Since its inception in 1997, the
Canadian Business Women in International Trade (BWIT) program of the Trade Commissioner Service has been providing targeted products and services to help women entrepreneurs globalize. Through its vast reach of Trade Commissioners in more than 160 cities across Canada and worldwide, BWIT’s mandate is to link Canadian women entrepreneurs with international business opportunities to help spur economic growth, job creation and broad-based prosperity. The program’s activities help to integrate women into the global marketplace and participate in global value chains.
Canada’s approach to supporting women-owned enterprises is to offer a suite of innovative programming to assist them in growing their businesses abroad. This includes targeted services for women that assist businesses with market expansion, including: a dedicated website, an annual and monthly newsletter, a LinkedIn group, a specialized directory for women-owned businesses, and women-focused trade missions. Trade missions provide women-owned businesses with opportunities to succeed internationally through educational, networking and matchmaking opportunities.
BWIT works with other government departments, businesswomen’s associations, service providers and private organizations across Canada to assist women entrepreneurs to meet their exporting potential, particularly through support of supplier diversity certification. Currently, 97% of Fortune 500 corporations have supplier diversity programs. By actively promoting the benefits of women-owned certification, the BWIT program contributes to procurement opportunities for Canadian women-owned companies with participating corporate and government entities worldwide.
SOME FACTS:
- Women-owned businesses employ over 1.5 million Canadians. In 2013, self-employed individuals and businesses with fewer than 50 employees accounted for 29% of Canada’s total GDP. Of Canada’s exporting SMEs, 16.6% are 50% women-owned and 7.6% are over 50% women-owned.
- Canada is committed to working with business and industry stakeholders to offer key services that will help Canadian business women in international markets.
- Where public resources have been committed to developing and implementing targeted programs to support women entrepreneurs, particularly in private-public programs, both the level of awareness and the activity of women entrepreneurs increase substantially.
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