Thank you, Madam Chair.
I would like to thank the committee members for allowing our network to speak with you today about women's economic empowerment.
My name is Ruth Vachon, and I am the chief executive officer of the Réseau des Femmes d'affaires du Québec, a not-for-profit organization whose aim is to accelerate growth in the number of businesswomen so they achieve inspiring success and are able to shine all around the world. We have been pursuing this goal for 43 years in Quebec, and, starting this year, we will be able to take it everywhere in Canada thanks to the government funding we have received. We support businesswomen in developing their skills, expanding their professional network and conquering new local, national and international markets.
To begin, we want to highlight the significant progress made in relation to equality between men and women. However, we must not forget that setbacks are always possible. Between 2018 and 2022, for example, Canada lost 61,000 women-owned businesses, 35,000 of which were in Quebec. That means that almost 60% of those businesses were Quebec businesses.
A study has been done by the WEKH, the Women Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub. It showed that the real problem for women's entrepreneurship in Canada is not when it comes to creating businesses, but when it comes to growth and development. To learn how to stimulate growth, we ourselves did a Canada-wide survey in 2020. The results are unequivocal: almost 80% of women entrepreneurs surveyed say that expanding their customer base is the main vector for the success and growth of their business.
There are several ways to expand your customer base. One of them is to sell your products and services to big corporations, or respond to invitations to bid for public contracts. When major institutions and big corporations want to diversify their supply chains by incorporating more enterprises belonging to groups that are under-represented in entrepreneurship, of which women are one, this is referred to as supplier diversification or responsible and inclusive procurement.
It is important to know that women represent no more than 5% of suppliers to big corporations, hence the term "minority suppliers". We see this as an unprecedented opportunity and one to be seized. According to Status of Women Canada, initiatives to promote supplier diversification are not very widespread in the public sector in Canada. One leading cause of this is the absence of legislative/regulatory requirements, but there is also a lack of awareness on the part of actors involved in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
We are very aware of this unique growth opportunity for women entrepreneurs. At the Réseau des Femmes d'affaires du Québec, we have devoted significant effort to this in the last 12 years. We have become a key actor in promoting and supporting responsible procurement.
In Quebec, for example, the Accélérer la relance des entrepreneurEs program has provided support for over 500 women entrepreneurs of all origins and all under-represented groups, to help them get contracts with big corporations here or at the international level. In three years, over 130 contracts have been signed, with a total value of a little over $81 million. That took a lot of effort on the part of the small staff we have, but the results have been hugely impressive.
In addition, we get big corporations involved by going out and knocking on their doors to have them commit to more procurement from women-owned businesses. The Réseau des Femmes d'affaires du Québec believes that if our women entrepreneurs went to their banker with contracts in their pocket, that would greatly facilitate getting financing approval. That is not what is being done, in reality, however. In our opinion, efforts on the government's part to stimulate financing are totally disproportionate compared to efforts to support women entrepreneurs getting access to the market.
So for a more inclusive society and economy—