The Investment Climate Reform (ICR) Facility has organised the ICR4WEE Conference on 5-6 June 2024. The event focused on creating better legal, institutional, and regulatory conditions for businesses to grow and operate, as well as to improve women’s participation in policy-making processes.
Building on its successful activities and the dynamic networks it has established across African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) states, the ICR Facility brought together ACP and European stakeholders, such as policymakers, business organisations, regulators and development partners to exchange learnings and ideas on making business environment reforms work for women in the ACP region and on how to create momentum for reforms.
About
Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) is recognised as a top priority for sustainable economic development. However, women are still largely underrepresented in decision-making processes and face various structural legal and social gaps in labour force participation, wages, access to finance, access to formal and informal networks, etc.
Acting today to strengthen WEE through innovative, gender-transformative economic policies is critical. This is where the ICR Facility comes in. The ICR4WEE Conference will discuss how investment climate reforms (ICR) can be used to strengthen Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE).
Creating a business environment that works for women too requires to:
- Adapt economic policies to respond to the needs of different groups of society, including women;
- Use innovative and strong approaches to foster women’s economic empowerment;
- Support financial inclusion, as a key to enable women-led enterprises to prosper.
Therefore, the topics to be discussed will include for example representation and agency of women in inclusive public-private dialogues, gender-sensitive industrial and investment policies, the impact of unpaid care work on women’s economic choices and autonomy, access to finance for women entrepreneurs, gender-lens investing, gender-based violence in the workplace and a range of other themes.
The aims of this 2-day conference include:
- learning from high-level speakers and experts from ACP public and private sector institutions on their engagement in WEE,
- showcasing and exchanging successes, including relevant programmes that supported reforms for women-led businesses,
- sharing the most recent research and findings on the relation between investment climate reforms and WEE, and
- providing a space for practitioners to discuss experiences with peers.
- More than 50 expert speakers
- 150+ participants
