68th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women side event: Empowering women through trade
13 March 2024
Breaking Barriers and Transforming Subsistence into Value Chain Participation
Video message]
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
A warm welcome to our event on empowering women through trade.
I want to cordially thank the Government of Indonesia for co-hosting the event.
Across the globe, women continue to face more barriers to work for pay. No or less income often translates into higher risks for poverty.
If current trends continue, over 340 million women and girls will live in extreme poverty by 2030. This is equivalent to about 8 per cent of all women and girls globally.
Gender equality remains an elusive target. According to the Gender Snapshot Report of UN Women and DESA, gender equality is nearly 300 years away.
Together with UN Women, we put a cost at achieving SDG targets on gender equality. This cost amounts to about 6.4 trillion US dollars per year from 2023 to 2030. This is roughly 20 per cent of the GDP of the countries on which the estimate was based. Compared to other targets, it is the highest cost, together with achieving sustainable food systems.
In this event, I don’t need to convince anyone about the need to act.
In today’s discussion, we want to explore policy actions to enable women to move from subsistence activities to activities with more potential and more value added.
We want to look at barriers that hold women back in this endeavour, and how an enabling environment for women can be created so that they can reap the benefits of trade.
We will focus on women farmers, small-scale traders and owners of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises and how they can connect to more profitable activities.
Given that access to finance remains a key constraint for many women entrepreneurs to scale up their businesses, we want to discuss the hurdles of creating an inclusive and supportive financial ecosystem.
And we want to have a close look at trade policy as trade offers opportunities to engage in higher value-added activities, more technology and learning. But for trade to be an avenue towards gender equality, we need measures that enable women to connect and thrive in these jobs and gender-responsive trade policies to ensure that the benefits of trade are shared.
As we prepare to celebrate the 60th anniversary of UNCTAD, we renew our commitment to inclusivity and gender equality. For this, we need to tap the transformative potential of trade so that women can participate in trade and the economy on an equal footing than men.
I wish you all a fruitful session and look forward to hearing its outcomes.
Thank you.
