Women as a key competitiveness factor in innovation clusters and ecosystems

Submitted by Imogen Allan on 18 June 2021

On 20 April, the European Alliance Against Coronavirus had the second session on women as a competitiveness factor in clusters and ecosystems. This session built on the first webinar that took place on 25 March.

Rozalia Weisz from the Skåne region in Sweden​ spoke about gender equality in cluster business and activities in the region. ​The low employment rate, need for more innovative entrepreneurs, and not fully utilized human capital are the current challenges they face.

To address these issues, they applied the ‘4 R’ method for gender-equality integration: representation, resources, reality, realisation. To all cluster initiatives, the region offers courses and workshops in gender equality and coaching for management teams and individual support for each cluster.

Veronica Elena Bocci from DITECFER​ gave insights into the G20 and the engagement of the civil society in the summit, which is under Italian presidency this year. G20 has an engagement group “Women20”, which works independently from the governments. It submits formal recommendations to the G20 Presidency before each summit. The topics that were addressed this year are the care crisis and growing employment gap because of the pandemic, the STEM gap, and gender-sensitive company resilience plans.

Ebe Muschialli, UNIDO​, shared her experience on gender mainstreaming in cluster development and practical examples from technical assistance projects to ensure women inclusion and participation in cluster-related intervention​.

Gender mainstreaming is a big part of UNIDO’s cluster methodology and is addressed by gender analysis in mapping exercises, vision definition, and the design of an action plan. They have successful cases, among which are the West Africa Competitiveness Programme – WACOMP Ghana, or the Market Access facilitation for traditional food products – PAMPAT Tunisia.

The morning sessions are open to everyone.

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Watch the full recording here:

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