Press release: UN Women and TÜRKONFED reinforce cooperation to expand joint work on gender responsive procurement
Date:
Istanbul, 11 July 2023 – The Turkish Enterprise and Business Confederation (TÜRKONFED) and UN Women signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to further reinforce their ongoing partnership focused on advancing and promoting gender responsive procurement (GRP) across Europe and Central Asia.
As part of the partnership, the two entities will finalize a GRP manual for women entrepreneurs and explore opportunities to expand this practice in Türkiye and beyond. The partnership will also have a strong focus on communications and visibility activities to promote GRP in the region.
A non-governmental and nonpartisan business organization, TÜRKONFED aims at contributing to the development of regional, sectoral and national economic policies. Under its Women in Business Commission, the organization works to increase the number of women both as entrepreneurs and employees in the industry and service sectors, to strengthen the place of women in the economy, to follow the legal regulations and practices in this field, and to support good practices.
Speaking at the signing ceremony, UN Women Regional Director for Europe and Central Asia, Alia El-Yassir said: "Nearly a year since we started working with TÜRKONFED, we already have tangible results: a GRP manual for women entrepreneurs that allowed us to launch multiple trainings. Today, I'm glad that this MoU will allow us to increase our cooperation, continue providing trainings, and help more women entrepreneurs develop their skills. We'll also explore ways to work together to create new opportunities for women entrepreneurs in other countries across Europe and Central Asia.”
“We need to bring together both our intellectual and social capital to develop an entrepreneurship culture and establish gender equality in entrepreneurship culture. It is critical that we create a multi-stakeholder, collective mind-based mobilization environment to equip women with information and tools that will enable them to develop in the field of entrepreneurship,” said Süleyman Sonmez, President of TÜRKONFED. “Together with our stakeholders, we are proud to transform this common vision into a nationwide mobilization. We believe that with this partnership, we will contribute to the economic empowerment of women based on gender equality, which is the 5th Goal of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), both at the national and international levels. As we always say, as TÜRKONFED, we have the power to transform the lives of men and women together,” he added.
This cooperation agreement is expected to contribute to women’s economic empowerment underlined as one of four thematic areas in UN Women 2022-2025 Strategy Paper in line with SDG5: Achieving Gender Equality and Empowering All Women and Girls.
The cooperation agreement is part of UN Women’s global initiative, the Women’s Entrepreneurship Accelerator (WEA) funded by Mary Kay.