The Time is Now to Accelerate Women's Public Procurement: A Toolbox and Call to Action

The initiative aims to accelerate and transform women's public procurement (WPP) globally. Currently, women-owned businesses receive less than 1 percent of the trillions of dollars spent each year on public procurement globally. The Toolbox maps the landscape of WPP in a cross-section of countries, identifying specific models, policy and program strategies, and recommendations that stakeholders can use to accelerate and transform WPP. The Toolbox is targeted to international development and financing agencies, policymakers, contracting officers, and corporate prime contractors in public procurement who are interested in subcontracting to and mentoring women-owned businesses, and women's business associations. Implementation of WPP models and initiatives has been undertaken by various countries and facilitated by international organizations, development finance organizations, and international development agencies in donor countries. The Toolbox builds on extensive content from the International Trade Centre (ITC), a joint agency of the United Nations and the World Trade Organization based in Geneva, which has done substantial work on women's access to markets, including corporate and public procurement, ecommerce, and international trade. The Toolbox presents a series of case studies and snapshots of WPP models and initiatives, including country and program snapshots, in-depth country case studies, and a global call to action. The Toolbox concludes with the announcement of a Virtual International Summit on Women's Public Procurement in the fourth quarter of 2021, to be co-hosted by the ITC and the Women20 (W20) of the Group of Twenty (G20) countries. The Toolbox provides resources to advance gender equity in the field of public procurement, including a briefer, building the evidence base, how to make public procurement work for women, strategies for women's public procurement, and checklists of minimum government measures and recommendations by actor. The Toolbox also includes key published resources and a list of acronyms used throughout the document. The ultimate goal of the Toolbox is to "build back better" after the Coronavirus Disease of 2019-2021 and to create a stronger ecosystem that contributes to gross domestic product and facilitates the development of scalable and sustainable women-owned businesses that create good jobs for the citizens of the countries in which development specialists work.