Since last year, the pandemic has forced the world to adapt to increased virtual interactions and to remote teamwork experiences. Despite this, it has provided an opportunity to propel collaboration across social and professional networks.

Collaboration plays a key role in unlocking new opportunities to find solutions to challenges. It can enable building resilience by anticipating, adapting and responding to crisis and unexpected events. Collaboration is the new innovation as it facilitates the development of new ideas to solve problems and it drives change during an emergency, such as the one we are currently living in.

Agenda 2030 implementation

As we move forward towards the implementation of the Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it is a fact that new ways of working are required considering the broad range of synergies needed across the seventeen goals. As such, progress will be achieved by bringing people together in the same space of action.

Out of the seventeen goals, achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls is the one that is being highlighted during this month. Under Goal 5, the United Nations states that “gender equality is not only a fundamental human right, but a necessary foundation for a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world.”

Choose the Challenge

Women play a vital role in the society, particularly in post-pandemic recovery. The World Economic Forum anticipates that by empowering women to participate equally in the global economy, it could add $28 trillion in GDP growth by 2025.

The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day is “Choose to Challenge”. This depicts a call to action to align joint efforts and set priorities in working towards achieving gender equality. Although the world has made significant progress towards achieving gender equality in the past decades, there is still work to be done.

MaastrichtMBA Women Business Network

As 2021 begins, a focus on strengthening collaboration is the one I personally want to emphasise. In this vein, I am happy to share with you the establishment of the MaastrichtMBA Women Business Network (WBN), which is the result of joint efforts from a group of female students that believe that collaboration is the new innovation, essential to reach a shared goal.

Through this group, we want to give to the talented and diverse women who are part of the MBA Program, an array of opportunities to network and the necessary tools to support their paths towards leadership positions at the workplace and beyond. Together we have laid the stepping stones and we look forward to continuing building a legacy as we believe (quoting an African proverb) that “if we want to go far, we need to go together”.

This column is written by On-Campus MBA student Natalia Salazar as an introduction on the recently founded MaastrichtMBA Women Business Network.