Unleashing the women power
The $700 billion question for Pakistan’s businesswomen
By Arif Zaman
It was a familiar pattern. A first time visitor to Pakistan whose expectations were exceeded and preconceptions challenged by what she saw and who she met. This was very much in line with the experience of previous visitors to Pakistan this year in delegations from Commonwealth countries in diverse sectors such as SMEs, mining, fashion and pharmaceuticals. What made this visit in the last few days so different was that the target audience was the country’s businesswomen, including a number of members of the Pakistan Federation of Business & Professional Women’s Organization.
The visitor was Freda Miriklis, the recently elected International President of Business and Professional Women International (BPW), the youngest President in the organisation's 80-year history and Chair, UN Committee for the Status of Women (2008-2011). BPW, the only organisation focussed on business and professional women, has consultative status with the UN and its members include influential women leaders, entrepreneurs, business owners, executives, professionals and young career women.
Deb Leary, President of the British Association of Women Entrepreneurs and myself, as Advisor to the Commonwealth Business Council (CBC), sit with Miriklis on the recently- established Board for Commonwealth Businesswomen (CBW), representing the collective power of three organisations pre-eminent in their fields and committed to a common cause.
The CBW mandate comes from two outputs of the Commonwealth meeting in Perth in October. Firstly, the Commonwealth Business Forum Communiqué and Report to Heads of Government which said that ‘women own up to 39 percent of private businesses in the formal economy but have not penetrated the global supply chain, are underrepresented on boards, and lack access to finance.  CBC will work with the International Federation of Business and Professional Women and the British Association of Women Entrepreneurs to establish a Commonwealth Businesswomen’s Network to strengthen the overarching strategy for women in business around procurement and policy.’
Secondly, the Commonwealth Heads of Government Communiqué itself which said that ‘Heads agreed to improving gender equality and the empowerment of women in the Commonwealth by supporting national programmes, intensifying efforts to promote women’s decision-making roles at all levels, and continuing to improve advocacy for women’s leadership and the empowerment of women as leaders....and for a more effective response from all actors in the global community to the disproportionately negative impact of the current international and national economic crises on women.’ 
It was significant that Miriklis, who was accompanied by the immediate past BPW president, Liz Benham, visited Pakistan as the first Mission for CBW and an acknowledgement of the pivotal role that Pakistan has played in establishing CBW at a time when Pakistan’s engagement with the Commonwealth - through its business community, young people and civil society as well at the Government level – is probably far more stable and stronger than in recent years. As a former High Commissioner to the UK said that Pakistan as the second largest member state and one of its original founder members may be stronger for its Commonwealth membership but the Commonwealth is also stronger for Pakistan’s active involvement.   
There was another reason why Miriklis was keen to visit Pakistan so soon into her term as President. The Pakistan chapter of BPW is now some 48-years-old and has probably the most extensive and established set of social programmes and projects than anywhere in the 98 countries in which BPW is represented across five continents. BPW Pakistan or the ‘Pakistan Federation of Business & Professional Women’s Organization’ (PFBPWO) as it is properly called was established in the immediate period after independence inspired by pioneering and visionary women such as Begum Ra'ana Liaquat Ali Khan, a great supporter of BPW Pakistan, and instrumental in the establishment of APWA.
Key objectives of BPW Pakistan include organising women in all parts of country to work for high standards of educational and intellectual attainments of women so as to prepare them as useful and worthy citizens; encouraging women and girls to acquire education in all fields and to apply their capacities and intelligence for the benefit of others as well as themselves; and solving the problem of working women through joint efforts and through mass education.
This is implemented through branches in all four provinces. In Karachi, BPW runs a hostel for working ladies and a Retired Women’s Home, a school and an Industrial Home and Computer Centre at Azam Town. BPW Rawalpindi Islamabad operates a women and child Health Care Centre at the Women’s Welfare Complex, Rawal Town Islamabad. BPW Lahore has a jobs’ placement and counselling for women in Faisal Town Lahore. It is ironic that public awareness of the BPW Pakistan’s reach and impact remains limited, while many recently established NGOs, with questionable agendas and limited impact, are being acknowledged.
In a whirlwind tour of these cities and projects concluding with a high-profile reception hosted by the Australian High Commissioner at which his British counterpart also spoke, Miriklis was clear that this was a side of Pakistan – business and professional women making a real difference to the quality of women’s lives (and with no donor funding) that needed to be much better acknowledged and encouraged by the international community and as a corrective to a one dimensional view of the country that is found too often in the West. This view was reinforced in a meeting with some 50 women CEOs of mid-large companies where the collective potential of those present as a resource to be tapped and power to be harnessed was self-evident. Significantly, many of these women are often not involved in the proliferation of women’s chambers and while they had not come together before to discuss their common interests and concerns as Pakistani businesswomen, an emerging CBW Steering Group for Pakistan will aim to sustain and strengthen momentum for this group and in their interaction with BPW Pakistan.
CBW is committed to a holistic agenda around the ‘5 Ps’ – potential, progression, platform, procurement and policy. Key to CBW is the belief, as Miriklis, puts it, that “we are not doing this because we think women are poor and we want to help them, or because we think they are victims. We are saying that women are invaluable and this is what they can bring to business.” A good example of this is the procurement component. This links to the Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEP) – Equality Means Business, a partnership initiative of UN Women and UN Global Compact that encourages engagement with business, civil society, the UN and Governments to advance and empower women in the workplace, marketplace and community. As a new UN Security Council member and building on its central role in CBW, Pakistan can show help to show international vision, direction and outcomes in an area in which it has a clear stake. One of the WEP Principles concerns ‘implementing enterprise development, supply chain and marketing practices that empower women.’ This also aims to support UN Millennium Development Goal 3: Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women. 
Spending is typically funnelled through procurement. Government procurement is a key element in the GDP of many developing countries. Corporate procurement is at the core of the global economy: Fortune 500 companies alone spend in excess of US$700 billion each year on procured goods and services. Approximately one percent of this goes to women-owned businesses. This is not because women vendors do not exist; it is an issue of process. Lack of knowledge about procurement processes, including how and where tenders are advertised and how to respond, has inhibited women’s access to procurement markets.
There are two main roadblocks to increasing women’s share of international procurement, though neither is easy to address. First, women entrepreneurs who want to sell products or services to multinational corporations (MNCs) often do not know what, precisely, MNCs require. Second, although many MNCs are eager to procure from women vendors, they do not have the means to find them – particularly in countries where the government lacks statistics on women-owned businesses. Even when the buyers and sellers do connect, the sellers may need technical assistance to meet the requirements of international corporations.
Businesswomen want to sell and so a solid link into the WTO initiative led by the International Trade Centre on the Global Platform for Action on Sourcing from Women Vendors which includes 45 multinational corporations provides for the first time direct linkages to women business owners across multiple sectors and countries. The aim of the Global Platform is to increase the share of corporate, government, and institutional procurement secured by women vendors for the ultimate purpose of bringing greater economic benefit to women and their communities.
CBW can now link buyers and sellers, plus agencies that provide technical assistance. The annual buyers-sellers meeting, last held in China in September (where 300 delegates from 19 countries participated, culminating in US$15m worth of contracts for the supply of goods and services from women entrepreneurs) offers opportunities for not only women entrepreneurs (as sellers), but companies headed by men or by women that participate as buyers. Typically buyers come in response to a supplier diversity programme where they reap benefits from sourcing from women vendors and in 2011 include Global Procurement Officers from Marriott International, Accenture, Cisco and IBM amongst many others and this does not include government procurement orders which are highly significant in their own right.
The common message from corporate members at the China meeting was that they need assistance in identifying the vendors in least developed and developing countries. They also said that many women-owned businesses would need various types of training to raise their products or services to the international standards.
If Pakistani women own more than 51 percent of their business in one of the designated sectors (which includes agribusiness; construction; automotive and clean and green technologies; information technology and BPO; and textiles and apparel) and are a member of a Trade Support Institution, they will be eligible to bid for these procurement contracts at the next Global Platform meeting in Indonesia next year. That is an opportunity and an incentive for Pakistani women entrepreneurs which should be fully seized. The question is will they be ready and prepared to secure success in the process. CBW is committed to fully supporting Pakistan’s businesswomen to make this happen.
The writer is an Advisor to the Commonwealth Business Council and