Interview: Arancha González, Executive Director of the International Trade Centre
As the urgency of the global financial crisis faded, the world faced a new crisis: employment. A global job market filled with skills mismatches, tepid job creation, and uncertainty for investors has led to political instability and protests over income inequality, the ineffective state of higher education, and government inaction. By 2050, the world will need approximately 500 million new jobs to be created.
At the same time, we are nearing the deadline for the Millennium Development Goals, and already robust discussions on what the focus on the next group of goals should be have spread from the United Nations to the farthest reaches of the world. In these discussions, a theme has emerged from developing nations: no more aid handouts. They want sustainable economic development that creates a better standard of living for all citizens.
With these themes in mind, Diplomatic Courier sat down with Arancha González, Executive Director of the International Trade Centre and an expert in international trade and global development, just after she had returned from attending the World Economic Forum meetings in Nigeria and Panama, to discuss the role of small and medium enterprises in development, growing South-South trade, and international efforts to support women entrepreneurs.
***
[Diplomatic Courier:] According to your mission statement, the International Trade Center focuses solely on trade development for developing and transition economies. How do small and medium enterprises fit into that mission?
[Arancha González:] The ITC is about helping small and medium enterprises trade; through that, to generate growth; through that, to generate employment; and through that, to create an environment that is conducive to development of countries. So in reality, the ITC is the organization that makes trade happen.
We work with two other organizations who are our parent companies, if you wish. One is the United Nations, the other one is the World Trade Organization, and they are helping make trade possible. With the WTO, you can conceive trade opportunities. In UNCTAD, which is part of the UN, you will debate and discuss trade policies. In the ITC, you work with big policies to make trade happen. So basically, we work with those actors on the ground that are responsible for using the policies that governments negotiate to generate world trade, and through that, contribute to growth and employment.
[DC:] With your focus on SMEs, how do you align that with the United Nations Millennium Development Goals?
[AG:] Small and medium enterprises make up 90 percent of the economic issue of countries. So the main economic actors in any country that ITC works with—whether this country is in the North or the country is in the South, in the East or in the West—the biggest engines for jobs are the small and medium enterprises. Now, the Millennium Development agenda and the 2015 development agenda is all about helping countries out of poverty—reducing, eliminating poverty in this world.
We at the ITC strongly believe that in order to do that, you have to make sure we generate very strong growth. Of course, this growth has to be balanced, it has to be inclusive, it has to be sustainable, but it has to be strong. And for that growth to happen, since the majority of economic actors in a country are small and medium enterprises, we can literally find ourselves with small and medium enterprises being a key actor in the reduction of poverty in the world. And therefore, they have to become a more prominent actor in the development agenda of today or for the future.
[DC:] Nearly 60 percent of the ITC’s operations are in Africa. What is the environment for doing business there, especially for SMEs, and what kind of challenges and opportunities is there for the business environment in Africa?
[AG:] Entrepreneurship in Africa is incredibly vibrant. Whenever I go there, there are thousands of small and medium enterprises. Entrepreneurship is part of Africa’s blood, I would say. So the opportunities are huge. The problem is how to better leverage these opportunities, because they are also huge challenges. And leaving aside what I would call macro-challenges—like infrastructure, like energy, like economic instability, like political stability—leaving those aside, I think there are four specific challenges related to small and medium enterprises that need to be taken into account to transform or use this huge potential.
The first one is the challenge of the capacity of the entrepreneurs in Africa to produce the kinds of goods or offer the kinds of services that the market is ready to buy. So one big aspect is that of capacity building for entrepreneurship.
The second one relates more to the competitiveness of small and medium enterprises. When I mean competitiveness, I mean quality in labeling and in packaging. I mean innovation. I mean value addition in countries, so not just exporting commodities or raw materials, but trying to add value in countries.
The third challenge that I find is financing small and medium enterprises. It’s very often extremely complicated for smaller actors to access the financing necessary for them to grow and move into greater impact in countries.
The final challenge, if you wish, is that of informality. A lot of small and medium enterprises are in the informal sector, and as we all know, informality means lower salary, lower working conditions, lower quality, lower innovation. So a lot of what needs to be done to help is move more and more of the small and medium enterprises to the formal sector.
[DC:] At the most recent World Economic Forum meeting in Africa, there was a lot of talk of Africa Rising. What role do SMEs have in that concept?
[AG:] Huge! Actually it was very interesting that in the discussions I had in Abuja during the World Economic Forum, there was a huge focus and a huge interest in better leveraging the potential of the small and medium enterprises. Take a country like Nigeria, where more than 95 percent of economic actors in Nigeria are small and medium enterprises. They are the ones that generate the bulk of the jobs that Nigeria will need in the next ten to twenty years. So it’s right at the center of the preoccupations of the Nigerian economic team to ensure that they contribute to the competitiveness of the sector so that it becomes more of an engine for the economy.
I can say this of Nigeria, but I can also say exactly the same thing of Liberia, which is where I was two weeks ago. I can say the same of Burundi, Rwanda; I can say the same of Kenya and Uganda, or Mozambique and Zimbabwe, to give you just a few. The story of Africa has a lot to do with better finance sectors, and a stronger small and medium enterprises sector.
[DC:] Latin America is another area that is predicted to grow rapidly in the next few years. How is the business environment for SMEs there?
[AG:] I was actually at the WEF meeting in Panama [in April], and it was pretty much the same story. I would say the biggest challenges that I saw for Latin America—and to some extent it shares those with Africa—is competitiveness and financing. These are just two big challenges, knowing that a huge part of the small and medium enterprises in Latin America is in the informal sector. You can see there the development of the dual economy: an economy that is more on the formal side, with a lot of bigger companies, but a bigger side with a limited ability to create jobs; and then a huge informal sector has the potential to generate more jobs, to generate more resources, more revenues from the state. But it’s not doing so because they remain in the informal sector. So informality, once again, means lower use of the potential.
We had lots of very good discussion in Panama on the need to focus more on the informal sector. There is an aspect [of this issue] that has to do with the cost of doing business and taxation systems in countries. If the cost of doing business and taxation systems are too onerous for small and medium enterprises, they immediately will have an alternative to operate in the informal sector.
The other area where there is a consensus that we need to act is on the education side—and in particular on the vocational training and education in skills. If you look at a lot of what Latin America’s education system is producing today, it’s engineers and doctors and architects, and not many plumbers, electricians, technicians, carpenters. There really is a mismatch between what the market is demanding and what the education system is producing, and this is also creating difficulty for small and medium enterprises to grow, because a lot of these small and medium enterprises thrive on vocational training.
[DC:] What role can South-South trade play in unlocking both Africa’s and Latin America’s potential?
[AG:] It’s huge, because what we are seeing in this last decade is the emergence of the South as a huge actor, not just in trade, but also in investment. And I think we have to now take into account not just this North-South dimension, but the rapidly growing South-South dimension.
Let me use some facts and figures around this to illustrate how big this has become. Twenty years ago, 70 percent of trade was among countries in the North only; 20 percent was North-South; and only 10 percent was South-South. In ten years, it is predicted to become one-third, one-third, one-third. So one-third of trade would be North-North, which would be shrinking; one-third will be North-South, growing a little bit; but then there would be a huge explosion of South-South trade, and representing a huge one-third of global trade. So of course, we cannot forget about this South-South dimension, whether we are talking trade or whether we are talking investment. A lot of the investments that are happening at the moment are also coming from the South.
Let me give you a couple of other figures. Let’s take, for example, Sub-Saharan Africa. In the year 2000, Sub-Saharan African exports to Brazil, India, China, Russia was only 9 percent. Today, exports from Sub-Saharan Africa to these four countries makes up 36 percent of their total exports. That tells you something.
[DC:] Both Africa and Latin America are areas where traditionally, women were excluded from business ownership or decision-making. What challenges do women still face, and what can or should be done to empower women?
[AG:] I would start with recognizing that a lot has changed in the past 15 to 20 years in recognizing more prominently the place that women have and can play in societies in general, but in the economy more specifically, Lots of progress has been made in terms of empowering women economically, also. I think it’s fair to say that we still have a long way to go, and I think we have challenges of three types.
I think we have a challenge of attitude towards women’s entrepreneurship. In countries we work with, the regulations and the conditions under which women entrepreneurs operate have been improved to include women, but the social attitudes have not changed, and women continue to have difficulty.
There are other countries where there remains—from a legal point of view, a regulations point of view, a conditions point of view—limitations to the operations of women entrepreneurs. For example, you have countries where, for a women entrepreneur to open a bank account, she must come accompanied by her husband. If not, she cannot open a bank account. Obviously this limits the ability of women entrepreneurs. We know that women entrepreneurs have more difficulty accessing credit than male entrepreneurs. This is not related to a higher default rate on the part of women entrepreneurs, but more to the fact that there is a certain resistance in societies to consider women entrepreneurs on an equal footing to their male counterparts. So there is the question of laws, regulations, trademarks.
And then there is the third problem: education. This is a problem where, in my view, the international community must ensure that women have access to the same education opportunities that men have, and that society become accustomed to the norm that woman attends an engineering school, or architecture, or whatever technical schools or facilities, just in the same conditions and with the same kind of approach as men would receive.
So there is a lot to be done in ensuring access to education for our future women entrepreneurs, and this is an area to which I am particularly sensitive, because obviously if you don’t give girls and then women access to education opportunities, it’s going to be very difficult to then make sure that we have a higher amount of more vibrant and equally treated women entrepreneurs.
[DC:] How will climate change affect the ability of SMEs in Africa and Latin America, as well as other emerging economies, to grow and prosper?
[AG:] I think in a big way, in particular, it will affect those operating in the agricultural or the rural sectors. Let’s not forget that a lot of the SMEs, for example, on the African continent, are small actors very active in the agro-food sector in rural areas. And obviously they are hugely dependent on climate, on rain. They are hugely affected if there is no rain. They are hugely affected if there is flooding. So of course they are hugely affected by the rise in sea levels or the desertification in parts in Africa.
It’s very pressing and very interesting and very present. We are working a lot with agricultural communities, with farming communities, for example in making sure that we help them adapt to the changes in climate that we are already seeing. For example, in the tea sector in Kenya or in Peru, which has a huge potential for production of agro-processed products. We are teaching sustainable production techniques to make sure that we help them adapt to this new situation, which is certainly affected by climate change.
[DC:] What is the role of public-private partnerships in the ITCs work?
[AG:] Huge. You know, we work for the private sector. We work for small and medium enterprises. But it’s impossible to work for the private sector if you don’t team up with the private sector. So it’s an absolute necessity for us to work more, to work closer with the private sector. We do this in three different ways. Obviously we get support from private companies to fund the organization, which can be through financial contributions to our work, through expertise, through knowledge, through in-kind contributions.
We work with a lot of companies, for example, that have an expertise in supply chain management or lean production techniques or on sustainability in central production techniques. We like to work with these companies in order to learn and then sheare this knowledge with the small and medium enterprises that need it.
The third dimension of this public-private partnership is using our relationship with companies to help connect small and medium enterprises to markets. We do a lot of training and capacity-building of companies to improve quality, to improve labeling, to improve design, branding, but the next step is obviously helping these SMEs get to the markets, join value chains, be part of a production chain or be able to find customers in that production circuit.
So we see that there’s a huge and growing role for this public-private partnership, which we are obviously trying to expand in the work of our organization.
[DC:] The ITC is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. What do you see as some of the opportunities and challenges ahead in the next 50 years?
[AG:] Well I would say our biggest challenge we faced in the last 50 years I’m sure we’ll continue to face in the next 50 years. Our biggest challenge is adaptability. It’s adapting our work, adapting our tools, adapting our assistance to the change in the circumstances around our small and medium enterprises.
When we started this work 50 years ago, we were three people on a desk with a fax machine, and it was about sending trade and market information to SMEs via fax. Fifty years later, this is not any longer how you do things! I mean, how you help the small and medium enterprises today is by making sure not only that you send them lots of data and statistics, but that you crunch all this data and provide them with market and trade intelligence. You certainly would not send companies a fax. You have to make sure you’ve got an online blog that they can access wherever they are. So our biggest challenge, I would say, is the challenge of adaptability and making sure we keep on assisting the small and medium enterprises that we serve in a supportive manner.
The biggest opportunity is that we know in the next 20 to 30 years, we need to create somewhere in the vicinity of 500 million new jobs. The bulk of these 500 million new jobs will be created by small and medium enterprises. There is a huge opportunity if we adapt to new circumstances, and if we manage to grow to provide solutions to our SMEs that have a transformative impact. This is our biggest concern: ensuring a transformative impact for our small and medium enterprises.
Chrisella Sagers Herzog is the managing editor of Diplomatic Courier and Editor-in-Chief of WhiteHat Magazine. She can be found on Twitter at @Chrisella.
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's special edition G7 ebook. The full ebook can be purchased here.
Photo copyright 2013 International Trade Centre (ITC).
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Global Development Through SME Growth
July 3, 2014
Interview: Arancha González, Executive Director of the International Trade Centre
As the urgency of the global financial crisis faded, the world faced a new crisis: employment. A global job market filled with skills mismatches, tepid job creation, and uncertainty for investors has led to political instability and protests over income inequality, the ineffective state of higher education, and government inaction. By 2050, the world will need approximately 500 million new jobs to be created.
At the same time, we are nearing the deadline for the Millennium Development Goals, and already robust discussions on what the focus on the next group of goals should be have spread from the United Nations to the farthest reaches of the world. In these discussions, a theme has emerged from developing nations: no more aid handouts. They want sustainable economic development that creates a better standard of living for all citizens.
With these themes in mind, Diplomatic Courier sat down with Arancha González, Executive Director of the International Trade Centre and an expert in international trade and global development, just after she had returned from attending the World Economic Forum meetings in Nigeria and Panama, to discuss the role of small and medium enterprises in development, growing South-South trade, and international efforts to support women entrepreneurs.
***
[Diplomatic Courier:] According to your mission statement, the International Trade Center focuses solely on trade development for developing and transition economies. How do small and medium enterprises fit into that mission?
[Arancha González:] The ITC is about helping small and medium enterprises trade; through that, to generate growth; through that, to generate employment; and through that, to create an environment that is conducive to development of countries. So in reality, the ITC is the organization that makes trade happen.
We work with two other organizations who are our parent companies, if you wish. One is the United Nations, the other one is the World Trade Organization, and they are helping make trade possible. With the WTO, you can conceive trade opportunities. In UNCTAD, which is part of the UN, you will debate and discuss trade policies. In the ITC, you work with big policies to make trade happen. So basically, we work with those actors on the ground that are responsible for using the policies that governments negotiate to generate world trade, and through that, contribute to growth and employment.
[DC:] With your focus on SMEs, how do you align that with the United Nations Millennium Development Goals?
[AG:] Small and medium enterprises make up 90 percent of the economic issue of countries. So the main economic actors in any country that ITC works with—whether this country is in the North or the country is in the South, in the East or in the West—the biggest engines for jobs are the small and medium enterprises. Now, the Millennium Development agenda and the 2015 development agenda is all about helping countries out of poverty—reducing, eliminating poverty in this world.
We at the ITC strongly believe that in order to do that, you have to make sure we generate very strong growth. Of course, this growth has to be balanced, it has to be inclusive, it has to be sustainable, but it has to be strong. And for that growth to happen, since the majority of economic actors in a country are small and medium enterprises, we can literally find ourselves with small and medium enterprises being a key actor in the reduction of poverty in the world. And therefore, they have to become a more prominent actor in the development agenda of today or for the future.
[DC:] Nearly 60 percent of the ITC’s operations are in Africa. What is the environment for doing business there, especially for SMEs, and what kind of challenges and opportunities is there for the business environment in Africa?
[AG:] Entrepreneurship in Africa is incredibly vibrant. Whenever I go there, there are thousands of small and medium enterprises. Entrepreneurship is part of Africa’s blood, I would say. So the opportunities are huge. The problem is how to better leverage these opportunities, because they are also huge challenges. And leaving aside what I would call macro-challenges—like infrastructure, like energy, like economic instability, like political stability—leaving those aside, I think there are four specific challenges related to small and medium enterprises that need to be taken into account to transform or use this huge potential.
The first one is the challenge of the capacity of the entrepreneurs in Africa to produce the kinds of goods or offer the kinds of services that the market is ready to buy. So one big aspect is that of capacity building for entrepreneurship.
The second one relates more to the competitiveness of small and medium enterprises. When I mean competitiveness, I mean quality in labeling and in packaging. I mean innovation. I mean value addition in countries, so not just exporting commodities or raw materials, but trying to add value in countries.
The third challenge that I find is financing small and medium enterprises. It’s very often extremely complicated for smaller actors to access the financing necessary for them to grow and move into greater impact in countries.
The final challenge, if you wish, is that of informality. A lot of small and medium enterprises are in the informal sector, and as we all know, informality means lower salary, lower working conditions, lower quality, lower innovation. So a lot of what needs to be done to help is move more and more of the small and medium enterprises to the formal sector.
[DC:] At the most recent World Economic Forum meeting in Africa, there was a lot of talk of Africa Rising. What role do SMEs have in that concept?
[AG:] Huge! Actually it was very interesting that in the discussions I had in Abuja during the World Economic Forum, there was a huge focus and a huge interest in better leveraging the potential of the small and medium enterprises. Take a country like Nigeria, where more than 95 percent of economic actors in Nigeria are small and medium enterprises. They are the ones that generate the bulk of the jobs that Nigeria will need in the next ten to twenty years. So it’s right at the center of the preoccupations of the Nigerian economic team to ensure that they contribute to the competitiveness of the sector so that it becomes more of an engine for the economy.
I can say this of Nigeria, but I can also say exactly the same thing of Liberia, which is where I was two weeks ago. I can say the same of Burundi, Rwanda; I can say the same of Kenya and Uganda, or Mozambique and Zimbabwe, to give you just a few. The story of Africa has a lot to do with better finance sectors, and a stronger small and medium enterprises sector.
[DC:] Latin America is another area that is predicted to grow rapidly in the next few years. How is the business environment for SMEs there?
[AG:] I was actually at the WEF meeting in Panama [in April], and it was pretty much the same story. I would say the biggest challenges that I saw for Latin America—and to some extent it shares those with Africa—is competitiveness and financing. These are just two big challenges, knowing that a huge part of the small and medium enterprises in Latin America is in the informal sector. You can see there the development of the dual economy: an economy that is more on the formal side, with a lot of bigger companies, but a bigger side with a limited ability to create jobs; and then a huge informal sector has the potential to generate more jobs, to generate more resources, more revenues from the state. But it’s not doing so because they remain in the informal sector. So informality, once again, means lower use of the potential.
We had lots of very good discussion in Panama on the need to focus more on the informal sector. There is an aspect [of this issue] that has to do with the cost of doing business and taxation systems in countries. If the cost of doing business and taxation systems are too onerous for small and medium enterprises, they immediately will have an alternative to operate in the informal sector.
The other area where there is a consensus that we need to act is on the education side—and in particular on the vocational training and education in skills. If you look at a lot of what Latin America’s education system is producing today, it’s engineers and doctors and architects, and not many plumbers, electricians, technicians, carpenters. There really is a mismatch between what the market is demanding and what the education system is producing, and this is also creating difficulty for small and medium enterprises to grow, because a lot of these small and medium enterprises thrive on vocational training.
[DC:] What role can South-South trade play in unlocking both Africa’s and Latin America’s potential?
[AG:] It’s huge, because what we are seeing in this last decade is the emergence of the South as a huge actor, not just in trade, but also in investment. And I think we have to now take into account not just this North-South dimension, but the rapidly growing South-South dimension.
Let me use some facts and figures around this to illustrate how big this has become. Twenty years ago, 70 percent of trade was among countries in the North only; 20 percent was North-South; and only 10 percent was South-South. In ten years, it is predicted to become one-third, one-third, one-third. So one-third of trade would be North-North, which would be shrinking; one-third will be North-South, growing a little bit; but then there would be a huge explosion of South-South trade, and representing a huge one-third of global trade. So of course, we cannot forget about this South-South dimension, whether we are talking trade or whether we are talking investment. A lot of the investments that are happening at the moment are also coming from the South.
Let me give you a couple of other figures. Let’s take, for example, Sub-Saharan Africa. In the year 2000, Sub-Saharan African exports to Brazil, India, China, Russia was only 9 percent. Today, exports from Sub-Saharan Africa to these four countries makes up 36 percent of their total exports. That tells you something.
[DC:] Both Africa and Latin America are areas where traditionally, women were excluded from business ownership or decision-making. What challenges do women still face, and what can or should be done to empower women?
[AG:] I would start with recognizing that a lot has changed in the past 15 to 20 years in recognizing more prominently the place that women have and can play in societies in general, but in the economy more specifically, Lots of progress has been made in terms of empowering women economically, also. I think it’s fair to say that we still have a long way to go, and I think we have challenges of three types.
I think we have a challenge of attitude towards women’s entrepreneurship. In countries we work with, the regulations and the conditions under which women entrepreneurs operate have been improved to include women, but the social attitudes have not changed, and women continue to have difficulty.
There are other countries where there remains—from a legal point of view, a regulations point of view, a conditions point of view—limitations to the operations of women entrepreneurs. For example, you have countries where, for a women entrepreneur to open a bank account, she must come accompanied by her husband. If not, she cannot open a bank account. Obviously this limits the ability of women entrepreneurs. We know that women entrepreneurs have more difficulty accessing credit than male entrepreneurs. This is not related to a higher default rate on the part of women entrepreneurs, but more to the fact that there is a certain resistance in societies to consider women entrepreneurs on an equal footing to their male counterparts. So there is the question of laws, regulations, trademarks.
And then there is the third problem: education. This is a problem where, in my view, the international community must ensure that women have access to the same education opportunities that men have, and that society become accustomed to the norm that woman attends an engineering school, or architecture, or whatever technical schools or facilities, just in the same conditions and with the same kind of approach as men would receive.
So there is a lot to be done in ensuring access to education for our future women entrepreneurs, and this is an area to which I am particularly sensitive, because obviously if you don’t give girls and then women access to education opportunities, it’s going to be very difficult to then make sure that we have a higher amount of more vibrant and equally treated women entrepreneurs.
[DC:] How will climate change affect the ability of SMEs in Africa and Latin America, as well as other emerging economies, to grow and prosper?
[AG:] I think in a big way, in particular, it will affect those operating in the agricultural or the rural sectors. Let’s not forget that a lot of the SMEs, for example, on the African continent, are small actors very active in the agro-food sector in rural areas. And obviously they are hugely dependent on climate, on rain. They are hugely affected if there is no rain. They are hugely affected if there is flooding. So of course they are hugely affected by the rise in sea levels or the desertification in parts in Africa.
It’s very pressing and very interesting and very present. We are working a lot with agricultural communities, with farming communities, for example in making sure that we help them adapt to the changes in climate that we are already seeing. For example, in the tea sector in Kenya or in Peru, which has a huge potential for production of agro-processed products. We are teaching sustainable production techniques to make sure that we help them adapt to this new situation, which is certainly affected by climate change.
[DC:] What is the role of public-private partnerships in the ITCs work?
[AG:] Huge. You know, we work for the private sector. We work for small and medium enterprises. But it’s impossible to work for the private sector if you don’t team up with the private sector. So it’s an absolute necessity for us to work more, to work closer with the private sector. We do this in three different ways. Obviously we get support from private companies to fund the organization, which can be through financial contributions to our work, through expertise, through knowledge, through in-kind contributions.
We work with a lot of companies, for example, that have an expertise in supply chain management or lean production techniques or on sustainability in central production techniques. We like to work with these companies in order to learn and then sheare this knowledge with the small and medium enterprises that need it.
The third dimension of this public-private partnership is using our relationship with companies to help connect small and medium enterprises to markets. We do a lot of training and capacity-building of companies to improve quality, to improve labeling, to improve design, branding, but the next step is obviously helping these SMEs get to the markets, join value chains, be part of a production chain or be able to find customers in that production circuit.
So we see that there’s a huge and growing role for this public-private partnership, which we are obviously trying to expand in the work of our organization.
[DC:] The ITC is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. What do you see as some of the opportunities and challenges ahead in the next 50 years?
[AG:] Well I would say our biggest challenge we faced in the last 50 years I’m sure we’ll continue to face in the next 50 years. Our biggest challenge is adaptability. It’s adapting our work, adapting our tools, adapting our assistance to the change in the circumstances around our small and medium enterprises.
When we started this work 50 years ago, we were three people on a desk with a fax machine, and it was about sending trade and market information to SMEs via fax. Fifty years later, this is not any longer how you do things! I mean, how you help the small and medium enterprises today is by making sure not only that you send them lots of data and statistics, but that you crunch all this data and provide them with market and trade intelligence. You certainly would not send companies a fax. You have to make sure you’ve got an online blog that they can access wherever they are. So our biggest challenge, I would say, is the challenge of adaptability and making sure we keep on assisting the small and medium enterprises that we serve in a supportive manner.
The biggest opportunity is that we know in the next 20 to 30 years, we need to create somewhere in the vicinity of 500 million new jobs. The bulk of these 500 million new jobs will be created by small and medium enterprises. There is a huge opportunity if we adapt to new circumstances, and if we manage to grow to provide solutions to our SMEs that have a transformative impact. This is our biggest concern: ensuring a transformative impact for our small and medium enterprises.
Chrisella Sagers Herzog is the managing editor of Diplomatic Courier and Editor-in-Chief of WhiteHat Magazine. She can be found on Twitter at @Chrisella.
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's special edition G7 ebook. The full ebook can be purchased here.
Photo copyright 2013 International Trade Centre (ITC).
