By ITC News
GENEVA, Switzerland – Pamela Coke-Hamilton, executive director of the International Trade Centre (ITC), and John Denton, the secretary-general of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) signed a Memorandum of Understanding that will benefit the two organizations’ collaboration on supporting small businesses.
The new partnership will look at well-established topics to advance the trade competitiveness of small businesses, especially those owned by women.
This signature follows consultations held since June of this year that map ITC’s and ICC’s various areas of work, their solutions and tools, focusing on the following core areas: joint advocacy, competitiveness, women’s economic empowerment, youth entrepreneurship, sustainability and the circular economy.
In more detail, the cooperation looks at these identified key actions:
- Improve the access of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises to trade and market intelligence, through ITC market intelligence tools, and ICC entrepreneurship centres.
- Enhance the performance of business support organizations including chambers of commerce, through trainings and advisory services on skills, digitalization, the new ITC benchmarking platform, and joint technical publications.
- Help micro, small and medium-sized enterprises mitigate climate change and engage them as key drivers of green trade, through joint awareness raising campaigns, advocacy events, and e-learning.
- Support women entrepreneurship and promote gender equality, through joint awareness raising campaigns on gender mainstreaming drawing on ITC’s SheTrades initiative.
- Promote youth entrepreneurship via ICC entrepreneurship centres in selected countries, for instance through joint virtual learning spaces and linkages to the ITC Ye! Community.
- Collaborate on collecting and analyzing data on competitiveness through ITC’s survey work and joint thought leadership.
- Partner on joint outreach and advocacy, for instance through webinars, training and events via the ICC World Congress Conference and ITC’s World Trade Promotion Organization Conference.
