This initiative will strengthen female leadership in the tourism sector
With the presence of the Undersecretary of Tourism, Verónica Kunze, and the Regional Director of UN Women for the Americas and the Caribbean, María-Noel Vaeza, the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was celebrated between the two institutions, which is presented as a job opportunity to promote the program of the Government of Chile, helping the economic reactivation with a strong female participation and in rural areas.
In this way, the MOU feeds the 2022-2026 Gender Agenda of the Ministry of Economy, Development and Tourism, particularly the Undersecretary of Tourism, strengthening the national strategy with a gender perspective, providing, for example, guidelines on this matter for the sector; promote the leadership and economic empowerment of women entrepreneurs in the industry; and promote indigenous and rural tourism with a gender perspective, which will be concretized in the Indigenous Tourism Women Entrepreneur Forum that will take place during the second half of this year.
The Undersecretary of Tourism, Verónica Kunze, highlighted that “this agreement marks the beginning of a great job with a gender perspective, which is a fundamental part of the guidelines that we have as a Government and that we want to pass on to all sectors. In this industry, 45.8% of employed women are women and it is a figure that is increasing, because many enterprises are led by them, but, nevertheless, the percentage of informality, for example, is higher than that of men , at least by 6.1 percentage points, and it is in these aspects that we must improve and work with as many actors as possible, such as UN Women”.
The link between the two institutions began in 2020 after participating in the APEC Indigenous Women’s Participation in Local Economies seminar, and during the following years the collaborative work focused on the northern part of the country, specifically with indigenous tourism, handicraft and businesswomen. agro-processed products, agreeing to sign this memorandum that also agrees to increase female leadership in the sector, improve working conditions for women and promote their digital inclusion in various initiatives.
“This agreement is fundamental because it will allow us to place gender issues at the center of productive policies and policies for the labor insertion of indigenous women, which is very important to us. It is essential that you see the wonderful work they do and how productive they are to insert them into the market, since Chile has one of the lowest female participation in the economy and the pandemic, precisely, has been a delay, so this agreement It allows us to improve in these aspects”, commented the regional director of UN Women for the Americas and the Caribbean, María-Noel Vaeza.
It should be noted that the Government Program, in the tourism field, recognizes the need to generate a sustainable sector development based on the protection of cultural, landscape and human resources, conceiving itself as a promoter of the improvement of the quality of life and access to basic and complementary infrastructure of the communities where it is produced.
Source: Subsecretaría de Turismo de Chile