Road to Growth comes to Guyana!
We’re delighted to announce that Road to Growth is coming to Guyana! Ambitious Guyanese women entrepreneurs can now apply to join our flagship business management and investment readiness training programme for the first time in the Foundation’s history.
Thanks to support from our long-term partner ExxonMobil Foundation, we’re piloting Road to Growth in Guyana this year with a select group of 25 women entrepreneurs. The programme will boost their business knowledge and confidence, creating growth, developing their networks and increasing their preparedness to access to finance to take their businesses to the next level.
Over seven weeks Road to Growth will take successful applicants through an intensive training programme where they will study core business skills such conducting a market analysis and business positioning, leveraging digital to market and promote your business and monitoring your cashflow.
This latest iteration of Road to Growth follows the successful roll-out of the Foundation’s flagship training programme for women entrepreneurs in Mexico, Nigeria, Kenya, Vietnam and Indonesia, reaching over 2,600 women so far.
This new programme comes at an important time. Globally there is up to $5 trillion dollars missing from the global economy due to the gender gap in entrepreneurship which, given the worldwide economic collapse caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, is money we cannot afford to miss out on. On top of this, existing inequalities between women and men have been exacerbated through the COVID-19 pandemic and half or more of early stage entrepreneurs in the Latin America and Caribbean region reported that starting a businesses is harder now than a year ago due to the pandemic.
Thankfully, Road to Growth is set to counter this: 100% of the women who participated in the programme in Mexico reported gaining a clearer vision and direction for their business, 98% valued the network they built, and 75% more women applied to funds from financial institutions after participating.
We’re excited to bring all these rich successes and the impact they spell for families and communities to women entrepreneurs in Guyana, with a joint call for applications to the programme launched with DAI alongside their Accelerate-Her programme.
Through the Road to Growth programme, I have learned to position my business better, communicate with my target audience, and get their attention [...] I have an academy where I teach textile designing, and COVID-19 affected our classes. But thanks to what I learned from Road to Growth, I was able to move my class online.
