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COMMONWEALTH: Business As Unusual for Women

Sanjay Suri

VALLETTA, Malta, Nov 25 2005 (IPS) - Someone in Ghana does excellent batik prints, someone in the Caribbean wants them badly. The Malaysians have new technology for doing banana chips, and only if that woman in Nigeria could do it the Malaysian way.

If they could connect through the Commonwealth Business Women’s Network (CBWN), they just might learn to do business with one another. Or so at least is the idea, that was given a new push at the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Malta this week.

The CBWN website was launched at the Commonwealth business forum held in September 2002 in London. Three years after the launch comes the ‘push’, and some women in the Commonwealth are waiting to see how far this takes women in business in the Commonwealth, a grouping of 53 nations that were once a part of the British Empire.

”The whole objective of the information gateway is to ensure that women in small and big business, and in medium-sized enterprises network with the whole community around the world, not only in the Commonwealth countries,” Koosum Kalyan from Shell told IPS.

”You will have the details on every government, every woman entrepreneur, small, big and medium, plus the multinational enterprises, and procurement contracts so women have the advantage of using that source to network with other people,” Kalyan said.

The CBWN was conceived in the ‘gender section’ of the ‘social transformations programmes division’ at the Commonwealth Secretariat. ”The initial funding is coming from the Commonwealth Secretariat,” Kalyan said. ”Thereafter it will have to come from the private sector.”

The information gateway could be a big boon to women, Kalyan said. ”If you look at Africa, the majority of African women are involved in medium and small enterprises.”

The website, she said, will be ”an exchange of information, an exchange of selling of products, because a lot of women have products, and don’t know how to sell them to other countries. If there is a network, that network will strengthen the relationship with other women entrepreneurs.”

Sarojini Ganju Thakur, adviser in the gender section, says the website could be ”a pool of potential information, business opportunity, knowledge which needs to be accessible to people in different countries. We have so much that needs to be shared, exchanged, built on, there’s the idea of mentoring people, there’s the idea of business development.”

The website could offer more than information, it could also offer sales and procurement, Thakur said. ”There is an area in the website where you can post job opportunities, procurement orders, advertisements, so there is that kind of linkage,” she told IPS.

”There is also amazing transfer of technology,” she said. ”It might be that somebody is looking in food processing for a particular technology which might be available. So all they need to do is to go to the net and say we are interested in processing this, can somebody respond?”

At the moment, she acknowledged, the website is in an infant stage. ”We hope to have it up and running in a more full way by March,” she said.

The women’s group expects strong support from the Commonwealth Business Council. ”The CBC also has the necessary political clout and support by governments and Commonwealth Secretariat,” the new group said in a statement.

”Women businesses now make up almost 50 percent of all new businesses in some Commonwealth countries,” the CBWN said in its statement. The group hopes to go beyond networking among women in business to ”mainstream key gender issues within the work of the Commonwealth Business Council.”

The group also hopes to encourage more ”women friendly” policies within the Commonwealth.