A group of 60 businesswomen began a four-day training organized by Rwanda Development (RDB) Board aimed at strengthening capacity to access foreign markets and improve the quality of products.

RDB will conduct the training in partnership with the International Trade Centre (ITC) and Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), which also target to train women in 18 other countries.

According to RDB, the training contains four components, including an export training course, business counseling, markets information and business advertising on the internet.

It targets women mainly in the business of coffee, leather, horticulture, handicrafts and services provision. The Senior Trade Promotion Advisor in the Office for Africa at ITC, Sebastien Turrel, said that the training is in line with the centre’s mandate to support private sector development focusing on gender empowerment.

"This training aims to strengthen capacity of women-owned businesses by accessing foreign markets and building up a network of strong partners,” Turrel said yesterday. "We will offer direct support to their businesses so that they can improve the quality of their products and be export ready.

This will improve their revenues.” One of the trainees, Donatille Nibagwire, the Managing Director of Floris, a fruits exporting company, said that the major constraint her company faces is transportation and finding the right market to export the perishables within a specific time schedule.

"Market access is the hardest aspect of our business. In this training, I hope to be equipped with enough quality information on how European markets behave so that we can improve our competitiveness,” she said in an interview.

The training is conducted by trainers from Cameroon, Senegal, Uganda and South Africa.

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