The achievements of Saudi women in all areas, including the economy and investment, are acknowledged and recognized.
Many dedicated citizens, officials and leaders supported the businesswoman until she excelled. But let’s try to represent the local investor’s image to the new Commerce and Industry Minister Abdullah Zainal Alireza in order to illustrate the type of decisions required to change women’s businesses in the private sector from random experiences to a fixed and organized stream of work.
Women’s economic and investment activities in the private sector started with individual efforts and initiatives to meet the woman’s financial or psychological needs, whether to prove herself or occupy her spare time. Therefore, many failed; others had low performance and some received a lot of warnings.
The only businesses that lasted were built on scientific principles and commercial wisdom accompanied with great determination to succeed.
Those who succeeded and those who failed were all working based on their personal initiatives and efforts and not according to an institutionalized organization. Random decisions also contributed to opening new horizons for women’s work and then shutting these opportunities down after the women were trained.
So women continued to invest in just one type of business where most focused on unregistered and unrecorded micro-businesses. That’s why the numbers and the statistics contradict each other. For instance, if a woman owned 1,500 commercial records in Riyadh, in reality she doesn’t own even a third of this number of records because a relative who took advantage of her name owns them.
The Saudi investor knows very little about competitiveness, merger or the participation of Saudi Arabia in the Gulf market let alone the World Trade Organization.
Saudi women in the private sector need decisions that help train, improve and strengthen their knowledge and support her. They even need decisions that would assist them so that they don’t harm themselves or their business.
They need equality in investment regulations that exist between them and foreigners. Doctors are not authorized to practice medicine unless they finish their degrees. Women also must not start their business unless there are regulations that govern that business. They must work, prove their capabilities and not shut down their business at the slightest problem.
Saudi businesswomen need a unified body that helps them issue their licenses, sign their paperwork and look into their problems. The issue of male legal guardians must be solved once and for all. Female sections at every governmental sector must be established.
Women need to work under proper commercial names without lying or hiding. There are, as we see, so many things that women need from the new minister of commerce and industry.
