Women This Is How NTMs Can Help Your Business Success

It is one thing to set up an enterprise and yet another thing entirely to achieve real business success no matter the field you are operating in.

From the challenge of finance, understanding the business climate to basic issues of manpower deployment and management, it could be gargantuan for female entrepreneurs.

And this is where the article comes in, devoted to exploring what NTMS have got to do with business success, the female gender in focus.

The acronym NTMs, refers to Non-Tariff Measures (NTMs), plainly Gender Sensitive Policies deliberately put in place to encourage women entrepreneurs.

A recent study by the United National Conference on Trade and Agreements (UNCTAD), indeed explores in detail how that NTMs can actually spur women entrepreneurs by eliminating bottleneck on their business success pathways.

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Articulated in a publication: “The impact of non-tariff measures on women’s e-commerce businesses in developing countries”, it hinges the obstacle as the absence of Non-Tariff Measures (NTMs) Or Gender Sensitive Policies.

In other words, women entrepreneurs are supposed to enjoy a gender-affirmative range of rules and polices to make it easy for them to excel in the business or market place

NTMS are therefore predicated on the understanding that targeted support are key to helping women entrepreneurs thrive in the global digital economy.

It could be in the form of quotas, non-automatic import licensing and rules of origin, to name a few

“While many NTMs aim primarily at protecting public health or the environment, they significantly influence trade by adding information, compliance and procedural costs. Their prevalence, as identified by UN Conference on Trade and Development, has risen steadily over the past decade. They increasingly shape trade, influencing who trades what and how much”, the report says.

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According to it, NTMs, although designed in a gender-blind way, disproportionately affect women-led businesses.

Compliance with these measures impacts these businesses more than those led by men due to several factors.

These include pre-existing gender gaps, firm size, exporters’ capacities, the economic sector in which businesses operate and the accessibility of support systems, the report adds.

Thus, business success for women could mean more than just having set-up finance or a range of goods or services in demand.

“Since women-led firms are more likely to fall into the micro, small and medium-sized enterprise (MSME) category than their male counterparts, they face greater NTM-related trade costs.

“These businesses may experience NTMs differently due to distinct capacities, demand and concentration by sector and product. Smaller firms, in general, struggle with high fixed compliance costs relative to their trade volumes, resulting in heavier regulatory burdens.

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“Women-led businesses are also often concentrated in less profitable product categories such as agriculture and textiles, which have a higher prevalence of NTMs compared to sectors like machinery, minerals, fuel and transportation”, the UNCTAD report added..