With the recently signed Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between India and the United Kingdom, India has for the first time signed up to a detailed chapter on trade and gender equality, besides a clear assertion in the preamble to “increasing women’s access to and ability to fully benefit from the opportunities created by this Agreement.” And gender experts are cheering. Prior to this, only the India-UAE Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) in 2022 had a mention in the chapter on micro, small and medium-sized enterprises about strengthening bilateral collaboration on activities to promote SMEs owned by women and youth, as well as startups; promote partnerships among these SMEs and their participation in international trade, and exchange of information on entrepreneurship education and awareness programmes for youth and women to promote the entrepreneurial environment.
India has been an active supporter of gender equality at the international level – it ratified the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1979; it is a signatory to the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action adopted in 1995 in support of women’s empowerment; and is also strongly committed to the achievement of Goal 5 of the UN’s 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) that aims to achieve gender equality and empowerment of all women and girls.
Further, India supports the Addis Ababa Action Agenda (2015) which recognises the importance of international trade as an engine for inclusive economic growth and poverty reduction and specifically underlines the role it can play in promoting women’s empowerment. However, traditionally India has been cautious about linking so-called ‘non-trade/progressive issues’ such as human rights, labour standards, gender, and environment with international trade, both bilaterally and multilaterally, by and large regarding them as ‘veiled protectionism’.
For example, India voted against the “Joint Declaration on Trade and Women’s Economic Empowerment” issued at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Ministerial Conference in Buenos Aires in December 2017. The Buenos Aires declaration is currently supported by 127 WTO members and observers. India has also opted to stay out of the Informal Working Group on Trade and Gender (IWG) established at the WTO in 2020 with the objective to advance gender-responsive trade policies and increase women’s participation in global trade in keeping with its general resistance to plurilateral deals within the WTO.
The IWG currently has 130 members and five observers. On the other hand, globally, the idea that international trade can play an important role in women’s economic empowerment and advancing gender equality has guided the marked increase in the number of trade agreements incorporating gender-related provisions in the last ten years. Indeed, over one-quarter of the free trade agreements notified to the WTO include at least one gender related provision. Chile has included gender chapters in ten of its FTAs, and notably the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) that became operational in 2021 includes a Protocol on Women and Youth in Trade and has a binding legal instrument on issues of women traders.
Another important initiative has been the Global Trade and Gender Arrangement (GTAGA) founded in 2020 that encourages action toward mutually supportive trade and gender policies with a focus on increasing the number of women entrepreneurs in trade. The initiative currently has eleven members including Australia, Chile, Mexico, New Zealand, and Brazil. The narrative of women-led development has no doubt enhanced the focus on women’s entrepreneurship within the policy establishment in India in recent years. However, the multitude of schemes and initiatives supporting entrepreneurship among women are primarily focussed on handholding early-stage development.
The focus is on capacity building, mentoring, and small-value collateral-free starting loans. But support for internationalization of women-owned enterprises through targeted measures to boost women’s participation in international trade has lagged. Just as lack of financial resources, time and mobility constraints, poor access to information and societal gender bias inhibit women from starting businesses – these impediments also hinder women from successfully accessing export markets to trade products and services globally. In relation to their male counterparts, women entrepreneurs pursuing foreign markets have difficulty in becoming a part of established distribution networks, face more obstacles with regard to logistics, regulatory and procedural compliance, and are at a higher risk of abuse, including corruption and harassment.
In this context the inclusion of gender-responsive provisions in the India-UK trade agreement is a muchneeded boost to including women as distinct stakeholders in the enabling ecosystem for trade in India. Along with the chapter on trade and gender equality, the agreement references the terms “gender” and “women” across other key chapters also, including government procurement, trade facilitation, digital trade, innovation, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), labour, and trade and development cooperation. The agreement admirably relates the ‘systemic barriers’ to the participation of women in trade; acknowledges the diverse roles women play in trade as workers, business owners and entrepreneurs; and commits to increasing women’s access to and ability to benefit from the opportunities, including with respect to women from rural areas, marginalised communities, and economically vulnerable backgrounds.
Moving forward, the Trade and Gender Equality Working Group (TGEWG) mandated under the IndiaUK trade agreement should work to identify concrete action points and pathways to increase the participation of women-owned SMEs in trade that can become standards for all future trade agreements by India. Secondly, just as MSMEs have been explicitly identified for focussed interventions to boost exports in the current foreign trade policy, support for women entrepreneurs should be brought to the forefront of the country’s national trade agenda through the export promotion mission announced in the 2025-26 Union Budget. Finally, gender mainstreaming should become an integral aspect of the execution and implementation of trade facilitation measures and ease of doing business initiatives. Here, collection of genderdisaggregated data and regular consultation and engagement with women business associations are vital for a strong evidence-based foundation.
(The writers are, respectively, Senior Fellow and Research Assistant at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), New Delhi.)