What a day! Goodenough College and its members, together with World Traders and Cisco brought together a celebration for International Women’s Day. 

We heard from Pamela Coke-Hamilton, the new Executive Director of one of the collaborations of the WTO and the UN, the International Trade Centre in Geneva. She was talking about their work with UKAID and a brilliant initiative called www.SheTrades.com. She Trades has been specifically designed to enable women trade successfully around the world, which in turn helps to build infrastructure and education in the countries involved. Do try to watch the videos on the site about how the projects work – we watched the one about Bangladesh. We then had two panels that explained the importance of world trade to women in business.

As we spoke more about trade, we realised from contributions by Liz Davidson, the FCO and the DIT how gender is being built into trade agreements that the UK is seeking. Adele Every of CISCO talked of role models and our own Liveryman, Shalom Lloyd discussed the role of female entrepreneur.

We heard from some amazing entrepreneurs, retailer Tanesha Westcarr, from Priscilla Mora and Vanessa Chacon, the owner of Elcanto, a Costa Rican apparel and fashion business. These businesswomen have achieved so much, and all with such a passion for life. 

By the end of the evening our message was very simple, be the change!!