President Tsai Ing-wen (???) and her Paraguayan counterpart Mario Abdo Benítez highlighted their respective government’s accomplishments in women’s empowerment during a Taipei forum on Wednesday about Taiwan’s cooperation with its Latin American and Caribbean diplomatic allies in the field.

During her opening address at the “Empower Women” forum, where representatives from nine allies of Taiwan shared about their countries’ cooperation with Taipei in empowering women to develop economic resilience in the post-COVID-19 era, Tsai said Taiwan had been pushing for gender equality for decades.

Taiwanese women are now known for playing an important role in politics and business, with female parliamentarians making up more than 40 percent of the legislative body and with 37 percent of owners in small and medium-sized businesses being women as of 2022, Tsai said.

Taiwan has also been working with its diplomatic allies in Latin America and the Caribbean on women’s empowerment, according to Tsai, referring to the foreign ministry-funded International Cooperation and Development Fund (TaiwanICDF), which is responsible for Taiwan’s foreign aid programs.

As part of the TaiwanICDF’s first regional development project, which focuses on women’s empowerment, women in Latin America and the Caribbean have been given vocational training to enhance their employment and entrepreneurial skills and business mentoring to help them establish micro and small businesses, Tsai said.

According to Tsai, the two-year project has successfully promoted gender quality and women’s empowerment by developing their skills, supporting women in building their own businesses, and providing them with a strong sense of achievement, confidence, and courage to transform their lives.

President Abdo, who is visiting Taiwan on a five-day state trip, meanwhile, said at the same forum that women’s empowerment had not been easy for his country to develop as women in general have been disadvantaged and frequently face domestic violence throughout Latin America.

That is why his government has been working with Taiwan to build a system of government-funded programs to help women access resources to enjoy better health and equal rights, Abdo said.

“We are very grateful for your country in helping us to implement many programs to help our women,” Abdo said.

With Taiwan’s funding, Paraguay is able to provide safer working environments for female workers and to establish over 100 vocational training centers across his country that provide training to women to make them more employable, Abdo said.

There have been more than 100 women entrepreneurs trained in these centers going on to win international awards, he added.

According to Yen Ming-hong (???), director of TaiwanICDF’s Technical Cooperation Department, the regional women’s empowerment project, which began in 2020, helps to train a large number of women in these countries to learn how to start their own businesses and provide them with startup funding after they finish an entrepreneur training program.

With TaiwanICDF serving as guarantor, these women entrepreneurs are also able to apply for loans more easily if they want to expand their business operations, Yen told CNA.

One of the entrepreneurs who has benefited from the TaiwanICDF project is Cristha Fuentes, a Guatemalan who owns a brand named after herself, “Cristha Fuentes,” that fuses traditional handmade footwear with contemporary design.

Fuentes told CNA on the sideline of the one-day forum that she founded the brand that sells mostly shoes and handmade leather accessories when she was only 19.

Before joining the TaiwanICDF program, she knew nothing about business management or finance.

She said the mentorship she received from the program was a “life-changing experience” as it helped her not only as a designer but also as a businesswoman to be more confident about her business decisions and goals.

The project also helped her understand which of her products were more profitable, which she then focused on to increase her revenue while continuing to retain her favorite shoe designs.

She has also won a grant by TaiwanICDF which she plans to use to expand her factory’s capacity and hire more sellers to continue to expand her business, Fuentes said.

Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel