Digital transformation skills for women

In order to maximise the advantages inherent in digitalisation and entering the digital workforce, the GTPA is proposing a series of training webinars to help women in underserved communities acquire digital skills. 

The series of six webinars will include training on the following:

• Essential digital skills
• Practical cybersecurity for MSMEs
• Digital marketing skills
• New technology, including AI and ML

The GTPA will make available – in a group setting – discussion and mentoring sessions for participants to workshop ideas and issues arising from the training programme. 

Digitalization offers a variety of opportunities for female empowerment and for a more equal female participation in labour markets, financial markets, and entrepreneurship.

Women’s often superior social skills represent a comparative advantage in the digital age, and this is particularly so when social skills are complemented by education and digital literacy.

Current gender inequalities may prevent women from fully benefiting from opportunities offered by digitalization. Women often find themselves trapped in a vicious circle, where current gender gaps hinder the chances for future improvements. In even in the most developed G20 countries, lower female enrolment rates in higher education, especially in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics), deters women from fully realizing the chances offered by digitalization. And this is even more marked in underserved communities where women are often excluded from any opportunities to gain higher education. 

Digitalization is likely to create a vast variety of new opportunities for entrepreneurship, too. Current gender imbalances like gaps in entrepreneurial skills, lack of developed social networks for female business founders, insufficient number of female role models of entrepreneurship and prevalence of financial constraints may keep women from recognizing and pursuing those entrepreneurial opportunities.

The GTPA will develop content specifically for this training webinar series.  All webinars will be delivered by experts, with female presenters selected wherever possible. 

All webinars will be recorded and made available on the GTPA website for participants to access for a period of three months after the completion of the training.

Training modules will cover:

• Overview of the digital environment
  • Topics to include:
    • What is digital transformation?
    • Why are digital skills essential for the jobs of the future?
    • Essential digital skills for employability
• Essential digital tools & the skills to use them
  • Topics to include:
    • Digital tools and skills for:
      • Financial management
      • Data management
      • Customer engagement
      • Sales
• Basic digital marketing skills
  • Topics to include:
    • What is digital marketing?
    • Digital marketing basics
    • Understanding SEO
    • 21st century customer expectations & Implementing a customer-centric approach
• Cybersecurity primer
  • Topics to include:
    • What is cybersecurity and why does it matter?
    • Basic Cybersecurity skills
    • Using customer data and understanding regulation
• Essential cybersecurity skills
  • Topics to include:
    • Learning to assess the threat landscape
    • Understanding how to develop & implement a response plan
    • Knowing how to recover from an attack
• New technology overview
  • Topics to include:
    • What is the 4th Industrial Revolution?
    • AI, ML and IoT basics

Our solution targets the following groups:

MSMEs

Women 

Sole traders

Emerging markets: South East Asia and the Pacific

The GTPA has done substantial research into the needs of MSMEs and women owned MSMEs. See attached research report and we have been working in the target markets for over 3 years working directly with the target audience on a separate project and we have through this on the ground work been able to identify the needs of business to build back resiliency, especially after the pandemic. Global Supply Chain resiliency report

• Essential digital skills
• Practical cybersecurity for MSMEs
• Digital marketing skills
• New technology, including AI and ML

Target: women 

We are also working on a separate grant to run this solution across ASEAN. Additional funding will allow us to provide this training to our target market for FREE initially. Many MSMEs in developing markets struggle to fund ongoing education and this would allow us to assist. Going forward we will be able to market the training solution to developed markets for a fee enrolment. Additionally, other government and chambers of commerce may wish to deliver training programs to business communities and we can target these organisations for funding.

We developed the training over the last 6 months but are now looking at being able to scale this into new markets and to developing markets. The funding prize would now allow for us to deliver the training package to these markets beyond our original scope.

We have four people working on our solutions team, 2 our full-time staff and 2 our contractors.

Lisa McAuley has worked in international trade for over 15 years. Lisa is currently involved as a member on the following international committees:

• WCO e-Commerce Working Group
• The Global Trade Dialogue – ICC and WTO
• Standards Committee for the ISO development of standards for Blockchain Technology
• UNCEFT on the development of standards for trade facilitation
• Member of the Small Business Advisory Council on Cybersecurity in the USA
• Bloomberg New Economy Solutions- Trade Advisory Council in the USA

Collins Rex is the GTPA’s Director. She has owned and operated her own very successful businesses on two continents, and in her professional capacity assists clients across a range of international marketing, product development and communications areas.

She has been responsible for the development and delivery of training material and courses in international business across a range of subject areas, in markets as diverse as Australia, South Africa, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, Peru, USA, Europe.  She has also to date delivered three highly successful Awards: Women Trading Globally programmes to women from across the Pacific and South Asia, and she is responsible for rolling out the GTPA’s “Building Support Services for Small Business in Developing Countries”. 

Collins has designed and delivered successful export-focussed training programmes for a range of organisations. Collins is a member of the International Advisory Panel for the Netherlands-based eCommerce Foundation and an International Judge at the Asia Pacific ICT Alliance (APICTA) Awards. She sits on the WCO’s eCommerce Working Group.

The GTPA is built on a model of collaboration and engagement and working together to create interconnecting ecosystems of expert, trusted relationships to support, enable and advance supply chains as the arteries of global trade.

Our projects are based on the following principles:

• International trade and investment is crucial to realising significant untapped economic potential. Jobs and economic prosperity are best created and protected over the long term through an open and competitive economic system.
• The benefits of international trade, investment and cross-border commerce must be shared more equitably and widely, and must be effectively enabled and communicated.
• Effective trade must support the development of trade and investment-capable companies to engage with global opportunities.
• Maximising the benefits of trade and investment through effective design and deployment is the shared responsibility of all levels of government, international institutions, and must take into consideration the importance of policy consistency across jurisdictions when necessary.
• Businesses directly involved in trade, and the businesses that support them, likewise have a responsibility to engage in policy-related dialogue and advocacy, to help inform the work of policy makers and abide by such policy in the pursuit of opportunities around the world.
• Trade initiatives must explicitly include the empowerment of women to engage in global business through internationally recognised capacity and capability programmes.
• Trade related commercial activity should actively seek to contribute to the achievement of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.
• Trade must support, and advance principles related to international development and poverty-reduction through trade.