LET’S HONOUR WOMEN’S ENTREPRENEURSHIP DAY
Today, November 19, is Women’s Entrepreneurship Day (WED), a day on which the work of women entrepreneurs is observed and discussed across the world.
Held for the first time at the United Nations Headquarters in New York on November 19, 2014, WED has become an annual event on which women entrepreneurs are celebrated, empowered and otherwise supported by all and sundry in the businesses they do.
Studies have shown that women in developed and developing countries alike are increasingly becoming active participants in local and global economies – and are doing so at a rapid rate, thus steadily becoming a power to reckon with in driving all-inclusive socioeconomic development.
Today, women account for 85 percent of consumer purchases, and control $20 trillion in global spending. At the same time, women perform 66 percent of the world’s work, both paid and unpaid. Yet, they earn only 10 percent of the world’s income.
That was how, when and why the Women’s Entrepreneurship Day Organisation (WEDO) smartly stepped in with the noble mission of alleviating world poverty – doing so basically “by educating, empowering, celebrating and supporting women-in-business worldwide.”
We agree with WEDO in that the world at large – and, indeed, Tanzania in particular – “cannot afford NOT to invest in women and girls’ entrepreneurial development. We must, therefore, work together to support and remove barriers to women’s economic empowerment”…
We are also agreed that entrepreneurship is a powerful catalyst for all-inclusive, sustainable socioeconomic development from the bottom up.
That is also why we hail the Dar es Salaam-based Malkia Ladies Group (MLG) for convening a meeting in the city tomorrow (November 20, 2021) to mull over women empowerment, and how best to start and nurture community-based investment groups.
As we reported in these pages yesterday, MLG is fast becoming a game-changer in the women empowerment stakes, and they need support to make women’s entrepreneurship a resounding success.
ACT AGAINST FOREST FIRES
When students from Lamoille Union High School in Vermont, the US, toured Iringa Region in 2018, they noticed serious “preparedness inadequacy” in fire-fighting in the region. The Americans raised funds back home to bolster Iringa’s fire-fighting capacity and capability, including the purchase of fire-fighting equipment and protective gear.
However, that pathetic situation has not been surmounted, and fire outbreaks continue to devastate acres upon acres of forests, including commercial-purpose eucalyptus trees.
In yesterday’s edition, we reported that over 7,000 acres of prime trees have already been lost to forest fires this year, some of the fires being deliberately ignited by people of dubious probity for selfish-cum-personal/narrower interests that shouldn’t be tolerated.
We are told Iringa Region still lacks the fire-fighting capacity and capability needed to extinguish such fires before they cause harm. Well: what happened to the fire-fighting equipment that was so considerately donated by the Vermonters, pray?
We urge the relevant authorities – including especially the President Samia Hassan’s government – to bolster fire-fighting capacities across the country. We also urge them to act swiftly and decisively against perpetrators of such criminology before it gets out of hand, discouraging further investments in the subsector.
