Fashion Helping Africa’s Women & Business, Says ITC

(AGI) Turin, June 12 - Turning Africa’s artisans into small and medium-sized enterprise owners and transforming its women into businesswomen, is key to developing the continent and its economy, said the Executive Director of the International Trade Center (ITC), Arancha Gonzalez. The ITC’s “Ethics Fashion” project, which was set up in a number of African countries including Kenya, is rapidly becoming a business model, the head of the Geneva-based organisation affirmed. “The slogan for our project is ‘Work, not charity’,” Gonzalez told AGI in Turin, where she is attending the 9th session of the International Chamber of Commerce. “Our aim is to ensure that these nations’ economies function well, that they are productive, competitive, and above all safer. We talk with governments about topics such as safety, rules of commerce, simplifying customs regulations, and dialogue between the public and private sectors. We speak with local financial and investment institutions too,” she said. “Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) make up 90 percent of all business, in Italy just as in Benin. Helping this 90 percent, which creates 40 to 50 percent of all jobs, is not possible without institutional support from organisations such as the ITC. These nations face the same challenges as us, they’re unfamiliar with the markets, and cannot obtain credit.
The risks are different, of course, but the main issue is the quality of their products,” she stated. The ITC therefore takes action at this level by educating and training local businesses to improve their products and then export them. “There is a quality and competition problem in Africa,” Gonzalez said.
“Many businesses can’t export because no one is buying; not just Europeans, but Americans, Chinese, and Brazilians too.
We’ve conducted training for businesses in Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Burundi in the coffee sector. We’ve supported women and the results have been incredible, especially in Kenya, where 4000 women work in high fashion. We’ve helped them produce clothing that has been sold to McCartney, Viviane Westwood, and Armani.
We’ve gotten amazing results. Women who used to work for under a dollar a day now work for 12 dollars. We established a business that was then sold to a female Kenyan tycoon, and the women who work there are now out of the slums and living in houses in the city, providing food and education for their children. “Markets have unbelievable power in reducing poverty,” Gonzalez emphasized. The ITC’s next goal, she said, is to “look for multinational companies in India, China, Europe, and U.S. that are ready to insert a million women in their chain of production”. “We’ve created a business model and we intend to pursue it,” she concluded..
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