Male, Maldives (CU)_ The Commonwealth Secretariat organized a four-day workshop for the Maldivian grassroots female entrepreneurs to assist them in capitalizing on digital infrastructure prospects for E-Commerce and Digital Marketing. The event was attended by around 75 women from Commonwealth nations in Africa and Asia. During the training, a number of participants discussed the challenges they encountered in operating their businesses during the Covivirus-19 outbreak.
The workshop was organized by the Commonwealth Secretariat’s Physical Connectivity Cluster of the Commonwealth Connectivity Agenda in partnership with the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) South and South-West Asia Office. The purpose of the workshop is to train the female entrepreneurs with the necessary skills to use digital and online platforms and digital infrastructure so that they join the global supply chain and thereby contribute to the growth of the global economy.
Commonwealth Secretary-General Rt. Hon. Patricia Scotland QC delivered her address at the event. She spoke about women empowerment. She said, “The economic disruption of the pandemic has been profound, and women have been the hardest hit. To ensure that women are central to the covid recovery, a key focus of the Commonwealth Connectivity Agenda is closing the digital divide. Our aim is to train policy makers and women entrepreneurs to ensure that they benefit from this rapid digitalization”.
Patricia Scotland added, “The Commonwealth Secretariat has engaged in peer-to-peer learning, knowledge exchange and capacity building. We launched a new e-learning course on digital infrastructure and the digital divide, and we’ve developed community partnerships with tech companies such as Oracle. These initiatives help to shape policies to provide practical skills to help overcome the digital divide.”
This training program is one of the initiatives of the Gambia-led implementation of the Commonwealth Connectivity Agenda’s Agreed Principles of Sustainable Investment in Digital Infrastructure for the Physical Connectivity Cluster. During the training, attendees studied about www.wesellonline.org, an online marketplace where only women entrepreneurs may sell their items. At the conclusion of the training, 81 female entrepreneurs signed up for the platform. Dr. Radika Kumar, advisor for infrastructure policy at the Commonwealth Secretariat, and resource experts from ESCAP Asia Pacific provided the training.
Image credit: 1 thecommonwealth.org, 2thecommonwealth.org, 3 thecommonwealth.org
