Women Entrepreneurship:
Powering Socio-Economic Progress

If I were to ask you to close your eyes and imagine an average entrepreneur, the clear majority of us end up thinking of a man in his suit with a briefcase or one managing his shop, it’s rare that one thinks of a woman.

There are an estimated 13.5 million to 15.7 million women-owned and controlled enterprises creating direct employment for 22 million to 27 million people in India. Despite significant strides, India’s growth story has ignored women. Rather, women’s participation in the labour force has stagnated and is expected to decline further because of labour trends, technological disruption and constraining social barriers.

As the EY Global Job Creation Survey of global entrepreneurs shows, women are outpacing men in job creation with an average expected growth rate of 10.9 percent compared with 8.3 percent among male entrepreneurs. Also another report by Bain & Co, women entrepreneurs of India are expected to generate 150-170 million jobs by 2030, which is more than 25 percent of the new jobs required for the entire working-age population. Therefore, unlocking entrepreneurship among women in India will provide an unprecedented opportunity to change the country’s economic and social trajectory and its women for future generations, in turn driving tremendous job creation.

In order to enable women to address their aspirations, to look towards entrepreneurship as opportunities rather than subsistence at the grassroots level, there is a need for systemic change in entrepreneurial ecosystems. To power these shifts at the local ecosystem level, at DA we believe in the power of social innovation methodologies and tools. Through our social innovation interventions, we have so far been able to set up and support over 600 women based enterprises in less than 3yrs across only about 80 villages, creating over 1250 jobs. While we have seen success in setting up and supporting enterprises, we recognise a lot needs to be done at the sub-system level of behaviours, attitudes and culture at the local level, in order to truly catalyse women entrepreneurship and capitalise on a focus on them within development practice. Social Innovation enables it by empowering them with tools to create their futures with their own hands and act as change agents in the community. These social innovations processes and tools not only let us go beyond the set narratives, but also help us explore and customize as per the real aspirations.

Some of the key tools put in place to ensure setup of women based enterprises and ensure scaling include:

• Comic Workshop – Comic Workshop tools enable communities to unleash their aspirations and share them as stories. This enables women to unveil their long forgotten skills and aspirations and turn them into potential business ideas. Some of the innovative ideas that have come forth from this process include computer training center (from someone’s childhood dream of becoming a teacher), e-rickshaw (from the passion of being able to drive like her brother does) or a boutique instead of a simple tailoring unit (from woman’s dream to be a fashion designer)

• Persona based Support Services – Each individual is different, owing to a varying combination of social identities and aspects of their upbringing, motivations, and personalities; each may also follow very different paths to reach the same destination of being a successful entrepreneur. This observation—that each aspiring entrepreneur has different motivations, needs and interests—inspired us to tailor our support services to broad categories of entrepreneurs that we call personas. For example a seasoned entrepreneur who already has experience of running a business might need support in terms of digitisation or his or her unit whereas a budding entrepreneur might need support in terms of helping develop their business plan or connecting them with technology vendors or financial institutions.

• Safe Spaces – Provides safe environment and physical infrastructure in order for women to have a space to internalize entrepreneurship, and build solidarity and networks. The safe spaces are being facilitated by social innovation tools of dialogue, co-creation, soft skills and leadership.

• ASPi – Virtual co-working space designed to enhance access to entrepreneurial opportunities for young girls and women. The ASPi in essence is an aspirational window to accommodate creation, discovery and navigation of low-literate expressions.

The merits of social innovation tools and methodologies to unleash the entrepreneurial opportunities for women have been spoken of at length. However, the test is really in how the rubber meets the road. That is, whether these tools, processes can truly mainstream women entrepreneurship so that they are empowered - socially, politically and economically to determine their own paths, livelihoods and the work they want to do. Rather than, simply being mere recipients of the lacklustre, subsistence based options that are made available through top-down structures.

In order to ensure power is actually in the hands of women there is a need to capitalise on the potential of collaborative action to enable change and build networks at two levels – the meso-level, with one set of actors facilitating ‘efficient’ and ‘effective’ operations through enterprise support services and the macro-level, with agencies that enable easier access to capital and influence the policy and regulatory environment for growth of women, thereby simplifying the complexity of the entrepreneurial ecosystem.■
 

Ankita Pant
apant@devalt.org