'I am creating a women Mafia'
( The following is a speech the author delivered recently at Future Talks: Women Connect-Collaborate during the launch of the GREAT Women ICT Platform in Makati City.)
It is obvious that when women come together… things happen. What if we came together as one? Then the one would be the many, and the collective creates a movement, and the movement stands on a platform for change… and progress… and innovation — to answer to one objective: strengthen the woman agenda.
What’s this all about? Before, the woman agenda was seen as focused on human rights issues specifically on poverty creating problems of marginalization and injustice. Five years ago, these were the issues of the local women programs that looked to empowerment at the community level. Under a government-run program funded by the Canadian government, the Philippine Commission on Women ran the GREAT Program. GREAT is the acronym for Gender-Responsive Economic Actions for the Transformation of Women.
In 2013, the ECHOsi Foundation, the non-profit development arm of the ECHOstore, was called in as private sector partner to the convergence program of national and local government agencies and women’s groups that looked at improving local business policy, projects and services for women businesses. One innovation at the end of that program in 2014 was the launch of the brand called GREAT Women. Now, it continues to be more than just a brand. Today, GREAT Women is an integrated platform to address gender issues. It is now the Philippine gender platform as we enter the GREAT Phase 2 once again funded by the Canadian government on the development side for the next six years, specific to an inclusive value and supply-chain approach to products. Hopefully, we can develop services, too.
In 2014, IBM offered its SmartCloud for Social Business as a grant to ECHOsi Foundation, through the linkages triggered by USAid. Technology, the great equalizer, finally came into the picture, without us really planning this. And because I felt it was more apt for me to put on my hat as president of the Business and Professional Women Makati sector (BPW Makati), I called in the PLDT Smart Foundation instead to be the technology partner and handler. It was great ( pun intended) that IBM’s SmartCloud actually shared the “Smart” in PLDT’s Smart Foundation. We tied in the PLDT SME Nation for an alignment, too.
We needed to address the gap: that we need an online space where every woman entrepreneur, businesswoman or professional could go to to access information about gender issues, offer their products and services in the online marketplace, which would house companies, brands, services and products that are majority women-owned and led. A space where mentorship can happen. An online space where a job can be posted, a supplier can be found. A place where we can jointly check metrics of how many women are truly being empowered and how much trade can actually happen between women businesses and services. The GREAT Women ICT (information communications technology) Platform, the first in the ASEAN region solely for women, is now formed as a collaboration between multi-stakeholder groups with the aim of linking women through technology.
I have seen how easy it is to launch something. How very very hard and challenging it can be to continue and make a project, a business or a concept sustainable and operational. And this is where we stand now with the GREAT Women ICT Platform. We will need to work this. Draw other women in. Populate it. Begin to trade. Create mentoring circles. Use it like our Philippine Gender Linkedin, Google group or even Facebook — but with a very clear agenda. We are helping women economically empowered become business savvy, strengthened in a network of sisters (and brothers, too) out to help each other. Let us change the game.
I jokingly tell friends when they ask what I am up to. I say, I am creating a women Mafia. It’s putting everyone together online. We have invited and included other women groups such as the Women Business Council (WomenBizPH), Women Corporate Directors, SPARK, Network of Enterprising Women ( NEW), Women in Tech, and the Women CEO group, among others.
PLDT- Smart Foundation hopes to align its SME Nation women entrepreneurs. The Philippine Commission for Women ( PCW) and the Department of Trade and Industry’s Women’s Desk have a joint role: to draw in GAD (Gender and Development) Focal Persons in government agencies into this platform for networking opportunities by way that GAD budgets can really support women’s economic development. The longer term direction is to invite women under industry and professional groupings. Access into this ICT Platform is through women groups. This way, everyone will need to be part of a group to add strength to it, and draw from it.
But what is the real big picture? The woman agenda is moving out of the realm of human rights and into mainstream issues of leadership, economic power, political and corporate decision making.
The GREAT Women Platform, which we started here in the Philippines, is being looked at for replication in ASEAN. The 10- country ASEAN Integration becomes official in December. Let us step into this new market place of 600 million consumers as one platform, the Filipina platform called GREAT Women. This is the bigger picture. That we, the Filipinas, internationally stand tall with pride, talent, skill and guts to take the lead for our sisters in the region. We collaborate. We connect. Let us change the game.
Let’s put women online and our women agenda centerstage.