🚀 How digital technologies have transformed women-oriented small business support
In our third Spotlight for International Women’s Day, we take a look at the ways in which digital technologies have changed how women-owned small businesses are supported. We highlight that digital-first players, like social networks and ecommerce platforms, have become essential channels for market access and training. Digital technologies have also augmented traditional modes of support; peer networks and bite-size digital training stand out among the successful practices. To extend these opportunities to digitally excluded female entrepreneurs, increased and smarter collaborations between supporters will be critical.
Digital-first players
When women-owned small businesses go digital, they typically use social media and free and easy-to-use ecommerce platforms to access markets and expand their business. These platforms recognize that women-owned businesses are a key segment of their user base, and they are now offering a range of support initiatives specifically for them. For example, Google for Growth has set up a dedicated women-owned business support program that offers training and community building; and Facebook’s (now Meta) SheMeansBusiness program follows a similar approach. National and regional ecommerce platforms such as GoJek and Jumia have started to offer similar initiatives, often in collaboration with international development organizations.
As we discussed in an earlier Spotlight, it makes business sense for big tech to support small enterprises; supporting women-owned small enterprises is equally sound. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram are already strengthening their efforts to better support women businesses. Through platform-led upskilling, these tech giants are building small businesses’ capacity in order to boost their depth of participation on the platforms. As a result, Facebook and Instagram are able to not only generate direct revenue from advertisements, but they can also benefit from the increased active engagement and content creation from female-led small businesses.
While women-owned businesses can run the risk of growing overly dependent on any given platform, the positive impact of increased market access and capacity is undeniable. In fact, unpublished qualitative evidence from Caribou Digital shows that women microbusinesses in Kenya heavily use Instagram and Facebook for advertising. To add, two surveys by the IFC confirm that women in Africa and Southeast Asia value training and support provided by ecommerce platforms more than men.
Peer-based digital training, aligned with real needs
Due to the outsized role of social media for female-led enterprises’ digital journeys, business owners are increasingly demanding targeted support on skills like digital marketing and ecommerce. Generic digital literacy training is not the most effective in meeting these needs. The previously mentioned Caribou study in Kenya finds that women want to develop specific skills on how to market their products better, how to sell more, and how to generally run a business better. Some forge ahead to set up social media-based businesses, only to find out along the way that they lack more than a general understanding of social media which prevents these ventures from thriving. These entrepreneurs report that they are lacking digital marketing skills and do not know how to develop content that markets their skills and products.
Support organizations have started to better address these skills gaps. While rigorous impact evaluations are missing, several solutions that offer content in digestible formats have seen large-scale uptake, suggesting that they offer tangible benefits to women-owned businesses. For example, the digital business education platform Ovante now serves more than 13,000 users through a learning methodology that caters to the evolving digital needs of female microentrepreneurs. Its Spanish application offers short modules that capture learnings from how other entrepreneurs have built their financial and digital capabilities, while a globally-oriented tool offers a stepwise program using gamification and engaging content.
A similar example is the HerVenture application developed by the Cherie Blair Foundation, which has been used by 50,000 female entrepreneurs. The application emphasizes modes of learning that fit into women’s schedules, segmenting learning tracks on topics such as accessing finance and e-commerce. The app customizes its content based on women entrepreneurs’ specified needs. Content is offered in small chunks and in the form of games and quizzes.
The success of these initiatives demonstrates how important it is to meet women owned businesses where they are. This is true for both content and channel. Digital training content should be bite-sized and customizable, organized in tracks and steps, to be taken flexibly. For channels, training that uses WhatsApp to disseminate bite-sized lessons can be effective.
In addition to content delivered online, women business owners greatly benefit from peer communities that are often enabled by digital technologies. Caribou Digital’s research shows that female entrepreneurs and gig workers join a number of virtual groups from which they learn from others and through which they support each other. Formal training and peer communities can also complement each other: success stories from Care’s Ignite program show that role models can influence and train other employees and entrepreneurs.
The need for new collaborations
Digital technologies afford major new opportunities for women-oriented small business support, and some organizations have successfully taken advantage of them. Still, reliable evidence about what works is practically absent while stubborn structural challenges may only have worsened through the pandemic.
Going forward, the situation calls for more and smarter collaborations between supporters, for two reasons. First, making a dent into systemic gender barriers requires both supporting women-owned businesses directly and improving conditions in their environments. No single organization can possibly do both at the same time.
Second, the advent of digital technologies has opened new opportunities to reach female-led small businesses, but scaling remains hard while trust building and local outreach continue to be important, especially for digital inclusion. Digital platforms that excel at enabling market access for women businesses may work with development organizations to improve their offering for low-skilled or digitally excluded small businesses. Global organizations with compelling training apps may partner with local ones that have already gained the trust of small businesses. If collaborations between digital-first and traditional players — and between global and local ones — become widespread, women-led small enterprises will reap far more of the benefits that digital technologies have to offer.
