About 25% of the 50,000 Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Mozambique are female-owned. Among these, a group of female entrepreneurs with access to formal education is seeking to tap into the growing opportunities in services and small-scale manufacturing sectors. Yet, as the World Bank points out, they have to realize their potential fully.
Overall, female-owned firms in Mozambique underperform the male-owned ones on sales, profits, capital, and labor investment. In general, women are often constrained by gender-specific obstacles that are negatively impacting their opportunities. These constraints -that can either be related to the environment in which women operate their businesses or to household-related factors- influence strategic decisions that female entrepreneurs make, which leads to achieving less productive outcomes than their male counterparts.
Because of these constraints, access to markets and access to finance are critical challenges to women entrepreneurship. Therefore, it is within this context that Mozambique’s Women Entrepreneurship Finance Initiative (We-Fi) has the objective of expanding access to markets and finance of women-owned/led SMEs.
To tests these underlying constraints to female entrepreneurship in Mozambique, the World Bank research team will be conducting a randomized control trial. This evaluation aims to measure the impacts of two types of interventions: bottom-up (a social gender role training, seeks to empower women to overcome internalized gender-related norms) vs. top-down (a facilitation service to overcome structural blocks in women’s access to finance, networks, and markets) solutions to overcome gender-related norms affecting business success.
I am excited to get involved in such initiatives, as it would allow me to gain experience on gender and entrepreneurship topics within international development.