adminranges from small-scale family businesses to large multinationals.
However, the “micro-level” nature of women’s economic empowerment begs the question of what else can be done to understand the complexities of women in entrepreneurship, and how women’s economic engagements can be scaled up to significant levels.
The majority of women in enterprise (over 70 percent) are found in the informal sector — largely subsistence-level agriculture, petty trading, and a few other ventures.
There are still institutional hurdles for women in enterprise — limited access to business financing opportunities, and other socio-cultural, and politico-economic factors that limit women’s capacity to scale their business up.
The recent conference on Women Entrepreneurship in Accra, Ghana, whose theme was “Women: Drivers of the 21st Century Entrepreneurial Revolution”, brought some of these questions to the fore. The participants were drawn from influential people in research, women entrepreneurs and policy makers.
Award-winning Securico managing director Mrs Divine Ndhlukula was the keynote speaker at this prestigious conference that brought women together from 14 different countries. Mrs Ndhlukula spoke on “Women’s Management and Leadership in Enterprises”.
She presented her personal and organisational experiences from a practitioner’s perspective. Mrs Ndhlukula emphasised the need to have a shared vision with all stakeholders and ensuring that employees need to have a good understanding of the company’s goals and targets and how their work contributes to the achievement of the company.
“There is need to move away from tokenism and generate a critical mass that will be active in elevating women’s entrepreneurship and moving it from success to significance, and this is how this particular conference was different,” Mrs Ndhlukula said.
“Pertinent issues like ‘Is micro-finance hurting, rather than helping women’ were debated, and there were very interesting pointers here,” she added.
Online Reporter