"This new guide provides corporations and their suppliers with a deeper understanding of the barriers and challenges preventing women-owned businesses from accessing and fully participating in local and global values chains. It provides the tools and techniques for reducing or eliminating these barriers and for leveraging the vast untapped economic potential represented by women-owned businesses. For many women, entrepreneurship offers a path to economic empowerment and it is incumbent upon corporations to help create conditions that permit this.

This guide is intended to support signatories of the Women's Empowerment Principles, which UN Women and UN Global Compact jointly promulgate, to take action on Principle 5: Implement enterprise development, supply chain and marketing practices that empower women. Corporations are well positioned to promote gender equality and empower women in their workplaces, in their communities and through their purchasing policies and practices."