By Asad Cheema
ISLAMABAD: Islamabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ICCI) on Friday urged the federal and provincial governments to come forward to provide support to businesswomen of flood hit rural areas for reviving their businesses. It said that a large number of businesses women have been destroyed in flood-hit areas due to which women entrepreneurs are facing great hardships
While addressing the 15th Annual Rural Women Leadership Conference 2022 organized by ICCI in collaboration with National Commission on the Status of Women and Potohar Organization for Development Advocacy (PODA) Ahsan Zafar Bakhtawari, President, ICCI said ICCI is ready to connect the women entrepreneurs of rural areas with online platforms like Amazon. He said so that they could get easy access to international markets to improve exports and earn more foreign exchange for the country.
He assured that ICCI can organize exhibitions of the products of rural
businesswomen to showcase their potential for trade export.
The women from four provinces of Pakistan, Gilgit Baltistan and Azad Kashmir
attended the event.
Nilofar Bakhtiar, Chairperson, National Commission on the Status of Women,
said that economic empowerment and financial inclusion of women was the best
option to reduce poverty and promote prosperity in the country.
She shared the initiatives of her organization to promote gender equality
and empowerment of women. She thanked ICCI for hosting the women conference
and hoped that such conferences would help change the role of rural women
from vulnerability to change makers by building linkages and partnerships
with others.
Sameena Nazir, Founding President, PODA said that women entrepreneurs in
rural areas were exporting their products to many countries, but the
destruction of their businesses due to recent floods had created financial
problems for them.
