UNIDO and UN Women promote women empowerment in the Colombian automotive industry

On 14 August 2020, UNIDO in collaboration with UN Women, organized an awareness seminar to promote the uptake of the Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs) - established by UN Global Compact and UN Women to offer guidance to business on how to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment in the workplace, marketplace and community - in the Colombian automotive industry.

This event formed part of a larger scale PR campaign, composed of a number of awareness sessions, that is being rolled out within the context of the project “Sustainable and inclusive industrial development of the automotive supply chain in Colombia through enhanced quality and productivity”. The objective of this event was to demonstrate to participants from local vehicle manufactures (including General Motors, Sofasa-Renault and Fanalca-Honda) and the Automotive Chamber of the National Business Association of Colombia (ANDI) that respecting gender equality not only improves their image and reputation, but also has a trickledown effect to their supply chains. This is being achieved by sharing best practice examples of automotive companies from around the globe that already publicly abide to the WEPs. Participants understood that gender equality is a human right and also impacts positively on the business case, as it has been demonstrated by a number of research studies that companies with women in leadership positions tend to have higher returns on investment and better productive results/reduced risk of insolvency.

As a result of this awareness campaign, the company PRAMEC S.A.S. – an automotive parts supplier with 75 employees - already joined the WEPs community, and is currently developing the action plan to meet WEP requirements. As a next step, UNIDO and UN Women will share the experiences of Colombian companies from other sectors, that have already joined the WEPs, to increase the motivation of more firms to follow this path.

The project is a collaboration between UNIDO, the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA), Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Tourism of Colombia (MINCIT), and “Colombia Productiva” Initiative.

For more information contact Fabio Russo (F.Russo [at] unido.org (F[dot]Russo[at]unido[dot]org)); Juan Pablo Diaz Castillo (J.Diaz-Castillo [at] unido.org (J[dot]Diaz-Castillo[at]unido[dot]org)); Stefan Kratzsch (S.Kratzsch [at] unido.org (S[dot]Kratzsch[at]unido[dot]org))