The Arab Businesswomen's Council (ABC), founded last October, will hold its first meeting here on February 16, chairwoman Sheikha Hessa Saad Al-Abdallah Al-Sabah said Friday.
The participants are expected to discuss "ways of strengthening relations among Arab businesswomen" and "the role they could play in trade and investment", Sheikha Hessa told the official KUNA agency.
The four-day meeting will be followed by a seminar, February 20 to 22, to be held in Bahrain and focusing on Arab businesswomen's participation in economic decision-making, said Fatima Hassan Jawad, chairwoman of Bahrain Business Women's Society.
In September, Jawad was the first woman to be officially registered by the Bahraini government as a "businesswoman".
In most other Gulf monarchies, where women are submitted to gender discrimination, Jawad's counterparts are still registered as "businessmen".
The Cairo-based ABC was created in Beirut during a joint conference of the Lebanese association of businesswomen and the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia.
During the meeting, which was attended by businesswomen from all over the Arab world, the then Lebanese economy minister, Nasser Saidi, pointed out that women represented only 25 percent of the active population, compared with 50 percent in the rest of the world. — (AFP, Kuwait City)
© Agence France Presse 2001
© 2001 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
