Tuesday is International Women's Day, a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women.
The day also marks a call to action for accelerating women's equality.
Program Director for the Women Entrepreneurship Strategy, Lee McGrath, says locally they're putting even more time and resources into empowering women.
"Windsor-Essex Economic Development Organization has kind of taken it a little bit further and made it a one month event. So you'll see events spread out through the month so that we can make it more than one day, and I think that's a really important message for International Women's Day."
The Women Entrepreneurship Strategy is a $2 billion investment launched by the federal government in 2019 that seeks to double the number of women-owned businesses by 2025.
Only 16 per cent of Canadian businesses are owned or led by women, and McGrath says there's a lot of reasons for that, one of the biggest issues being that there are less women that can get supports for funding.
"We as a collective in Windsor-Essex developed a community, which we titled RISE. And although it was founded by Invest Windsor-Essex and led by the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Centre, it functions in partnership with the the University of Windsor's EPICentre, Workforce WindsorEssex, WEtech Alliance, Build A Dream and Windsor Essex Capital Angel Network"
The purpose of RISE is to create a suite of services available to women in the region by amalgamating and supporting initiatives with the goal of increasing the number of female entrepreneurs and women in STEM-related fields.
In terms of a message looking forward, McGrath believes what's needed more is supports for later stage investment for female entrepreneurs.
"We know that men have an easier time finding capital investment, investors, and the funds to actually grow their business more internationally."
Through programming, training and education, McGrath says they've supported 3,300 women in the region in the three completed years that the program has been running.
In the fall of this year, she says there will be further opportunities for women in the Windsor-Essex region to apply for funding under the Women Entrepreneurship Strategy.
- with files from AM800's The Morning Drive