Thank you so much, and thank you for this opportunity.
Women's Enterprise Organizations of Canada, often known as WEOC, is a national association of government-funded support organizations that work to help women to start and expand their businesses.
Currently we're all across Canada and each of our member organizations supports clients and advisory and training services. Here in the west we also provide loans. Those loans are not, sadly, available in the east. This is unfortunate because the efficacy of the combination of in-house lending and advisory services really has proven to be far more effective than one over the other.
Although increased globalization has made it easier for small business to enter the export arena, female business owners have been less likely to export. While women-owned enterprises represent almost 16% of all SMEs, they are a much smaller percentage of businesses that do export.
Women-owned businesses tend to be in the health, information, arts and retail sectors as opposed to the more exportable products and services coming out of manufacturing, technical services and wholesale trade.
Some of the non-propensity to export comes simply from the fact that many women do not see their products or services having export potential. They are not at the point where they're ready to take the risk to move forward or feel they have the competencies or skills to compete on a larger scale.
However, as we all know, women-owned SMEs are a potential growth for export, given the current disparity in numbers. More and more G7 and G20 countries are recognizing the importance of this under-resourced and under-serviced segment as more and more women are entering manufacturing, agri-food, food value-added in this arena, and that's becoming of much greater trade interest.
In the main, our member organizations work to ensure that client businesses are viable, robust, that the numbers make sense, and the enterprises, whether start-up, expansion or purchase, have a reasonable expectation of survival. Also, where loans are made, they ensure they have a good chance of being repaid, obviously.
For the past eight or nine years there has been an emphasis on building export capacity in our clients, where products or services have even the slightest expectation of exportability. This is due to government's increased interest in export and our own evolution as support organizations recognizing the importance of growth through extended markets, and partly also through the growing recognition of the supplier diversity in the U.S., and more recently in Canada, as good business practice and not just corporate social responsibility.
For those who don't know, supplier diversity is the recognized benefit to companies and government agencies of the diversification of the supply stream to include women and minorities and other under-served segments of the business community.
In the U.S., procurement departments have been mandated to find diverse suppliers, which has given rise to business fairs and trade opportunities specifically targeting supplier diversity. For women, the major business fair in June, put on by the Women's Business Enterprise National Council, known as the WBENC, boasts over 4,000 attendees each year, at least 15% of whom are procurement specialists from major corporations and government bodies. WEOC, in conjunction with BWIT, this year, are going to bring over 100 women from across Canada to WBENC to display their services and their products.
Along with our core services of advice and training, our biggest contribution to this is coaching and capacity building, along with accompaniment to trade missions, particularly important for new exporters, and connectivity to other women export communities and resources.
We encourage our clients to attend WBENC. They often scrape together the resources to be able to send our staff to help connect buyers and other stakeholders there. Often the advantages of these excursions, even more than making initial contacts to potentially larger markets, is to interact with those entrepreneurs in the U.S. who might be secondary or tertiary markets, to incrementally grow capacity until larger clients can be served.
Government does a great deal to support SMEs in export global opportunities for associations: CanExport, of course, the trade commissioner service, and in our case BWIT, the Business Women in International Trade, which is part of GAC. BWIT ensures that Canadian businesswomen can explore international opportunities. It works with trade commissioner services to develop trade missions, and partners with us in building capacity in individual women.
What could government do more of? We have static budgets, but increased mandates, so I would say funding or project dollars specifically for internal supports—for export, export advisers, hand-holders, coaches—as well as some mechanism by which we could get direct funding for trade mission preparation and accompaniment for our clients. This is really important in our role as trusted advisers. We've often sold the idea of a trade mission, and we need to be on hand to help develop that capacity, coach for success, broker with other resources and make important connections for our clients. We are the grassroots organizations that plant the seeds that grow the companies that increase our trade profile.
Thank you very much for your attention.