Good morning, Madam Chair and honourable members of the standing committee.
My name is Olutoyin Oyelade. I'm the president of the Casa Foundation. It's indeed a real privilege and rare honour to present to your esteemed committee this morning my ideas on the women entrepreneurship strategy and how that supports women in trade.
The WES is not just a policy framework but also a road map that has unlocked the potential of women entrepreneurs to shape the future of the Canadian economy. Moreover, the business women in international trade initiative—launched much earlier and now managed under the women entrepreneurship strategy—aims to boost women's participation in international trade.
Although available data from ISED and Statistics Canada indicates a huge growth in the percentage of women in trade generally speaking, the question then is this: How well have women in trade really fared when you talk about their contributions to the GDP of Canada?
Available data from ISED and also from the website for business women in international trade indicates that, between 2021 and 2022, few women played in the international markets when compared to 12.5% participation by their male counterparts in the international markets.
Few women have access to the needed resources. This is general information, and it is available generally. However, the question to keep asking ourselves is this: How is this measured, and how are the indicators put together to factor in mutual benefits? What is beneficial to the country called Canada on one hand, and what are the indicated measures that are put in place to make sure that women actually spearhead their own destiny, their own journey, in the international markets? Women do have dreams and choices. However, half of the time what we hear is the fact that we need to set up quota systems and make sure that we allocate this to women. It is important to do so, but there are other ways to look at it. I'll be talking about that, perhaps, during the question and answer session—situations where you put resources in place to have ecosystems and platforms where women can excel and have direct access to the resources they need. This is because information is not as readily available as we might assume.
I am Nigerian African, and there are the cultural paths of women's entrepreneurship in trade globally. There is the culturally informed education that needs to be adopted or factored into the current strategy to make sure women are also able to do what they need to do in terms of managing and leveraging the resources from the diaspora. They have their connections before they ever come into a new country; they must be able to leverage that through partnerships and education that is culturally delivered. These are some of the things I aim to talk about today.
The broader impact that we're looking at is having a women endowment fund, for instance, so that even after all of the funds have been disposed to them in bits of 90 days, two years, three years.... What's next after $5,000? What's next after $50,000 to help them to scale, to help them to expand and to help them to connect with clients across the globe? I think that a women endowment fund might actually be able to do that for us, and I hope I get to speak about that again later today.
There is the venture labs part of it also that I think we should be talking about. For instance, the Casa Foundation put together programs whereby $5,000 was disbursed to women every 90 days after completing a 10-week program, because we got the needed support from some financial institutions. It was $5,000 to $10,000.
They're looking to grow into the international market, and the question they keep asking us is this: After the initial $5,000 to $10,000, how do they access this? I see a lot of concerted effort in a lot of the women who are already in business, because they're big and medium-sized businesses, but a lot of people are not focusing on the lower rungs of the ladder, and these are the people who can actually generate for us the needed resources.
Again, I'll allude to Africa. We're told that there's a potential opportunity for $6.6 billion in revenues to be generated by doing business in Canada-Africa relations. How do we bring women in to take a portion of that and make sure they're able to dovetail into the Canadian economy? That's the way I think women can contribute to the national economy of Canada.
Thank you very much, Madam Chair.