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Women in international businesses

We promote Swedish business women who want to expand internationally through International Women’s Entrepreneurial Challenge, IWEC.  The 2022 international conference and awards ceremony will be held in Madrid, Spain, on November 13-15 . We welcome Swedish nominations for 2022 – nominate here. 

Each year, the world’s most successful women-owned international businesses gather somewhere in the world, under the umbrella of IWEC, International Women’s Entrepreneurial Challenge. The 30 countries participating in IWEC nominate 2-3 successful international business women. Since 2013, fifteen Swedish business women have won this award and are now part of a powerful IWEC network which represents companies with a total annual revenue of 29,8 billion USD and employing over 260 000 people.

“It is tremendously exciting to be part of the IWEC network and it is expanding each year, says Charlotte Kalin from Make Trade. For us it started in 2012 when the chambers of commerce in South Africa got in touch about expanding IWEC into Scandinavia. Since then, each year between one and three successful Swedish business women have been awarded in Barcelona, Lima, Istanbul, Brussels, Seattle and Shanghai. In 2014 we hosted the IWEC awards in Stockholm.” 

Make Trade is the home of IWEC in Sweden.

We welcome nominations for 2022 IWEC Swedish awardees here. The IWEC awardee needs to be a woman, the majority owner of her company, have a turnover of 1,2 million USD or more and strive for international success.