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Nthabiseng Libate
ECONET Telecom Lesotho (ETL) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) that will see women-led businesses getting a platform to market their products.
The products will be sold on ETL’s E-Commerce mobile application in the hope that they will get access to a wider market.
The project was primarily mooted to assist women who were part of the UNDP’s Her Empire mentorship initiative. Her Empire started in May 2022 and trained 18 businesswomen to promote gender equality in the business sphere.
According to the UNDP, Her Empire was informed by the realisation that men were dominant in business. Therefore, there was need to increase the number of female entrepreneurs.
The partnership signed this week will see the two entities exploring ways of using mobile technology to respond to emerging development challenges while accelerating efforts towards the attainment of sustainable development goals (SDGs), UNDP resident representative Nessie Golakai said.
“ETL has pledged to support this initiative with technologies required to enable women-led enterprise to thrive in the world filled with uncertainty,” Ms Golakai said.
She said they would cooperate in facilitating access to simple digital and mobile technology-based applications, sharing of information, supporting capacity building and development of innovative technology and identifying operational and strategic synergies.
“I’m glad to announce that this is not the first MoU between companies. ETL has helped us before in developing several digital solutions for the government in health, community policing and information systems to capture and analyse data to help strategic delivery of different ministerial mandates,” Ms Golakai said.
On his part, ETL chief executive officer (CEO), Dennis Plaatjies, said SMEs mostly struggle to access finance.
“A large percentage of the country’s economy depends on small businesses that are mostly led by women, so through this agreement, they will be assisted to access a wider market through the E-commerce application to sell their products internationally,” Mr Plaatjies said.
