Road to Growth

Across the world there is a vast gender gap in entrepreneurship that sees women entrepreneurs unfairly held back from successfully growing their businesses.

Women entrepreneurs have enormous potential to innovate, inspire and change the world. However, gendered barriers like stereotypes, discriminatory laws and practices, and inequalities in education and care work mean many women – especially in low and middle income countries – are held back from building the skills, knowledge, networks and confidence needed to achieve business growth.

We have developed our Road to Growth training programme to break through these barriers and support women entrepreneurs to succeed. The programme delivers business skills and financial literacy training, builds participants’ knowledge, confidence and networks, and guides them through the creation of a plan to achieve their ambitions for business growth over the following years.

Training is delivered over seven weeks, either online or face-to-face, with each week focusing on a different topic such as knowing your market, digital marketing, financial relationships, and confidence to meet growth goals. These sessions give women entrepreneurs:

• Support to develop an operation and cost plan to inform their growth plan.
• Knowledge in digital marketing and social media platforms and their use for business growth.
• Profitability, cash health and asset analysis skills.
• Skills in monitoring and improving cash flow.
• Knowledge of different types of business financing.
• An overview of business documentation, rights and responsibilities.
• Knowledge on market analysis, business positioning and sales forecasting.
• An understanding of how to balance business and family.
• Opportunities to network with representatives from financial institutions.
• Confidence, commitment and energy to put their growth plans into practice.
• Lasting and highly beneficial alumni networks of “sisterpreneurs”.

Trainers provide participants with one-to-one support throughout and training is accompanied by interactive exercises, group discussions and inspirational guest talks.

Road to Growth was launched in Nigeria in 2015. Since then, the programme has been adapted to respond to the evolving needs of women entrepreneurs across seven countries.

The programme is currently delivered in Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa and Guyana. It has previously been delivered in Mexico, Vietnam and Indonesia.