The Importance of Promoting a Female Social Entrepreneurship

Dec 8, 2021 | Social Impact

The core basis of social entrepreneurship is to acknowledge and recognize a certain social problem in the society and act upon it in order to acomplish a positive social change. For example, the gender gap in social enterprises is commonly known to be a social issue in many European states. This means that when men outnumber women in entrepreneurship rates, the gender gap decreases in many social enterprises. However, today with the greater involvement in social activities women become an essential player in addressing certain social problems and therefore become a substantial part of the global social entrepreneurship.

But, what are the social entrepreneurs ideas that we can apply in order to motivate socially innovative women to ‘’dive’’ in the waters of social entrepreneurship ?

  • Invest in Social Entrepreneurship Education

Women-owned businesses represent an enormous potential for economies around the world. They play an important role in creating economic opportunities and growth, despite facing many constraints. According to the International Finance Corporation (IFC), one in three formally registered businesses are owned by women and 80% of jobs world-wide are in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

A practical example of investing in women businesses is to ‘’encourage’’ a social entrepreneurship education through organizing more educational courses, programs for gaining or improving business skills, easier access to financial services, including credit access for funding future business activities, etc.

  • Social media promotion

Promoting a social entrepreneur woman on the social media platform is the ‘’baby step’’ in advertising a future successful business. Continuously, sharing posts, information about products and commenting about them is crucial in attracting audience and followers from different ages. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter are the most common social tools for marketing and selling. Social media is one of the easiest and free ways to support social entrepreneurship ideas as well as global social entrepreneurship.

  • Ensure an easier access to business grants

‘’Newly born‘’ female entrepreneurs who have an easier access in receiving a grant, have a greater chance for their business to succeed. This is why, in order to help female entrepreneurs some government agencies, nonprofits, and private organizations provide small business grants for women. There are different types of grants that women entrepreneurs can apply for, depending on the ‘’direction’’ where their business is going.

For example, there is the IdeaCafe Grant, and it is a small business grant of $1,000 available for anyone who owns their own business or plans to start one, or the Cartier Women’s Initiative Award, who is awarded once a year to 21 female entrepreneurs around the world. The Cartier award grant, where the top seven finalists will win $100,000 is intended for women business owners in the early stages of development of their business.

  • Empowering women entrepreneurs: best practices and challenges

Women are present in every part of the global value chains, as producers, business owners, executives, employees, distributors, and consumers. With the globalization and rapid advance in communications technologies, value chains have unlocked opportunities for women around the world to participate more fully in the formal labor markets and access products or services to improve their wellbeing. Today, Cher Wang, who is a Taiwanese businesswoman and a co-founder of HTC corporation is known to be one of the most influential and successful women entrepreneurs in tech.

There is also Shiza Shahid, the co-founder of the Malala Fund, that works by advocating girls’ rights and invests in local education activities. It is a global movement that provides each girl at least 12 years of safer education. Additionally, in the area of improving girls education, Sakena Yacoobi, is also known to be an influential social entrepreneur woman, because through the Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL), she is working to rebuild an early childhood to primary education for girls and young women across the Central and Southern Asia.

Furthermore, as a famous and successful female entrepreneur, we can also mention Servane Mouazan , who is the CEO of Ogunte, an organization that helps women, who are social innovators, become better connected in solving environmental problems.

However, even though these social entrepreneur women are recognized as being one of the best practices, still on the other hand most social entrpeneur women face a number of difficulties in establishing and maintaining businesses. These include: access to finance, unfavourable business regulations, and cultural barriers. Although most of these challenges  are common to both sexes, in many cases they tend to be more significant and demanding for women who are entrepreneurs.

Concluding Thoughts

In the past few decades, the role and contribution of women’s entrepreneurship to women’s economic empowerment, economic growth, society and sustainable development at large has been widely and clearly recognised. Realizing the full potential of women-owned enterprises demands change at various levels, ranging from direct interventions such as training, to changes in attitude and greater gender-sensitivity within macroeconomic frameworks. Highly educated and professionally qualified women must be encouraged for managing their own business, rather than being employed in any outlets.It is observable that women entrepreneurs have proved to be a strong driving force in today‘s corporate world. They are competent to balance their duties of both motherhood and entrepreneurship and they constitute almost half of all businesses owned today.

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