Action Brief: Promoting Gender-Inclusive Global Supply Chains through Gender-Responsive Procurement (GRP) and Supplier Diversity

Women own one third of the world’s businesses, but women-owned businesses win less than one per cent of the procurement spend of both large corporate buyers and governments. Meanwhile, the private sector spends trillions of dollars on goods and services, with 58 per cent of capital flows spent on supplier payments in private organizations with revenues exceeding US $1 billion. This highlights a massive gender gap and market failure.

This Action Brief aims to serve as a guide for private sector companies to leverage their purchasing power for women’s economic empowerment and gender equality in global supply chains while advancing corporate strategy and driving inclusive economic growth. The brief brings together data from different UN Women-conducted research, surveys and programme pilots.

The WE RISE Together project works across the Mekong subregion, in Thailand and Viet Nam, where the concept of Supplier Diversity and Gender Responsive Procurement (SD-GRP) is still in the nascent stages of development. Gender-responsive procurement is the selection of services, goods and civil works that considers their impact on gender equality and women’s empowerment.

This project focuses on the retail and tourism sectors, the project works with a variety of actors, including with public and private buyers in these sectors, to increase their capacity to better advocate for, promote and implement supplier diversity through SD-GRP.

The WE RISE Together project is supported by the Australian Government through the Mekong-Australia Partnership and implemented by UN Women.