ITC launches ‘She Trades Commonwealth Ghana’ to train 3,000 women entrepreneurs

The International Trade Center (ITC) has launched the Ghana chapter of the She Trades in the Commonwealth to train about 3,000 female entrepreneurs and deliver greater economic returns for Ghanaian women entrepreneurs.

The She Trades project which will run for only two years will provide intensive training and mentoring activities for the women. The goal of the project is to strengthen the capacity of 3,000 women-owned businesses with a view to generate sales worth 28 million euros ($38 million) by 2020.

The program will address challenges faced by women entrepreneurs, including access to and control of land, cumbersome business and financial institutional processes amongst other significant matters. It will also provide women with better tools and information to implement gender-responsive policies and share best practices.

The She Trades will work to increase the competitiveness of women entrepreneurs in agriculture, apparel, IT and service sectors in four Commonwealth focus countries: Bangladesh, Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria.

In an interview with a beneficiary of the She Trades project, Chiedza Makonnen of Afrodesiac Worldwide Co. Ltd. disclosed that the project has had tremendous effect on her business which has seen her go global.

“We were a small enterprise now we are a medium growing into large skill enterprise. Access to market will be the number one component that they’ve been able to give us to scale up our business and access to information, trade resources and initiatives that allow us to export our products freely into the US and European market and these are our information we didn’t have before She Trades,” Chiedza Makonnen told Ghanaweb.

The She Trades in the Commonwealth was officially launched in April and is funded by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DIFD) and was endorsed by the UK Prime Minister Theresa May during the opening of the Commonwealth Business Forum (CBF) in London.