Good News from Colombia

1. Guest Columnist

Between August 5 and 8, I had the pleasure of visiting Bogotá for the first time. Despite the short visit, my time in the capital of Colombia was enough to account for its great diversity, beautiful landscapes, and, above all, the warmth of its citizens. My visit also allowed me to learn about the resilience and sense of innovation of Bogota´s business community, as well as the strength of its national institutions, which have focused on providing stability and sustained growth, thus consolidating Colombia as one of the most vibrant and developed countries in Latin America.

But my visit to Colombia had a particular objective. Since assuming the leadership of the WCF on July 1 of this year, Mr. Nicolás Uribe, Chair of the Federation, defined providing tools for SMEs in four main transversal axes: digitization, sustainability, access to international markets, and empowerment of women, as our top priority. Within the framework of this last axis, our Chair has commissioned me to lead the WCF's strategy to support all female entrepreneurs worldwide and guarantee greater participation of women in leadership positions within our community. In this sense, the objective of my visit was to present this strategy and develop spaces that allowed us to provide practical tools to support women-led businesses. As world president of Women Business Leaders (Femmes Chefs d'Entreprises - FCEM), an international association that has brought together more than five million women entrepreneurs from more than 120 countries around the world since 1945, I have worked for the internationalization of small businesses led by women. For this reason, I am committed to contributing on this front, providing various countries with real solutions to create a much more inclusive and friendly business world for all women. We began this work in Bogotá by holding a world-class event in which 240 businesswomen participated. In this event, we demonstrated that companies designed to meet the needs of women or created by women are good business and reduce gender gaps. In addition, we presented success stories and provided tools that allowed attendees to develop actions in their daily operations to improve the participation of women in business. At the WCF, we will continue to consolidate women as protagonists in the development of our business sector. We will work to create more and better economic opportunities, identify successful women entrepreneurship programs from international institutions and different chambers of commerce to expand them throughout the world, and promote relevant information on the benefits that greater participation of women in business has for our society.

Marie-Christine Oghly World President of Femmes Chefs d'Entreprises (FCEM) and Deputy Chair of the World Chambers Federation (WCF)