First Commonwealth Women Entrepreneurship Summit Launched

On the first joint International Women’s Day and Commonwealth Day for several years, the inaugural Commonwealth Women’s Entrepreneurship Summit is launched.

Held while the UK is Commonwealth Chair and G7 President, it will be a 2-day online conference focusing on women’s entrepreneurship across emerging tech sectors.

Targeting policymakers, entrepreneurs, government agencies, entrepreneurship support organizations, funders, and educational institutions, it aims to frame and feed into key international meetings including CHOGM and the G7 which will be held within about 100 days of the Summit and the G20 and UNCTAD 15 later in 2021.

As WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, said at her recent appointment, ‘Ecommerce will help us to be more inclusive of women’ and as the G20 said in December 2020, there is ‘a missed opportunity – to tackle the gap that needs immediate action, which is the representation of women in emerging fields.’ The Commonwealth Women’s Entrepreneurship Summit will address that need.

The event is being convened by the world’s largest entrepreneurship community (Global Entrepreneurship Network) which supports entrepreneurship ecosystems across 180 countries; the Commonwealth Businesswomen’s Network (directly recognized by all 54 Commonwealth governments); the UK Government (Women in Innovation Network); and Africa’s largest network of women entrepreneurs (AWEP: African Women’s Entrepreneurship Program) which was established and supported during and by the Obama-Biden Administration.

The Summit will focus on how business is being transformed by emerging tech areas such as fintech, createch, edtech, biotech, cleantech, and agritech, how women from diverse backgrounds are and can be such a key part of this innovation ecosystem, and how governments and industry can help to make this happen.

Three of the partners already host their communities on the WorldLabs innovation ecosystem platform which we aim to leverage to drive involvement before, during, and after the event.

Women entrepreneurs from across the Commonwealth are being invited to create a short 60sec video sharing their experiences as entrepreneurs providing inspiring and challenging on-the-ground accounts. The campaign called Heroine Stories will be shown during the Summit and made available to worldwide audiences through social media. This is the most innovative project involving women entrepreneurs, schools, and universities in the Commonwealth’s history and will be a powerful legacy of the Summit.

The Summit will feature some of the world’s leading experts on women’s entrepreneurship and fast-growing tech sectors from Fintech to Edtech, Healthtech to Agritech.

Details of speakers and sessions will be released soon. The Summit registration site is live now and will provide the latest updates regarding the program and activities as we countdown to the conference.

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