12,000 Women Supported in Vietnam & Indonesia: WEAVE’s Achievements

Our WEAVE project ran in Indonesia and Vietnam in 2020 and 2021. Through WEAVE, we delivered mobile learning and online training and mentoring to bring entrepreneurial skills, confidence and support to over 12,000 women entrepreneurs.

Today, following an external evaluation, we’re delighted to share WEAVE’s outstanding results through our final project report and a new animation spotlighting the experiences of two participants, Quynh Nguyen and Shinta Aviyani.

WEAVE ran from May 2020 to November 2021, and comprised the delivery of several of four of our programmes: HerVenture, our mobile business skills app, Road to Growth, an online business management training programme, Mentoring Women in Business, which provides professional mentoring to women entrepreneurs, and a pilot of our leadership and influencing skills training, which has since evolved into its own programme: Road to Leadership.

In October 2022, nearly a year on to allow for business development to take place, we conducted an evaluation to understand whether WEAVE resulted in long-term changes in participants’ behaviour or business performance. Through interviews and focus group discussions with participants, we found that:

• 85% of Indonesian survey respondents said their business revenue had increased thanks to WEAVE. 81% increased customers and 78% increased business profits.
• In Vietnam, 73% of women surveyed who had both used HerVenture and took part in Road to Growth said that what they learned had contributed to business growth.
• 62% of Vietnamese survey respondents said their business revenue had increased thanks to WEAVE. 59% increased business profits and 51% increased customers.
• Most participants in both Indonesia (86%) and Vietnam (91%) gained in self-confidence, a crucial component to successful entrepreneurship.

All in all, we can see that WEAVE benefitted participants and resulted in increased knowledge, improved business practices, and higher levels of self-confidence and assertiveness. The majority of respondents expressed high levels of satisfaction, willingness to participate in future programmes, and a high rate of recommending the programme to peers.

WEAVE’s evaluation also yielded valuable lessons learned, particularly to do with the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic—in both countries, participants who did not report improved business performance cited this as the reason—but also to do with digital delivery, localisation and partner working.

We are confident that WEAVE has played an enormous role in the development of thousands of women’s businesses across Vietnam and Indonesia. So too that it has also enabled us to identify ‘what works’ in our own programmes so that they can be replicated to support more women entrepreneurs in the future as we launch our new ‘Ready for Business’ strategy.