Regions Join to Create Digital Hub for Women-Led Businesses

• A new initiative is set to create a digital platform supporting women-led trade across Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas
• The platform aims to help a million women-led businesses

A new private-sector initiative linking Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas is working on what backers call the first neutral digital clearinghouse for women-led trade.

The effort aims to find out if currently disconnected business ecosystems in emerging markets can be integrated through a unified digital marketplace.

The effort, Connecting One Million Women to Trade, or C1WT, has recently started deploying a proprietary digital platform, the Global Trade Accelerator, or GTA. The platform is built to support one million women-led businesses through 10,000 business associations in 102 countries.

Supporters estimate the model could generate as much as US$900 billion of additional B2B trade over the next decade by linking women entrepreneurs into formal global supply chains.

The project also reflects a wider private-sector effort to develop new digital trade infrastructure at a time when public multilateral institutions have faced challenges trying to modernize trade facilitation systems.

According to Ky Dele, C1WT's founder and president of Blueprint Global Group, the object is to establish a structure which links grassroots organizations with higher echelon networks and also gives women-led enterprises a common global system for scaling across borders.

Launched in November 2025, the Global Trade Accelerator uses eight core pillars that bring together capacity building with digital tools such as trade intelligence, policy advocacy, financing pathways, marketplace access, training modules, and multilingual onboarding for business associations.

At the Accra meeting, the U.S.-based National Black Chamber of Commerce indicated a commitment to support via the 360i Innovation & Entrepreneurial Hub, which prepares small businesses for contracting opportunities and access to investment.

NBCC president Charles DeBow said the partnership could open new financing avenues to women entrepreneurs in Africa and the diaspora by offering access to investor networks that have been out of reach.

A technical showcase held in Accra demonstrated that the platform responds to barriers faced by women-led enterprises, which include, among others, a lack of verifiable business data, limited access to compliant documentation, and difficulty in meeting global standards.

The GTA comprises multilingual onboarding for associations, digital KYC/AML checks, training and market access tracking dashboards, product listing tools for buyers and sellers, as well as cross-border coordination features for chambers and associations.

By housing these functions in a single place, the platform hopes to eradicate fragmentation among a myriad of small groups of businesses that today operate with little coordination and on outdated or inconsistent data systems.