JEDDAH, 21 February 2006 — Three Saudi businesswomen are participating in a roundtable discussion at the World Bank in Washington on the role of women in the development of the private sector in the Middle East and North Africa. Nashwa Taher, who was one of the two businesswomen recently elected to the board of directors of the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Alia Banaja and Aisha Al-Mana are the three Saudi women who will participate in the discussions which begin today and continue for four days. Businesswomen from other countries are also participating in the discussions; they include women from Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Morocco, Algeria, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen and United Arab Emirates.
“I think it’s important that we go and participate in these discussions because we’ll be representing our country and the topic is very relevant to us,” said Alia Banaja. The objective of the roundtable is to learn from these women who have succeeded in their own environment, are familiar with the opportunities and pitfalls that women entrepreneurs face, and develop jointly an agenda and strategy to be advanced by the bank group as well as donors and partners. It is also a chance to present to these women and build capacity around the latest thinking on gender and corporate/private sector development issues. These issues are cutting edge in developed countries and exposure to these themes could help to make these women agents for change in their own countries.
According to the World Bank, the Beijing+10 meetings in March of 2005 revealed that, of the ten Beijing platform points, the least progress had been made toward advancing women’s economic opportunities. Improving women’s employment opportunities is also one of the key indicators of the third Millennium Development Goal, which is focused on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment. Among the developing regions, the MENA region has the lowest rate of women’s labor force participation, despite the significant investments that have been made in education at all levels.
Increasing levels of female education and the growing accessibility to markets through ICT, combined with the significant financial resources that women possess, make women’s entrepreneurship an important and promising strategy to pursue in order to spur growth of the private sector. Women entrepreneurs represent an important yet underutilized economic potential, not only in terms of their own labor but also in their potential to create jobs for others, particularly other women. Worldwide, women account for about 48 percent of employees in women-owned businesses, compared to 28 percent in male-owned ones. Surveys from MENA countries show a similar result. Women prefer to work for the public sector, large private firms or women-owned businesses of any size, but especially SMEs. As the growth of MENA countries will lie in the creation of small- and medium-sized businesses, promoting women-owned SMEs is likely to promote female employment.
Among the key questions that policy makers face are how to address the high female unemployment rate and how to put to effective use the tremendous investments made to advance women’s education in the MENA region. How can the recent gains that MENA has made in social sectors be used to create new industries and spur growth in knowledge-intensive industries, so as to create jobs and address the overall challenge from East and South Asia? The Roundtable Discussion taking place over the next three days is based on discussions with women entrepreneurs inside the region, participation in conferences on this topic, and recent trends in the US/Europe to address similar issues. The first day will focus on formulating a joint agenda for action. It will focus on gaining access to networks of power inside countries, gaining access to networks outside the countries, improving access to finance, and lowering barriers to women’s work by focusing on creating an infrastructure to balance work and family.
The second day will be on using the private sector to advance women’s empowerment and help women entrepreneurs grow bigger and better business. The agenda for this day will focus on how to use recent developments in the corporate world, such as the increased attention on corporate social responsibility and corporate governance, to advance gender equality, how to leverage partnerships between corporations and NGOs, and how to use the presence of women in the corporate world and on boards to promote women’s leadership.
The program for the third day will focus on innovative ways and means to expand the entrepreneurial capacity of women in the region - at all levels - through mechanisms that can mitigate business risks for start-ups at various scales and in diverse sectors. The presentation and interactions with experts will focus on franchising, home-based and web-based entrepreneurship. On the last day, there will be meetings with women’s leadership networks and associations in the Washington DC area which can provide sustained help in the future. The objective here is to develop a network that could support women’s business association with cutting edge information and techniques.
