Women-led entrepreneurship
Mini toolkit
Central to inclusive and sustainable development is the urgent need to harness the economic potential of women. Read this mini toolkit that shares a few tools and initiatives adopted by Development Alternatives for overcoming socio-economic barriers faced by women along with insights on facilitating a solidarity platform for strengthening the voices of rural women.
Central to inclusive and sustainable development is the urgent need to harness the economic potential of women — half of the world’s population. It is estimated that by 2020, 870 million women who have been living or contributing at a subsistence level will enter the economic mainstream for the first time as producers, consumers, employees and entrepreneurs. The economic impact is expected to be staggering, with profound effects on global development as a whole. There is increasing recognition that women entrepreneurs are the rising stars of economies in developing countries like India. Despite this, women’s participation in the Indian labour force and female entrepreneurial rates remain dismally low. More alarmingly, perhaps, workforce participation of women has been continuously declining in India, and the latest level is nearly half of what it was in 2004–05.
Moreover, the ones working are predominantly stuck with traditional occupations — like beauty parlours, tailoring centres and incense stick making — restricted by the lack of exposure to new and innovative ideas and support services.
Therefore, in order to address these challenges, DA deployed a social innovation methodology to bring about innovation in women entrepreneurship. Some of the key approaches adopted are as under:
- Creating safe spaces for overcoming socio-cultural barriers — As part of this, we create safe, physical spaces to build solidarity and networks, facilitating active participation of women, through social innovation such as participatory dialogue and co-creation processes with women.
- Building new models for inclusion — The program recognizes various catalysts for women entrepreneurship, and believes in building more inclusive value chains by mainstreaming women led models like the micro credit facility owned by Federations.
- Catering to specific ambitions — The program has developed design driven research tools like personas, to understand specific ambitions of potential women entrepreneurs and customise support services as per their needs and demands.
Since the social innovation approach is flexible, iterative and responsive to changing dynamics, the program continuously integrates learnings and feedback in its strategy. For instance, while implementing safe spaces for women, we found that most women limit their options due to restrictions imposed by their family, repression by their community and lack of access to resources.
The toolkit, therefore, aims to share the learnings and good practices attained from our experience of implementing safe spaces, and provide tips on structuring them as a community-driven platform for increasing trust and facilitating networks of influence and information between its members.
Authors: Ankita Pant, Roopali Gupta
