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Forum article speeds trade development initiative

"'Helping SMEs Get Wiser to Consumer Choice' (Forum 1/2002) generated numerous calls and e-mails from countries including Ghana, India, Mauritania, Peru, Romania, Thailand and Viet Nam, to name just a few. This showed the huge need to assist small entrepreneurs with 'accessing the global marketplace', and for this reason, you have just moved our five year plan forward, to implement sooner what we had as a long-term goal.

"We have created a new initiative, 'Global Linkages', to formalize what we had been doing -- linking people with trade -- through a new infrastructure. The work ITC is doing through the Executive Forum, the Forum magazine, the web site, etc., make them powerful tools to assist us in our ultimate goal, which is to increase trade among all SMEs.

"By coincidence, as I was in the Chilean Economic Development Agency office in Chile, they received the Spanish version of Forum, where the article appears.

What a wonderful touch this made to our discussions!

I will continue to keep you abreast of what we are doing with the challenge of opening the Institute for Global Linkages.

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