Stepping up our commitment to supporting female migrapreneurs
At Catalysr we’ve always found strength and power in our diversity, whether that’s through our many different cultures or other lived experiences.
Here’s a chart showing the migrapreneurs we’ve backed so far and their country of origin.
Our migrapreneurs to-date have come from 16 different countries: India (19.4%), Pakistan (17.9%), Egypt (11.9%), Syria (9%), China (7.5%), Vietnam (6.0%), South Korea (4.5%), Singapore (3.0%), Srilanka (1.5%), Ghana (1.5%), Zimbabwe (1.5%), Japan (1.5%), Kenya (1.5%), Indonesia (1.5%) and USA (1.5%).
You might also have noticed that Australians make up 10.4% of our participants, and that’s because they have participated as co-founders of our migrapreneur startups — another example of how migrant-owned businesses create business and employment opportunities for everyone.
An area where we haven’t particularly put a lot of focus on in the past, as a new social enterprise, is gender diversity.
You might have come across this article recently, showing Sydney being ranked 11th in the world on supporting female entrepreneurs, slipping down from 8th position in 2016.
As an ecosystem, we need to do a lot more to support female founders. Just a few months ago, many of the top Australian VC firms banded together to support female founders in an initiative called Office-hours, which builds on top of fantastic programs offered by SheStarts, Tech Ready Women and SBE Australia, SheEO and pitch-nights by Heads Over Heels, to name a few.
So, how does Catalysr’s report card look on supporting female migrapreneurs?
We’ve crunched the numbers, and this is what they have to say.
In our first two years, 41% of our migrapreneurs have been women. In our last program, the proportion was nearly 60% female migrapreneurs, some of them you can follow on here.
They were supported by our fantastic Migrapreneur-in-Residence, Pratibha Rai, a female migrapreneur herself, with over a decade of startup experience.
However, we can do a lot more to serve female migrapreneurs, and play our part in increasing the diversity of our startup ecosystem.
For this reason, I am very excited to announce that Vasudhara Foundation has decided to back us and join us on our journey at Catalysr.
Vasudhara is a Sydney-based foundation which supports early stage social impact projects. One of its key focus areas is supporting female entrepreneurs so this is naturally a great fit.
Our collaboration will enable us to serve more female migrapreneurs, as well as provide our current portfolio companies run by female migraprenuers access to an even larger network and funding opportunities.
The most promising female migrapreneurs in the our future pre-accelerator programs will also get the following benefits as an add-on:
- Special Access to pitch to Vasudhara’s team and networks, where they will be able to access various opportunities such as: mentoring, networks, grants and investment.
- PR and media support by Catalysr and our partners, to share the incredible stories of our female migrapreneurs and showcase their work.
If you’re a female migrapreneur reading this, you can apply for our upcoming program launching in September 2018!
Let’s create Australia 2.0 together.
