Our impact

Our mission is to empower women in low and middle income countries to start, sustain and grow successful businesses, and to build fair and inclusive business environments. Together with partners, we’ve supported over 250,000 women entrepreneurs in more than 100 countries.

Our work has played a vital role in enabling women across the world to become better off, more secure and more independent. It has supported them to provide for their families, boost their communities and contribute to their economies. It has helped level the playing field for women entrepreneurs everywhere. And it has contributed to a fairer, more equal, more prosperous world.

Boosting women’s businesses

Our digitally-enabled training and mentoring programmes have supported over 250,000 women worldwide to start, sustain and grow businesses by building their skills, knowledge and confidence and increasing their access to finance, markets, networks and opportunities.

Read about the impact we’ve had for the women in our programmes, in their own words…

Supporting women’s rights

Our work is rooted in gender justice and directly contributes to women’s rights by supporting them to claim the opportunities and resources that they are unfairly denied access to because of their gender.

Revolutionising the business landscape for women

We’ve worked to influence companies, policymakers, governments, multilateral organisations and individuals all over the world to tackle the gendered barriers holding back women entrepreneurs. We amplify women entrepreneurs’ voices and press for change to stop them being held back.

Contributing to sustainable global development

Women entrepreneurs are deeply driven by improving society and solving social issues. Their success contributes directly to better outcomes for children and communities.

Our research shows that their motivations are deeply linked to the future prosperity of their families and communities: nearly one in five (19%) of the women we surveyed told us that their primary motivation for being an entrepreneur was to improve their own or their families’ lives and more than one in ten (12%) said their key motivation was to create better conditions for their communities.

Measuring our impact

Our work with women entrepreneurs happens within the bigger picture of women’s economic empowerment overall.

Our view is that a woman is economically empowered when she enjoys her rights to control economic resources and has the power to make both business and personal decisions that benefit herself, her family and her community.

We view economic empowerment as a process involving multiple changes across different areas of life and society: women’s access to economic opportunities, political and legal systems​, social norms and attitudes​, household factors​, individual capabilities, women’s ability to exercise agency, and women’s economic achievements​.

Our work specifically and directly supports women entrepreneurs through programmes that bring about changes in the following crucial areas of women’s economic empowerment:​

• Improving women’s access to economic opportunities​
• Women entrepreneurs’ individual knowledge, skills and capabilities​
• Women entrepreneurs’ agency and empowerment​
• Women entrepreneur’s economic achievements​

We measure our impact against each of the areas outlined above.​

We also advocate with and for women entrepreneurs to improve the entrepreneurship ecosystem in which they operate in low and middle income countries. Focusing on:​

• Political and legal systems​
• Social norms and attitudes​
• Household factors and resource allocation​