Prime Highlights
- UN Women, in collaboration with TÜRKONFED and Türkiye İş Bankası, creates an international “gender-responsive procurement” handbook.
- The project hopes to advance inclusive procurement and women-owned businesses globally.
Key Facts
- Women business owners can only access less than 1% of global procurement expenditure.
- The Turkish-English handbook for free use globally.
Key Background
“Gender-responsive procurement” (GRP) is becoming increasingly popular as an economic system gender equity erasure tool. Even though international procurement—public and private—reaches trillions of dollars every year, less than 1% reaches women’s enterprises. This disparity acts to the detriment of economic empowerment and sustainable development of women entrepreneurs.
Identifying this gap, UN Women has been advocating GRP practices at the policy, strategic partnership, and private sector levels. In Turkey, UN Women’s flagship initiative with TÜRKONFED (Turkish Enterprise and Business Confederation) and Türkiye İş Bankası earlier yielded a national GRP guidebook to enhance women-owned businesses’ access to markets. The guidebook offered supplier diversity, tendering process, and business readiness recommendations.
Expanding on this success, the three institutions have subsequently formalized their collaboration to create a Global Gender-Responsive Procurement Handbook. The new handbook, launched in an official signing ceremony at Türkiye İş Bankası’s Resim Heykel Museum during July 2025, will be augmented further with best practices and global experience. It will provide hands-on guidelines for both women-owned businesses and procurement officials to construct more inclusive supply chains.
The international version will contain templates, checklists, and case studies for a wider readership. It will train institutions and purchasers in inclusive procurement practices, and empower women entrepreneurs with the skills to efficiently manage procurement systems.
This project not only adds value to UN Women‘s global mission of empowering women economically, but also demonstrates the commitment of TÜRKONFED’s and Türkiye İş Bankası’s to equality and innovation in business. The launching of the handbook is a milestone towards mainstreaming gender equality in international procurement systems.
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