Empowering Women Entrepreneurs in Emerging Markets

Our innovations are empowering women entrepreneurs worldwide

Women are twice as profitable for banks as men

The Opportunity

Empowering women entrepreneurs in emerging markets must go hand-in-hand with facilitating access to finance.

According to the World Bank, 70% of women entrepreneurs are un(der)served and face a USD $300 billion+ annual credit deficit.

In addition, female customers have a higher propensity to save. And once women connect with a bank, they access a range of financial products from the same source. As a result, women enterprises pose a greater potential for cross-selling financial products compared with their male counterparts.

Furthermore, non-performing small business loans of members of the Financial Alliance for Women (FAW) were 42% higher for men than for women. And data from FAW members shows that the average profit margin for loans to women-led SMEs is 15% higher than that for loans to men.

The Need

However, women entrepreneurs have limited access to finance and access to markets for a variety of reasons, including:

Limited awareness/understanding of the formal financial sector’s products/services;
Informal nature of their businesses and relatively smaller sizes in terms of turnover and equity;
Lack of ownership of property or land title to pledge as collateral; and
And inadequate documentation in terms of business records needed to determine borrowing capacity.

In addition, those banks that do develop custom products for empowering women’s entrepreneur may have difficulty reaching new, qualified, prospective customers, or have concerns about their ability to repay loans.

Emerging360’s Solutions for Empowering Women Business Owners in Emerging Markets

Emerging360 develops products for empowering women business owners with the skills, knowledge, and attitudes necessary to access finance, access markets, and grow in sustainable ways. Furthermore, our instructional design approach is unique in focusing on gender and cultural obstacles to finance.

In addition to custom offerings for clients, Emerging360 is developing a cutting-edge, non-financial services (NFS) platform that enables banks and other financial institution partners to build their brands and reach new women-owned MSMEs while increasing repayment rates, etc.