ITC SheTrades Outlook

ITC SheTrades Outlook helps governments and other stakeholders assess, monitor and improve the policy ecosystem to support women’s participation in business and international trade. Governments are using data from SheTrades Outlook to make trade and trade-related policies work for women.
Rolled out in 52 developing and developed countries since 2019.
About ITC SheTrades Outlook
SheTrades Outlook provides country assessments based on 55 policy indicators across six pillars: trade policy, legal and regulatory framework, business environment, access to skills, access to finance, and work and society. This innovative tool offers trade and gender data, collected through an institutional survey and supplemented by existing data from international databases.

The tool is primarily aimed at policymakers, trade and investment support institutions, development partners, women’s business associations, civil society organizations, and researchers.

Through SheTrades Outlook, stakeholders can:
  • Assess and compare: SheTrades Outlook does not rank countries’ performance. Rather, through a comparable set of indicators, the tool allows governments to assess the gender-responsiveness of trade and trade-related policies and compare performance across countries.
  • Monitor: ITC aims to update country data every five years to monitor progress on trade and gender. The SheTrades Outlook data collection is low-cost and can be rolled out in a country in around three months.
  • Learn from good practices: SheTrades Outlook highlights the good practices of countries on women’s economic empowerment to inspire similar initiatives elsewhere. This incentivizes policy change through peer-to-peer learning and understanding baseline information.
  • Break down silos: Stakeholder consultations (before and after data collection) enable ministries, agencies and private-sector organizations that often do not work together to share information and jointly agree on policy changes or new activities.
Milestones
As of 2023, SheTrades Outlook provides data on trade and gender across 52 developing and developed countries. More than 1,000 public and private-sector institutions were interviewed to collect data. ITC aims to expand the tool globally to support additional governments with data and evidence for gender-responsive policymaking. The tool has a repository of more than 100 good practices on women’s economic empowerment around the world.
 
ITC has organized SheTrades Outlook validation workshops to present and validate results, discuss recommendations and identify areas for policy reform. ITC developed policy briefs that present key findings from the data and provide policy recommendations.

Based on SheTrades Outlook results, ITC has given technical assistance to policymakers in 14 countries to make policies more inclusive. This includes helping policymakers mainstream gender in trade and SME policies, export strategies, African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) implementation strategies, public procurement policies, acts and regulations, and COVID-19 stimulus packages, and developing definitions of women-led and women-owned businesses.
 
Lastly, ITC launched the SheTrades Outlook Network in 2023 to give in-country government officials a platform to share and learn from good practices that promote women’s economic empowerment and gender equality across the world. So far, 28 countries have joined the network and participated in workshops to unpack good practices featured in SheTrades Outlook and to share experiences and lessons learned.
Resources
Policymakers often become interested in mainstreaming gender into their policies based on the learnings from SheTrades Outlook. However, they frequently cite the lack of technical capacity to formulate and implement gender-inclusive policies. That is why ITC provides technical assistance to governments to mainstream gender into trade and trade-related policies, laws and regulations, ensuring that the advisory work is tailored to countries’ contexts and priorities. 
SheTrades Outlook policy briefs
ITC develops policy briefs to report key findings and provide policy recommendations from SheTrades Outlook. Policymakers can use the briefs to inform stakeholder consultations and identify focus areas for programming and policy reform at the national, regional, and international levels. The policy briefs are publicly available on the tool. 
Step-by-step guides for policymakers
ITC developed structured methodologies to help encourage inclusive policy reform in-country. They are detailed in three step-by-step guides that give policymakers and negotiators access to easy-to-use questionnaires, checklists and decision trees to complement SheTrades Outlook data and operationalize policies, programmes and initiatives.
  • Mainstreaming Gender in Free Trade Agreements – Available in English and Spanish,
  • Making Public Procurement Work for Women – Available in English, French and Spanish.
  • From Design to Evaluation: Making Trade Policy Work for Women – Available in English and French.
  • SheTrades Outlook: Key Trends and Insights – Available in English
Explore SheTrades Outlook country profiles and good practices by clicking here!
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