BBVA - Press Room

• "Project Enlaza" targets female entrepreneurs and self-employed professionals and businesswomen with a view to facilitating access to and training of the use of new mobile devices that raise business productivity
• This project is an initiative led by the Enlaces Platform, an association of businesswomen and female entrepreneurs and professionals
• "Project Enlaza" is initially targeted at 1,000 female members of several associations distributed nationwide, a figure that will rise to 3,000 in just two years
• BBVA, Vodafone and Alares, project collaborators, are contributing work and experience to help deliver targets

"Project Enlaza", promoted by the Enlaces Platform, whose goal is to bring more women into the information society and to introduce female entrepreneurs, professionals and small business owners to process innovation, was unveiled this morning in Madrid in a ceremony attended by representatives of the project collaborators, along with the General Manager of Equal Opportunities in the Spanish Ministry for Equality, Capitolina Díaz and the General Secretary for Employment, Labor Relations and Social Responsibility in the Ministry for Labor, Maravillas Rojo. In just two years, "Project Enlaza" will reach 3,000 women, allowing for improvement in the day-to-day management of their business activities, thanks to the tools and training effort put in motion with this initiative.

The Enlaces Platform (www.plataformaenlaces.org), which in Spanish means links, is the result of an initiative launched by a group of female entrepreneurs and professionals, with ties to a series of women´s associations and organizations, who have pooled their experiences and know-how in enterprising, working for themselves, creating and consolidating businesses.

The platform was devised to seek out cooperation between entrepreneur organizations and businesswomen and to share knowledge and resources to make these women more competitive.

Goals of "Project Enlaza"

The project´s main goals are aimed at boosting and encouraging the use of next generation mobile devices as technology tools in the management of these women´s business activities, to facilitate commercial relations and national and international business communication, and to offer a package of services and content that constitute an online toolkit for managing their business from any place and at any time of the day in a practical, effective and easy to use manner.

In addition, the idea is for "Project Enlaza" to serve as a link between businesswomen and their associations with a view to creating intercommunication synergies.

BBVA, Vodafone and Alares: project partners

BBVA, Vodafone and Alares are the project collaborators, contributing their work and experience to help "Project Enlaza" deliver its targets. All three entities have put a broad spectrum of services on offer to businesswomen at very competitive prices. These services will be channeled through the Enlaces Platform.

"Here at BBVA, given the prevailing economic climate, our focus remains firmly on the Spanish business landscape as the lever for economic recovery. And we are particularly keen on fully integrating Spanish women into that business landscape, in line with our commitment to generate value for all our stakeholders", said Javier Bernal, Director of Business Development at BBVA.

VODAFONE, as part of its commitment to legislation on equality in the business arena, brings to the initiative its mobile phone functionality that helps businesswomen and female professionals and entrepreneurs to better perform their jobs: access to information on the move, enabling devices for application access and opening new channels and ways to interact. "We can do all this with the ICTs incorporated into this revolutionary project. This offer has been designed around a package of products that, combined, enable users to achieve an all mobile solution, tailored to their needs", said Rafael Urgel, Director of Business Sales at Vodafone.

Alares, an expert firm in family assistance, will contribute a personal and family assistance program designed to help project participants reconcile and balance their work, family and private lives. "We are keenly aware of the importance of balance in all arenas, but we think it is of the utmost importance among this group of businesswomen and female entrepreneurs. This is the reason for our engagement with this project", explained Javier Benavente, President of Alares.

Julia García-Vaso, Chairwoman of the Enlaces Plataform underscored the importance of businesswomen in times like these, marked by economic crisis: "not only on account of their contribution to GDP but also, and this is backed up by hard data, because of their role in consolidating companies and their lower failure rates. Let"s do business and stimulate the economy efficiently, treating people as people and leveraging talent, technological development and innovation".