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Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Director General of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), has affirmed that despite the global shocks following crises in the many countries, more than 72 percent of world trades are going on smoothly.
Okonjo-Iweala said this on Thursday in Lagos at the 20th anniversary of Streamsowers and Kӧhn, a team of dedicated legal professionals.
The former Nigerian Finance Minister noted that despite the turbulence around the world, a greater percentage of global trade is not affected.
“I can tell you that in spite of all these disruptions global trade has been very resilient,” she said.
“72 percent of world trade still goes on on WTO terms and people are shocked when I say that.
“We have a methodology for calculating it and we’ve not changed that. 72 percent of world trade meaning that countries have realised that both weak and strong but especially the middle powers like Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, UK that trading according to global rules is more to the benefit of their businesses, their countries than a fight with each other,” she said.
Meanwhile, Okonjo-Iweala revealed that more than 100 Nigerian women are among the beneficiaries of the WTO $50 million digital empowerment programme aimed at equipping the women to trade beyond their shores.
“We found that women who trade externally make almost three times more than those who trade domestically so if we can empower women, give them access to the market for them to access externally knowledge that they may lack to access external finance and all the things we talked about, they will make three times more than what they’re making,” she said.
“That’s what’s exciting about it so what we set out to do at the WTO is to create a program that enables us to do that and we started what we called the Wide Fund (Women in the Digital Economy Fund) and we’ve started by raising 50 million dollars to do that, it’s done by a global competition.
“We first asked countries to compete and we picked four and Nigeria was one of them, so I was very proud. I have had to tell everybody I had nothing to do with it.
“And then we came down to the country and conducted a competition among women and we were able to pick over 100 and something women from Nigeria but now we have 300 and something from all over the world.”
