Strategy success and new ambitions: Our 2022 Annual Report

In 2022, the world presented women entrepreneurs with new challenges such as high inflation and the cost of living crisis. Together with partners, the Foundation continued to play a key role in supporting women in low and middle income countries to start, sustain and grow their businesses.

Over the year, the last year of our 2019-2022 strategy, our programmes directly supported over 30,000 women entrepreneurs in 52 countries. That’s our highest number of women reached in one year since 2013, and a considerable increase on last year’s 22,905 women.

Working with a network of 63 in-country partners, we successfully achieved our 100,000 Women Campaign, greatly expanding our reach and deepening our impact.

We are proud to have made great progress for women entrepreneurs over 2022, as well as strengthening our organisation and laying the foundations for our ambitious new 2023-2026 strategy. Together with partners we…

• Continued delivery of our HerVenture app in South Africa, Guyana, Nigeria, Kenya, Vietnam and Indonesia, reaching 27,710 new users.
• Launched a new learning track for HerVenture on mobile money – a vital tool for women to access and manage their finances.
• Won the Best Use of Mobile for Social and Economic Development award in the Social Impact category at the Mobile App Summit and Awards 2022 in Kenya, for HerVenture.
• Brought our Road to Growth programme to a new country, South Africa, and continued delivery in Kenya, Nigeria and Guyana, supporting 356 participants.
• Launched our new Road to Finance programme, piloting it in Nigeria and Guyana before delivering the programme again in Guyana, supporting 134 participants.
• Evolved our Leadership, Influencing and Advocacy training into its own standalone programme, Road to Leadership, continuing its delivery in Kenya and piloting it in South Africa, supporting 158 participants.
• Provided professional mentoring to 314 women entrepreneurs through our global, gold-accredited Mentoring Women in Business programme, with 314 business professionals participating as mentors.
• Grew our research and advocacy work, joining three new advocacy coalitions, commencing a new project on unpaid care work, and undertaking new research with women entrepreneurs for our 2022 annual audit report.
• Completed the first full year of our Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) framework, enabling us to measure and analyse our services’ impacts and better understand the profile of users and participants.
• Developed a new Theory of Change and organisational strategy to guide our work, looking ahead to 2030.

We would like to thank all our partners, sponsors, donors and stakeholders, our staff and trustees, and our founder, who all supported the Foundation’s work throughout 2022.

Above all, we would like to thank the 30,063 women who trusted us to support their entrepreneurial journeys over the year.  

We look forward to building on this progress in 2023 and beyond through our new strategy.