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The Road Ahead: Strategies to Support Women Entrepreneurs in Latin America and the Caribbean
un article par Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, Council of Foreign Relations Development Channel
The Multilateral Investment Fund of the Inter-
American Development Bank (IDB) and The
Economist’s Intelligence Unit recently published
their inaugural Women’s Entrepreneurial
Venture Scope (WEVenture Scope) report, which
ranks twenty countries in Latin America and the
Caribbean based on their business climate for
women entrepreneurs. “Women entrepreneurs in Latin
America and the Caribbean are potentially one of
the greatest underutilized resources in the
region,” the report finds, noting that over the
past twenty years, more women in Latin America and
the Caribbean have become active in the workforce,
which has spurred economic growth. According to
the report, Latin American women’s growing incomes
led to a thirty percent reduction in extreme
poverty from 2000 to 2010. The report’s authors
suggest that this reduction would be even more
dramatic if there were more female entrepreneurs
in the region.
A female small scale gold miner working in Nicaragua, 2006 (Courtesy Reuters/Oswaldo Rivas).
click on photo to enlarge
Despite mounting evidence that empowering
businesswomen has widespread economic benefits,
however, their social and economic potential
remains largely untapped. The WEVenture Scope
report shows that because women in Latin America
and the Caribbean are unable to access the
capital, resources, skills, and networks that they
need to develop their businesses, many female-run
microenterprises cannot grow into the small and
medium enterprises (SMEs) that drive countries’
job-creation and economic growth engines. In
addition, over half of the women entrepreneurs
surveyed in Latin America and the Caribbean
participate only in the informal economy, leaving
them more vulnerable to corruption and further
limiting their access to financing.
The barriers facing women entrepreneurs in Latin
America and the Caribbean are hardly unique to the
region. In its 2012 Women’s
Report, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor
(GEM) showed that although women’s participation
in entrepreneurship differs across regions, there
are still fewer women than men entrepreneurs in
almost every country. The exceptions: Panama,
Ecuador, Mexico, Thailand, Nigeria, Ghana, and
Uganda. In fact, studies have shown that women in
Latin America and the Caribbean are more likely to
pursue entrepreneurial activities than their peers
in almost any other region of the world. GEM data
shows that twenty-seven percent of the female
population in Sub-Saharan Africa and fifteen
percent in Latin America and the Caribbean are
engaged in entrepreneurship, but women’s
entrepreneurship rates in the Middle East, North
Africa, Europe, and Asia barely reach five
percent.
The GEM report highlights a number of factors that
could contribute to the low rate of female
entrepreneurship worldwide. For example, women
usually start their own businesses out of economic
necessity rather than opportunity and frequently
have less confidence in their entrepreneurial
abilities than their male counterparts do. The
report’s authors stress that these challenges need
to be put in context, noting that gender
disparities have cultural and institutional roots,
given that entrepreneurship is often a male-
dominated field with few female role models.
Still, women entrepreneurs continue to play a
growing role in economic growth. As of 2012, there
were more than 126 million women around the world
starting or running their own businesses and an
additional 98 million leading established
businesses. Many of these women-led businesses
employ women as well as men, and more women
entrepreneurs enter markets every day. With fewer
barriers in the forms of access to capital,
markets and networks, those numbers should climb
even higher.
[Note: Thank you to Janet Hudgins, the CPNN reporter
for this article.]
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DISCUSSION
Question(s) liée(s) à cet article:
Do women have a special role in poverty reduction?,
* * * * *
Commentaire le plus récent:
According to the target articles (above), as well as many other economic analyses and reports, the key to poverty reduction is the education and employment of women and their actions for economic justice.
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