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                                                                                 3rd Quarter 2007
              Womenable E3 News
In This Issue
E1: News in Brief
E2: Tech-Savvy Women Business Owners
E3: Finding the Funding
New Study Explores Women's Entrepreneur- ship in MENA
   
doorways
Women business owners in five countries in the Middle East and North Africa share much in common with each other and with women business owners in other parts of the world, finds a landmark study just published by the International Finance Corporation's GEM initiative in collaboration with the Centre of Arab Women for Training and Research (CAWTAR), and with research and analytical support provided by Womenable.  

Quick Links
News in Brief Links
Women's Equality Day

Women's suffrage timeline

Womenable Reference Library

WBOs in MENA: news release

WBOs in MENA: survey report

Africa Competitiveness Report 2007

Tech-Savvy WBOs Links
FileMaker/Greenfield Online WBO technology survey

CWBR/IBM WBO technology survey

Dell/ICSB SME technology survey

Intuit Future of Small Business reports

Finding the Funding Links
AWID: Where is the money?

AWID: Money and Movements

Global Fund for Women

Women's Funding Network
Admiral Grace Murray Hopper

"We're flooding people with information. We need to feed it through a processor. A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge. We've tended to forget that no computer will ever ask a new question."

 ~ Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, pioneer computer scientist and first woman to be named a Distinguished Fellow (sic) of the British
Computer Society

E3nabling News

It is our goal, in this quarterly newsletter, to provide a concise digest of news, information and links to 1: educate, 2: enlighten and 3: empower your work on behalf of nascent, new, established and growing women-owned enterprises around the world.
 
Our subscribers come from all walks of life - businesses large and small, NGOs, associations, the public sector and educational institutions - yet all share a common interest in supporting women's enterprise development in their communities and around the world. We hope you find this information of interest.
 
suffragettes E1ducate: News in Brief

The last few months have seen the release of several important studies focused on women's enterprise development in some key regions of the world and focused on some specific issues. Several are summarized below. Then, read on for a synthesis of three new studies on technology use in women-owned firms, and a look at where the money is for women's enterprise development. 

But first, what were you doing on Sunday last?
  • Women's Equality Day: On August 26, 1920 women in the United States were finally enfranchised as citizens, gaining the right to vote with the adoption of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And since 1971 we have celebrated Women's Equality Day on that date - albeit pretty quietly. How do other countries compare in granting women the right to vote? Check out an international women's suffrage timeline here. The first country to grant universal suffrage to women? New Zealand, in 1893. The most recent? Kuwait, in 2005.
  • NWBC-ICSB Best Paper Award: At the 52nd world conference of the International Council for Small Business, held in June in Turku, Finland, the ICSB's Women's Entrepreneurship Committee - in partnership and with the financial support of the National Women's Business Council - awarded its 4th annual Best Paper Award in Women's Entrepreneurship to a paper entitled, "Export Propensity and Performance: Understanding the Influence of Owner Gender" co-authored by Barbara Orser, Martine Spence, Allan Riding, and Christine Carrington, all of Canada. You can download and read this paper, as well as the three previous award-winning papers, at Womenable's web site on our Womenable Reference Library sub-page.
  • Women Business Owners in MENAThe IFC's Gender Entrepreneurship Markets initiative, in partnership with the Center of Arab Women for Training and Research (CAWTAR) and Womenable, recently published a landmark  study focused on women business owners in the Middle East and North Africa. The study found that women business owners in five countries in the Middle East and North Africa (Bahrain, Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates) share much in common with each other, and with women business owners in other regions of the world. Access to capital and financial management skills, general business development assistance, and accessing new markets are top needs. To learn more, click on the links below to read the study news release and to download the full report.
  • Women's Entrepreneurship in Africa: A new report, published jointly by the World Economic Forum and the World Bank, focuses on economic and entrepreneurial conditions in Africa. And, for the first time, the report includes a chapter on gender issues on the continent. To learn more about the project, and to download the report, visit this link. Womenable provided commentary and input to the development of this special gender chapter.
 E2nlighten: Tech-Savvy Women Business Owners
Studies focus on the ICT practices of entrepreneurial women and small business owners in general

As we all know, technology is advancing at an ever-increasing rate, bringing all of us closer together, but causing more headaches as well. woman on computer

Two studies looking at the use of technology among women business owners have recently been published, as has a report looking at the state of ICT (information and communications technology) in the SME sector globally, and a report looking at the future of small business and technology in the year 2017. We thought that you should know about these studies and their key findings:

  • ICT is critical to business success: Eighty-three percent (83%) of women business owners with fewer than 100 employees agree that technology is an important factor in their business success. (FileMaker/Greenfield Online survey) Further, 7 in 10 feel confident in their knowledge of how technology can help improve their businesses.
  • Technology serves multiple roles: ICT is becoming more integrated into important business functions. Over two-thirds of women business owners recently surveyed by the Center for Women's Business Research are using technology to enable them to fulfill their accounting, sales, marketing and customer service needs.
  • Trusted referrals are important: While the Internet is being used widely by women business owners for information gathering in ICT and other business matters, women business owners still rely most strongly on friends, family and fellow business owners for referrals and first-person experiences with technology. External technology specialists are also important, as most owners surveyed do not have internal IT departments.
  • "Pain points" as well as advantages: A study conducted by Dell and the ICSB among small business owners in 12 countries found many of these same findings among all SMEs, but also queried owners on some important ICT challenges. Among them: the cost of keeping up with new technology, a lack of understanding about new technology, and inadequate technical support from product manufacturers.
  • Technology trends in the future - portable, virtual, macro and micro: A very interesting report from Intuit and the Institute for the Future - the second in a series of three reports on the Vision of Small Business in 2017 - takes a look at how technology will shape the future for small businesses. The report highlights three key trends, alliteratively labeled: 1) On My Time, On My Terms, 2) Global, Local, Virtual, and 3) From Push to Pull.
  • ICT is not without its challenges for women: The CWBR and FileMaker studies both found that women business owners are worried about the security of their online information and transactions, and about keeping key business information safe from system failures. And the FileMaker survey found that nearly two-thirds (63%) of women business owners still feel as though they are being talked down to by technology experts.
E3mpower: Finding the Funding
Where is the money for women's enterprise development?
fishing for money
"Show me the money", "Money talks", and one of my favorites, "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money", all point out that money is an essential lubricant in the worlds of sports, politics and business. And, of course, without the financial support of governments, multilateral organizations, foundations, and individuals, the women's enterprise movement would not be where it is today.

Did you know that:
  • Many donor nations include a requirement in their project support grants that development efforts need to include some level of focus on women, and
  • Several countries have recently passed gender equality laws, some of which include enterprise development language. However,
  • Few countries have focused programs for women's business development in particular, or an official advisory group for women's enterprise.
The Association for Women's Rights in Development not too long ago published a review of support for women's rights issues and organizations in the global community. Visit this link to read more about this initiative and download their report. AWID also hosted a conference in Mexico last fall on "Money and Movements." Many session materials are available at the link above.

What have these investigations and conversations concluded? Two important findings are that:
  • Funding is becoming more difficult as many multilateral agencies are cutting back direct support to NGOs in favor of channeling funds through national governments. More than half of women's groups surveyed are receiving less support now than they were 5 years ago, and
  • Foundations and women's funds are becoming more and more important players in the women's development environment.
Two of the most important of these organizations, founded in 1987 and 1985, respectively, are the Global Fund for Women and the  Women's Funding Network. Their web sites contain a host of useful resources, from lists of funds and how individuals may get involved to resource guides and other publications. The Women's Funding Network notes in their 2006 annual report that their member funds (including the Global Fund for Women) made over $50 million USD in grants to women's initiatives all over the world.

We know of no complete accounting of the level of economic support for women's enterprise development worldwide - do any of you?  Please send along any pieces of this puzzle that you have run across, and we'll gather and share them with all of the Womenablers out there who read this e-newsletter - and more and more of you are signing up every week!

We encourage your feedback and comments, as well as your help in spreading our "womenabling" news. Feel free to click below to forward this e-mail to others you feel would be interested in any or all of the articles above. And let us know if there are any aspects of women's enterprise development that you feel we should investigate and share more broadly.
 
Sincerely,
Julie R. Weeks
Womenable