When cross-border trade is simple, fast and cost-effective, it can create new business opportunities, and enable greater economic development. Yet gender bias remains a significant barrier to women's participation in international trade: women traders often face great risks and unfavourable conditions which can discourage them from engaging in cross-border commerce. Specific action must be taken to ensure that neither women nor men are negatively impacted by trade barriers.

How can we create a more gender-sensitive trade environment?

When it comes to solving the practical barriers, trade facilitation reforms can serve as an effective tool for creating a more predictable and inclusive environment. The Global Alliance for Trade Facilitation brings together government and businesses to address unnecessary red tape at borders and deploy targeted reforms.

In this webinar, Jose Raul Perales, Deputy Director of the Center For International Private Enterprise (CIPE), will document the insights, challenges and emerging best practices for the role gender plays in trade facilitation reforms.

José Raúl Perales is Deputy Director of CIPE, which is the Global Alliance for Trade Facilitation, a public- private partnership for trade-led growth and reform launched in partnership with the International Chamber of Commerce and the World Economic Forum, and supported internationally by both public and private sector stakeholders. In his role as Deputy Director, Perales oversees a team of experts involved in the design and implementation of all in-country projects and serves on the management team of the Alliance.

Prior to joining CIPE, Perales served as the Assistant Secretary for the Private Sector at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In this role, Perales advised the Secretary on the impact of the Department's policies, regulations, and processes on private sector companies, universities, and not-for-profit institutions and enhanced strategic communications in order to help the public and private sectors jointly meet their shared responsibility for homeland security.

Perales has served as the Director for the Americas at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and as Executive Director and Vice-President of the Association of American Chambers of Commerce in Latin America (AACCLA).

Previously, Perales was the Senior Associate at the Latin American Program of the Woodrow Wilson Center, where he coordinated projects on the political economy of Latin American free trade agreements and conducted policy research and programs on economic development and politics in Central America, the Caribbean, MERCOSUR, and Cuba.

Perales also served as trade policy adviser to the government of Puerto Rico, where he successfully created a strategy for advancing the island's foreign trade interests and mediated government-private sector interaction on commercial affairs.

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