Barclays Bank Kenya and ITC Partner To Support Women Entrepreneurs Through The SheTradesKE Platform

Women entrepreneurs have been making huge strides all over the world. Africa and Kenya in particular haven’t been left behind. In Kenya, women-owned businesses account for over 48% of all SMEs, contributing about 20% of the Kenyan gross domestic product (GDP). This is an encouraging figure. Unfortunately, women face a unique set of challenges in business including accessing financing, unfavourable trade policies and cultural barriers that affect their ability to control resources.

It is with this in mind that Barclays Bank of Kenya and the International Trade Centre (ITC) have launched a partnership that seeks to equip 10,000 local women entrepreneurs with new skills and connect them to international trade opportunities by 2020. The International Trade Centre (ITC) is a joint agency of the World Trade Organization and the United Nations established in 1964. It is the only development agency that is fully dedicated to supporting the internationalization of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

SheTrades is a product of the Women Vendors Exhibition and Forums(WVEF) which is a flagship event of the International Trade Centre. In July 2015, ITC launched the WVEF tech challenge in partnership with Google and CI&T calling on software developers to develop an app for women owned businesses around the world with the objective of connecting one million women entrepreneurs from around the world to global markets in the next five years. Out of more than 300 competitors, Greenbell Communications (GBC) of Kenya was chosen as the winner of the Challenge.

The SheTrades app was designed to address the need among multinationals and larger enterprises to engage with companies owned by women which had proven rather difficult to locate and identify. It provides women entrepreneurs across the world a unique platform to connect to markets. In Kenya, the initiative will operate under the banner SheTradesKE and will be implemented in cooperation with Barclays Kenya and various other partners.

Through the partnership, Barclays will leverage its expertise in financial services while ITC will employ its experience in business development to offer local women entrepreneurs support in critical areas, including financial management, in order to help them create and maintain links to international markets.

“This partnership comes at an opportune time when SMEs are being globally recognised as vital economic growth and employment drivers. SheTradesKe presents us with a great opportunity to empower women in business and certainly draws us a step closer towards achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals which seek to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030, while curbing social and economic inequalities,” Mr Awori said.

Ms Arancha González, Executive Director of ITC said: “I am really pleased to launch this partnership with Barclays. Access to credit is a key constraint for women in business. It often confines them to the informal sector. Lack of credit limits the ability of women owned businesses to grow and generate jobs. Working together with Barclays in Kenya will go a long way in helping women in business access credit. It will be a win-win cooperation.”

The collaboration between ITC and Barclays Bank of Kenya will be deployed based on a 5-year roadmap, unveiled by a launch event on 15th July, 2016. On the launch date, Barclays Bank of Kenya and the International Trade Centre (ITC) signed the MoU to provide 10,000 women in the SME sector with skills which will help them grow their businesses between 2016 and 2020.