The summit borrows from scalable models with high impact aimed at driving industrialisation and inclusive financial and economic advancement for women
Niamey-Niger, Mohamed Fahmy
NIAMEY – The first African Women in Processing (AWIP) summit will kick off here on Sunday, bringing together a large number of decision-makers, business leaders, start-ups and large companies.
The summit, sponsored and organised by the African Union (AU), will seek to leverage operational technical resources and networks for ideas exchange, attracting investments and critical assets needed to drive an inclusive industrialisation and growth aligned to the AU’s aspirations towards the ‘Africa We Want’.
The gathering builds on the AWIP initiative which draws inspiration from various instruments and protocols focused on women economic empowerment.
AWIP is especially aligned to the new Decade of Women’s Financial and Economic Inclusion (2020-2030). It aims at catalysing and accelerating the transformation of the Industrial Processing led by women to support the African Union industrialisation Agenda and achievement of Sustainable Development Goals amongst other national, regional and continental and international targets.
It further aims at expanding the opportunities for women especially in the context of AfCTA.
AWIP initiative is focused on delivering inclusive and sustainable social-economic development with gender equity at the centre. It addresses structural and gender norms and sets a new path for women focused policy direction.
AWIP summit seeks to accelerate the strategic execution of the initiative at the different scales across Africa and targeted at millions of women involved in processing.
The First African Women in Processing Summit follows a consultative process that has mapped bottlenecks that women in processing face, the projected opportunities under AfTCA and those emerging under the AU industrialisation agenda.
The summit borrows from scalable models with high impact aimed at driving industrialisation and inclusive financial and economic advancement for women.
AWIP is further proposed as an investment strategy that embraces technical support, access to infrastructure, appropriate and tailored investment, technology development, innovation management, including research and development.
It also takes into consideration the different contexts of AWIP from the rural, informal to urban, ensuring that the model approach leaves no one behind.
AWIP requires broad ranging policy changes, including those focused on targeted support.
The AU, RECs and African governments should design and develop policies that incentivise women in processing, including dedicating spaces within the Special Economic Zones for AWIP.
On Finance and Investment, AU, African governments, development banks, partners, and private sector investors should develop innovative financial products, tools and services dedicated to AWIP.
On partnerships, the AU and partners, RECs and governments should support the establishment of an AWIP Forum to organise women and improve the visibility of African Women in Processing.
AWIP initiative aims at provisioning women with the right tools that will enable them to tap into viable sectors, exploit available assets, transform the raw inputs into globally competitive products, and feed Africa.
The AWIP summit seeks to collectively build an understanding of the journey of the African women in processing, elaborate on how emerging opportunities can be exploited, and the kind of support needed (financial, investment, infrastructure, technical to policies environment) by the women.
It will also seek to generate concrete recommendations and commitments that will ensure that change will happen at country, regional and continental level.
The summit will also propose and validate a governance structure and general strategy to supports, harmonise and facilitates the actualisation of AWIP across all AU member states (at country, regional and continental levels).
During the summit, panel discussions and several training modules delivered by AUDA – NEPAD (4 modules) will seek to explore and improve understanding of emerging opportunities under the AfCFTA and globally.
