their peers in the classroom. For instance during the session on advocacy and mobile devise use, CIPE association partner from Bolivia shared how her organization uses SMS and messaging tools like Whatsapp to alert her members about new legislation that they support or disagrees with.
“When we send email updates to our members about a particular legislation, which usually includes lengthy descriptions about what the legislation is proposing, we assume that our members won’t read the email right away. To incentivize our members to read the emails – or for them to at least be aware that our organization is working on the issue – we send SMS alerts to them with short descriptions about the email and the legislation. This way, we can nudge more people to read the actual email.”
A participant from an employers’ organization in Cambodia was intrigued with this example, and noted that she’ll use a similar tactic when she returns home. “Our email readerships are pretty low, so any strategies to increase more people to read the emails would be good – especially SMS alerts! Everyone pays attention to their mobile phones, so why not use the platform to market our advocacy campaigns?”
All the participants have returned home with more energy and knowledge. But they now have a bigger task to tackle: implementing what they’ve learned to improve the local environments for women entrepreneurs. The participants are all required to lead in-country training sessions for their board members, staff, or coalition members to improve how their organizations recruit or address women member needs. CIPE will follow up with the partners in the coming months to see how their implementation phase goes forward, and we’re excited to see how they’ll empower more women in their local economies.
Maiko Nakagaki is a Program Officer for Global Programs at CIPE.