Women in the Commonwealth: Trade and Investment

How do women do in international trade? The International Trade Centre’s large-scale survey looked at the extent of the challenge, and estimated that only one out of five exporting companies is women-led. That disparity occurs not only in developing countries but across Europe. Women-led enterprises are generally concentrated in less dynamic sectors than male-led ones, and women-led enterprises are involved in both import and export. In employment, job segregation means that women tend to work in lower paid jobs.

What are the reasons for that disadvantage? Women face unequal access to finance, skills, property and business networks, and some of those disadvantages can be explained by the fact that women often run smaller businesses and have other gender-specific barriers to entry. I have seen at first hand in numerous developing countries how financial innovation can be used to make credit facilities more accessible to women living in poor and rural communities. Lack of access to reliable and feasible loans is one of the major barriers to entry for women wanting to become economically independent.

Village savings and loan associations harness the existing social structure in villages to bring together people to make a financial contribution and save money as a community. That is a good example of funds being used as credit facilities and of a way for female entrepreneurs to get funding in locations where there are no traditional banking facilities. In Uganda, for example, more than 15,000 such savings groups have been established, and local people have now benefited from financial training. That is a good example of why savings groups are a key tool to promote female economic empowerment, so I hope the Government look at supporting such initiatives throughout the Commonwealth.

We need to reform the business, policy and legal ecosystem to ensure that it is not stifling female entrepreneurship and participation in trade. We need much better data to understand the barriers that prevent women from trading in the first place—what it is that is holding them back. We need to ensure that women have a voice when policies are being designed and implemented. It is also critical to acknowledge the work of the private sector, which has an important role to play in mentoring and training women to supply chain diversity programmes. All companies must be encouraged to create concrete opportunities for female entrepreneurs.

Secondly, the UK should champion an MBA scholarship initiative for 500 young women entrepreneurs and business leaders of the future from Commonwealth developing countries. That would give an opportunity for young female entrepreneurs to further their skills and to grow their businesses.

Thirdly, I congratulate CDC on its excellent commitment to close the economic gap between men and women. Forums such as the gender-smart investing summit in London have been successful in promoting collaboration between development finance institutions and encouraging them to work together. CDC is also encouraging women to be more economically active.

To give a specific example, the Chemi & Cotex company in Tanzania manufactures the leading brand of toothpaste in east Africa. I was impressed to learn that women now make up nearly 50% of its workforce. All the women who head up the sales branches join the company in junior roles and develop their skills within the business. That type of outreach programme is vital to help women to participate fully in the local economy. We must leverage the power of female entrepreneurship and continue to promote gender equality.

Fourthly, the UK should organise a business forum that brings together women entrepreneurs from across the Commonwealth. It would be a great opportunity for women entrepreneurs to share best practice and to forge networks, but also a chance to reflect on and take stock of the progress that we have made with different trade and gender initiatives, to determine the next steps for the future, and to reflect on the 2017 WTO Buenos Aires declaration on trade and women’s economic empowerment.

Finally, the UK should appoint a new special envoy on women’s economic empowerment in the Commonwealth to work at international level across the Department for International Development, the Foreign Office and the Department for International Trade. That would be an extremely powerful way to champion gender equality further. The new envoy could work with the new WTO working group on women and trade, which is expected to be agreed at the upcoming WTO ministerial conference in June of this year. It would allow an opportunity for a co-ordinated and harmonised UK approach truly to unleash the potential of women entrepreneurship in Commonwealth developing countries.

I believe that 2020 is an important year for women’s economic empowerment. It marks 25 years since the adoption of the Beijing declaration and platform for action, while little more than two years has passed since 127 countries launched the 2017 WTO Buenos Aires declaration on trade and women’s economic empowerment. Ahead of the June CHOGM in Rwanda, the issue must continue to be high on the agenda of the various economic groupings in the Commonwealth, from the G20 and the African Continental Free Trade Agreement to APEC, or Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation. The UK has made a strong commitment to the trade and gender equality agenda, and I hope that in 2020 the UK Government will continue to build on the success of the African investment summit, scaling up that ambition even further.

Despite those challenges, alleviating period poverty can in itself create business opportunities for women across the Commonwealth. Lilypads is a social enterprise that works domestically and internationally. It has developed a reusable pad, which it manufactures in Nairobi, Kenya. Part of its mission is to develop low-cost pads, which can be supplied individually. Crucially, Lilypads helps to train women, who can sell the sanitary items in their communities as a way of generating income. It is in the business of creating opportunities for women. Culturally, it supports conversations that prevent menstruation from being a topic that simply cannot be discussed. Period poverty is experienced by women all over the world. I am pleased that steps are being taken both domestically and globally to eradicate it. Whether in Cupar or Kenya, Berwick or Botswana, no woman should be prevented from participating fully in her community by her inability to access sanitary products.

We must reflect on our domestic approach and adjust our international approach, and the same is true in reverse. Our commitment to the global goals does not just mean changing how we look at development work; it means changing our perspective and our policies at home too. The goals apply here. That is particularly relevant to SDG 5. This is not just about looking at what we do domestically and expanding it internationally; it is about looking at what we do internationally and replicating that domestically where appropriate.

Last year, the right hon. Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt) committed the Government to helping to eradicate period poverty worldwide by 2030. I am sure Members across the House will agree that that is a laudable aim, but a year is a long time in politics—especially this last year, in which we have had, as of today, one Budget, two Prime Ministers, three Chancellors and four Secretaries of State for International Development. Last week, I presented a Bill on period poverty, the purpose of which is to require the new Secretary of State to report to the House on progress on the 2030 commitments, to ensure that they do not drop off her agenda. I am pleased that my Bill was sponsored by hon. Members from across the House, including the hon. Members for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), for Bristol South (Karin Smyth) and for Belfast South (Claire Hanna), alongside my six female Liberal Democrat colleagues.

I urge the Minister to update us on the progress that is being made towards the achievement of the goals and the UK’s involvement in that. There is a clear and obvious case that eradicating period poverty is, in and of itself, a worthy end towards which the UK should continue to make an important contribution. Women who are currently excluded from trade and investment opportunities in the Commonwealth will surely benefit.

However, it remains the case—I do not put this at the door of the UK Government; it is for all of us across the world to resolve—that only one in five Commonwealth parliamentarians is a woman. That means four in five are men. Only seven of every 10 girls attend secondary school. Thirty-two countries do not mandate equal pay for work of equal value, 19 do not have laws prohibiting early marriage, and 89% of Commonwealth countries have at least one piece of legislation on the books that holds women back economically in terms of starting or growing a business. That is unacceptable, and it must be addressed before any real economic progress can be made.

On early marriage, as it is the week of International Women’s Day, I want to pay tribute to a truly inspirational woman, who is a tribal chief in Malawi. Since being appointed a few years ago, Chief Theresa Kachindamoto has annulled more than 1,000 child marriages and sent all the girls back to school. She is in charge of 551 village head men—they are all men. If one of them allows a child to be married, she dismisses him immediately—zero tolerance. That is why she is known in Malawi as the marriage terminator.

I spent some time in Malawi during recess. I went with Oxfam to two villages, where we met girls who had been married and had babies as children, and had dropped out of school. When they were encouraged to return, they said they could not because they had to breastfeed their babies and school was too far away. Oxfam gave them bicycles so they could go to school, cycle home at lunch time to feed their babies, and return to school. They no longer have to choose between their children and the education they need to create better lives for themselves.

Even if every country sorted out the inequality in education, the well-documented relationship between trade and gender would remain. Women are disproportionately affected by trade policy decisions, particularly in developing countries, as we have heard. As the UK leaves the European Union and forms its own independent trade policy, the Government have an opportunity to show leadership and develop a truly gender-responsive approach to trade policy. I hope they make the most of that opportunity.

In countries where women’s socioeconomic positions are particularly precarious, trade can of course offer important routes to their social and economic empowerment, and trade agreements can create decent work opportunities for women. However, far too often they have been a source of further exploitation. Some trade agreements result in women finding themselves trapped in low-wage jobs and dangerous working environments, which we all wish to avoid.

Well-regulated, unionised jobs for men and women in one country being lost as they are relocated overseas, often to markets without those protections, is a potential downside of a trade agreement that is not well thought through. Poorly designed trade policy can therefore fail to deliver coherent ways of improving women’s rights and economic status. At worst, it can harm the rights of women—particularly those from poor and marginalised communities.

Civil society campaign groups in the Commonwealth have highlighted that bad trade policy can lead to jobs with low wages and poor working conditions for women—effectively a race to the bottom rather than, to use the Government’s favourite phrase, the levelling up that we all wish to see. Bad trade policy may result in women’s livelihoods being put at risk, and the interests of private companies and investors being prioritised over commitments to women’s rights. It can also lead to inadequate provision of quality public services and infrastructure, such as education, which are vital to give women an equal chance to participate in the market, redress their unpaid care work and tackle violence against women and girls.

But there is good news: there are ways of making this work. The joint declaration on trade and women’s economic empowerment at the 11th World Trade Organisation ministerial conference helpfully identified some things for future discussion. I hope that the Minister is aware of those things and has taken them to heart, but I will remind him of them anyway. There were five key recommendations: sharing respective experiences relating to policies and programmes that encourage women’s participation in national and international economies; sharing best practice for conducting gender-based analysis of trade policies and monitoring; sharing methods and procedures for the collection of gender-disaggregated data—so often in gender equality work, just having the data makes for a huge step forward—and the use of indicators, monitoring and evaluation methodologies so we can analyse gender-focused trade statistics and work out whether we are doing anything good; working together in the WTO to remove barriers to women’s economic empowerment and increase their participation; and ensuring that aid for trade really supports the tools and know-how to analyse, design and implement gender-responsive trade policies. Future discussions alone are not enough. If trade agreements proceed as usual and lock in liberalisation measures, they set back efforts to improve labour standards and workplace rights, and they disadvantage women. I am sure that none of us wants that.

Not enough is being done to determine the gender impacts of trade agreements at the outset, let alone any subsequent review post ratification. Will the Minister set out what representations the UK intends to make at the upcoming 12th ministerial conference on gender and trade?

The SheTrades Commonwealth scheme, which was launched by the former Prime Minister at the Commonwealth Business Forum in London in 2018, has been cautiously welcomed by campaign groups and civil society organisations. There is caution, however, because such initiatives invariably focus on channelling support to women entrepreneurs in developing countries. That is good, but they are often target-driven, and much of the funding is ultimately directed towards well-connected and wealthy figures in developing countries, without any measurement of or focus on the benefits for other women. Those schemes may well have the noble intention of ensuring that women are better represented in global trade, and that is a good thing, but it is not enough if they fail to address the wider structural issues that are often reinforced by trade policy architecture.

Similarly, the Commonwealth connectivity agenda has been heralded as an additional tool to address how digital solutions can be used to empower women and unlock economic opportunities for them. Of course, that is worthwhile, but we have to tackle the underlying structural issues. The outcome statement of the 2018 Commonwealth Women’s Forum, which took place alongside the business forum, should be commended for recognising that trade policy could be used to leverage economic empowerment for women and encourage ratification of the International Labour Organisation conventions. Those involved in the forum call on the Commonwealth Heads of Government to

“create an enabling macroeconomic environment…Call on Heads to lead global action on developing and implementing gender responsive trade policies and economic development in collaboration with women…Call on Heads to address the systematic barriers to women’s full and equal participation in the economy…Commit to extending employment regulations and social and legal protection to cover women workers in the formal and informal economy…Call on Heads to recognise the economic value of unpaid care work”,

without which women will continue to be doubly disadvantaged. Even that does not go far enough to identify the negative potential impact of trade liberalisation measures that are drawn up without due attention to gender; nor does it include recommendations for how to proceed with binding obligations on all parties.

Echoing what the hon. Member for Stafford said, I ask the Minister to set out the Government’s priorities for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting. In 2018, the International Trade Committee heard much evidence on how trade policy unfairly affects women and what measures might be considered a step forward—the Minister might want to refer to that at CHOGM. The woman from the Gender and Development Network gave evidence about significant economic and social disadvantage, including unemployment, low pay and poor working conditions. She also highlighted how poorly thought-through free trade agreements can drive down labour standards. Again, that is not what we want. ActionAid noted in its evidence that women face economic discrimination at every level, and women in developing countries could be at least $9 trillion better off if their pay and access to paid work were equal to men’s.

The introduction of specific gender chapters in free trade agreements, such as that in the Canada-Chile free trade agreement, has been commended as breaking positive new ground. Such agreements have the potential to build on existing global commitments, such as the convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women, and to provide for the establishment of trade and gender committees to oversee the application of aspects of a free trade agreement. However, such chapters often do not contain binding obligations or enforcement measures, so they have been described by the UN conference on trade and development as “light touch.”

The Labour party committed in its manifesto to ensuring that trade policy respects workers’ rights, not just domestically but abroad. That includes accountability for global supply chains. It also involves ensuring that women workers in the Commonwealth who produce goods for our market are in decent jobs with decent wages, safe working conditions and union rights, and that they are safe from sexual harassment and violence. We should not be in the business of offshoring exploitative conditions.

Many UK companies source goods from the global south and the Commonwealth, which has created many jobs in sectors that employ women, such as garments and agriculture. However, it is important to ensure that the jobs that are created have safe working conditions and pay a living wage. If we are to design a trade policy that genuinely promotes women’s rights and encourages women’s greater representation and participation in trade and investment across the Commonwealth, we must address the structural challenges. To ensure that trade policy in the Commonwealth is in line with women’s rights, the Government must carry out gender and social impact assessments prior to all new trade agreements—and I mean all of them. The debate is about the Commonwealth, but we should do the same for all trade agreements.

The Government’s response to the International Trade Committee report, in which they which committed to publishing gender-specific reviews and scoping assessments with trade agreements, is welcome. However, if Parliament does not have a properly defined role in scrutinising and debating those agreements, I worry that we will not be able to hold the Government to account on them.

Trade agreements can affect the public services that women rely on for their social protection, displace local jobs through surges of cheap imports and undermine working conditions. They can also do the opposite, and we could decide that we want to do the opposite. In the discussion about women’s economic empowerment, if we get it wrong and continue to overlook the aspects of trade agreements that stand to do the most damage, we risk making women’s lives worse. If we get it right, there is a good possibility that we can make women’s lives much better and assist with women’s economic empowerment in the Commonwealth. I hope that the Minister will address some of what Members have said.

The Commonwealth is rapidly becoming one of the economic powerhouses of global growth, with joint GDP expected to reach $13 trillion this year. While progress has been made in unleashing the full economic potential of women across the Commonwealth, their access to the benefits of trade remains startlingly unbalanced, as we have heard from a succession of speakers today. This issue is important for developed and developing countries alike. From barriers to technology and start-up capital to land ownership restrictions, all too often women are unable to fully exploit their business talents and realise their trading ambitions.

Women do not lack ability or ambition, yet we know that only one in three UK entrepreneurs is female, which is a gender gap equivalent to approximately 1.1 million missing businesses. Globally it is estimated that female-led SMEs face a credit gap of around $300 billion, with businesses run by women collecting less than 3% of global venture capital in 2017. The World Bank estimates that of 173 countries worldwide, 90% had at least one law impeding women’s economic opportunities, hence our determination to help women in the UK to export to or invest in our Commonwealth partners and other global markets, and to enable women in Commonwealth nations to trade with us. After all, supporting women-owned businesses to trade internationally is a proven way to boost broader economic transformation.

In recognition of that, at the London Commonwealth summit in 2018 all member states agreed to address systemic barriers to women’s full and equal participation in the economy and increase opportunities for women in trade internationally. The UK is playing a key role in championing those goals. Our 2018 UK export strategy commits us to harnessing trade’s potential for boosting economic growth, creating jobs and supporting greater participation by women in the economy. In the UK-US negotiation objectives announced earlier this month, we made clear that we are seeking an agreement with the US that advances women’s economic empowerment.

As an independent member of the World Trade Organisation, the UK is now working with other members to use the joint declaration on trade and women’s economic empowerment, which, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford and others mentioned, was adopted at the 11th ministerial conference of the WTO in 2017 as a road map for progress on this vital agenda. We will seek to build on that momentum and drive forward our existing commitments at the 12th ministerial conference in June. As we also look ahead to the next Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Kigali, Rwanda this summer, I am encouraged that strategies for women in business and trade are expected to form part of the discussions.

I was pleased to spend several months working with colleagues in the FCO and DFID to deliver the Africa investment summit on 20 January this year. During the summit, we announced an additional £6.1 million of funding for the extension of the work and opportunities for women programme, known as the WOW programme. That will support a further 100,000 women in Africa to access safer and better paid employment. A memorable part of the event was when I attended a reception in the margins of the summit hosted by the Royal Academy of Engineering, where I met female entrepreneurs from African countries who received the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Africa prize. It is dynamic young entrepreneurs like them who will supercharge economic growth across the developing world in the decades ahead.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford asked whether we should establish Commonwealth MBA scholarships. Since 2018, the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission has focused its new awards under six key development themes. It supports high-calibre female postgraduates from 23 Commonwealth countries in master’s subjects relating to the theme of business and industry. In 2018, some 48% of new awards were for women. As for the investment strategy of the CDC, that body is working hard to help promote women’s economic empowerment through their own investments. The CDC sponsored the first global gender-smart investing summit in London in 2018 and is a founder member of the 2XChallenge, which seeks to mobilise $3 billion-worth of investments into developing countries by the end of this year in support of women’s businesses.

My hon. Friend asked if we could appoint a special envoy on women’s economic empowerment for the Commonwealth. The UK’s special envoy for gender equality already represents the breadth of work that the UK Government do on this issue, and a key part of their role is to promote best practice in gender equality overseas.

I agree with my hon. Friend about the importance of women entrepreneurs forging bonds across the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth Business Women’s Network is currently a route to do that and a vocal participant in Commonwealth events. Indeed, it is co-hosting a conference this month on collaboration, trade and education across the Commonwealth. It will also be active in the Commonwealth Business Forum, which is taking place immediately before the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Kigali, where we expect encouraging women entrepreneurs to be on the agenda set by the incoming chair-in-office, Rwanda.

My hon. Friend asked me about the SheTrades Commonwealth initiative, which we launched at the last Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting, in London. As she observed, that innovative project has been doing great work in supporting women entrepreneurs in four Commonwealth countries—Bangladesh, Kenya, Ghana and Nigeria—by helping to enhance their business competitiveness and connecting them with international markets. Building on the success of SheTrades, the Secretary of State for International Development announced a further £3.5 million, as my hon. Friend mentioned, towards a programme extension at the UK-Africa investment summit in January.

In today’s debate, we heard speeches from across the House. The hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) championed the issue of period poverty and the way it blocks women from accessing the economy, and thus trade. She spoke powerfully about that. The hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Anne McLaughlin), with her memorable reference to the marriage terminator, and others, also spoke with great knowledge, based not least on the interregnum before her return to the House, when she worked abroad to understand the issues at a deep level.

The hon. Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire) also spoke powerfully, although it is worth mentioning that, notwithstanding the barriers that women face, which across the House we are all committed to doing everything we can to address, it is trade liberalisation that has led to the greatest and fastest improvement in human welfare in history in past decades. It is a shame that the Opposition party has been taken hold of by a fundamentally Marxist view, which has led them to oppose trade agreements with the most benign of allies, leads to an attitude that regards liberalisation as fundamentally against the best interest, and talks as if we can impose our standards on every country—least appropriately of all on a developing country.