(Women Gateway)
Business Exchange For um: Bahraini and American Experiences concluded on Monday with a call to allocate certain purchasing budget of the government to buy products from small and medium businesses.
Bahraini and US speakers stressed in the closing session of the forum the importance to support those organisations for their dedication to recruit women and youth. Manager of US Women Company Barbara Kassow stressed the importance of government’s support to small and medium businesses, citing the success of the US experience in supporting those organisations that represent 99 per cent of total firms. She said that those organisations were very important for offering 60 to 80 per cent of total new job opportunities in America last year.
She said that with the global financial crisis, small and medium companies should be supported to revive economies. She advised women to not start businesses before studying the market and projects they want to be involved in them.
While discussing the government support to small and medium organisations, lawmaker Dr Abdulaziz Abul said that Bahrain has no programme or policy to adopt such initiative. He called for the drafting of a law to legally support the proposals.
During the event, a paper on Women Gateway as an initiative to empower women was presented by the Portal Manager Amira Isa. She said that Bahrain Business Women’s Society, charged with the responsibility of empowering business, women grasped the opportunity to establish a new medium for them to communicate and exchange experiences and knowledge. To fulfill this, the society entered into a joint venture with Al-Nadeem Information Technology to set up a portal named womengateway.com.
She said that the portal aims to help women to gain knowledge and information in order to empower themselves in managing their careers. The portal provides women with news, features, women profiles, research papers and other services. “On 23rd February 2003, the women gateway portal was launched. Initially it was a bilingual website with a vision to be a one-stop location for businesswomen to go and find all they required in terms of information, tools and services.”
Amira said that in its first year of operation Women Gateway proved its success as a unique women portal, and acknowledged as the fourth best portal in the Arab region with total visitors of 151,000 in August 2003. In the following year, the Women Gateway administration found that the Arabic Language content available for women was limited, focusing as it did on cookery, make up and religious matters. This created a big gap between the needs of the modern woman and what is really available.
At the same time, Bahrain society was experiencing a great change where new legislations were issued to expand women opportunities to participate in the political, economical and social development of the country. The country witnessed a big growth in the civil community and many NGOs were established where the number of women organisations increased from five to more than nineteen societies. Women empowerment became a main objective of the government, political and economic organisations.
And as the need for information and networking became pervasive, Women Gateway, with the infrastructure and the expandability in place, recognised the importance of widening its scope to target all women groups while still catering to its principal community of business women, said.