cultural commerce — or simply because the crafters of the document did not immediately have culture on their radar. While the GATS was a welcome addition to world trade rules, it has yet to be fully used to effectively trade culture services, especially from developing countries. The following recommendations (from women’s barriers to copyright protection) consider how trade in cultural output can be enhanced to promote gains for developing countries.

# **Recommendations**

##  _Trade and Gender_

As discussed earlier, women’s creative agency in the field of creative work is significant. In a development policy, this creativity can be tapped to address such issues as rural poverty, a tyranny that too often compromises human development in villages full of creative women. But few countries have a framework geared to promoting the works of, say, female artisans in international trade. This work has been left largely to ad-hoc NGO operations and business entities that are sometimes rife with labor exploitation, inefficiencies and uncompetitive trade patterns. While structural barriers that keep women behind (on all fronts) cannot be overcome overnight, the following measures are worth deliberating:

- 1) Design and implement a Women Artisans in Trade Initiative (WATI) that functions on local, regional and international levels. The mandate of this program would be to promote artisan works (such as baskets, beads and necklaces) by rural women in local and international trade. The devil is in the details, as they say. But such an initiative deserves scrutiny at the WTO debates and even when considering local economic diversification strategies. Moreover, this program could be linked to such programs as “The Global Platform for Action on Sourcing from Women Vendors.”<sup>43</sup> But unlike Global Platform, a 10-year initiative that was started by the International Trade Centre (ITC), WATI would be focused on creative work of women artisans.

Needless to add, the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) aims to provide opportunities for African products to effectively enter the United States market, for example. These products include crafts and other ‘creative goods.’<sup>44</sup> But again, WATI could be aligned to AGOA to trade more products by African female artisans. Such a framework could be adapted to other regions as well.

> 43 “Established in September 2010, the ITC led Global Platform for Action on Sourcing from Women Vendors is a 10-year initiative that aims to increase the amount of corporate, government and institutional procurement secured by women vendors for the ultimate purpose of bringing economic benefit to women and their communities.”— International Trade Centre, “The Global Platform for Action on Sourcing from Women Vendors,” accessed April 9, 2015, http://www.intracen.org/itc/projects/women-and- <u>trade/the-global-platform-for-action-on-sourcing-from-women-vendors/.</u>

> 44 See: Susan Ellis, “$10 Billion Handicraft Market -- and AGOA -- Courts African Artisans,” IIP Digital, U.S. Department of State, accessed April 25, 2015, <u>http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/article/2003/12/20031219120643silles0.1855585.html#axzz3YLa G50Rf.</u>

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