Article contributed by Mr. Heinz Fiedler, IWWG's Facilitator and Facilitator of infoDev's Regional Network in the Middle East & North Africa

The Gateway to Economic Development through Women Empowerment and Entrepreneurship project was carried out by the International Working Group on Women Focused Business Incubation (IWWG), within the framework of infoDev's global communities of practice on innovation and entrepreneurship. During December 2008 – February 2010, a team of five regional coordinators, supported by general members of the IWWG as well as an international facilitator, worked to collect information on women business incubation around the world, to analyze the obstacles and identify the opportunities for women entrepreneurship and to identify good practices to support women in starting their own businesses.

Information was collected through a series of questionnaires, personal interviews, Internet search, and literature reviews to explore reseach areas including:

• relevance of women business incubators
• business environment for women entrepreneurs
• key economic sectors where women are active and services offered to women entrepreneurs in these sectors
• constraints women face as entrepreneurs
• good practices, effectives business models and tools for women business incubators.

Building a knowledge portfolio on women business incubation was an important aim of the activities. While women focused business incubation is a widely accepted tool to promote economic development, there is a lack of information about the experience with and potential of this tool with regards to supporting women entrepreneurs. To bring the research findings to life, each regional coordinator also collected stories about successful women entrepreneurs from their business incubators. These success stories contribute to understanding the type of support services needed to harness the entrepreneurial and economic development potential of women.

The good news is that women focused business incubation is gaining momentum in many Asian countries. For example, South Korea has 14 women focused business incubators and this trend is slowly gaining ground in other parts of the world. In the Middle East and North Africa, women business incubators have been established with new infrastructures in Morocco and Bahrain. However, these positive findings should not hide the discrepancies. In China, for every one thousand business incubators, only one is focused on women entrepreneurs. Iran has about 45 business incubators, with less than 1% focused on women entrepreneurs. In Africa, the concept of business incubation is just emerging in the majority of countries and progress is being made in Southern Africa. For example, Mauritius has established 6 business incubators of which 2 are focused on women.

The IWWG research shows that the general business environment is overall not favorable for women entrepreneurs. The majority of respondents from all regions recognize the lack of and/or inadequate financing as the main constraint. In addition, many countries emphasized the lack of information, supportive networks, self confidence and knowledge as limitations in addition to cultural barriers. This is where the important role of business incubators comes in. However, the importance of these obstacles differs much in the participating regions. The full report provides more insight into these differences.

The IWWG recommends increasing activities for raising awareness about the potential of women entrepreneurs for economic development and continuing to build knowledge about women focused business incubation. Other recommended actions include strengthening the supply of services to women (start-up) entrepreneurs at large and especially to those starting technology or knowledge based businesses, reviewing laws and regulations to create a more favorable business environment for women entrepreneurs and strengthening e.g. infoDev's regional and global networks to better support women business incubation and entrepreneurship.

Although specific support for women entrepreneurship is not generally available, the IWWG identified a number of good practices and business incubation models reaching from integration of the women entrepreneurs’ family for securing understanding and support for the needs of business development, through learning tools for providing the much needed knowledge to potential women entrepreneurs, to specific tools helping to overcome specific barriers such as a kindergarten in a business incubator that began as a service for client companies and became a business in itself.

Effective business incubation models and components were also collected by the work group. These business models range from virtual incubators to enable women to work from home to business models that provide micro loans to women entrepreneurs. Business models also include non-financial support as well as an incubation focus on specific business areas such as rural and eco-tourism, handicrafts and support for university-related entrepreneurship.

The activities of the IWWG have shown that there is not enough support for women entrepreneurs in the five regions, mainly  because of cultural barriers and lack of knowledge of gender specific needs. Despite the differences among the regions, the general result of the IWWG activities clearly shows that women have more difficulties than men when starting or developing businesses. As a result of its project activities, the IWWG's recommendations to continue to untap the potential of women entrepreneurs include to:

• Explore the opportunity of creating gender-based business incubators to facilitate the start-up of women owned businesses especially in the Middle East and Africa
• Involve government in incubation activities to better inform decision makers about the need for relevent policy change
• Enlarge and strengthen the network of women focus business incubators and organizations by updating the existing database, exchanging information, ideas and effective business models, tools and good practices
• Develop a global and/or regional mentoring system among women entrepreneurs and organizations and train female mentors, advisors, trainers for a wider reach of such initiatives
• Encourage highly educated women and women in academia and research to be more entrepreneurial oriented
• Explore opportunities for knowledge and technology transfer among women entrepreneurs
• Intensify involvement of womens' organizations, banks and micro credit institutions to support incubation policy and better promote the concept of women focused business incubation
• Support the development of government-university-private sector linkages and cooperation to generate better understanding and improve services at lowers costs for all parties
• Link incubation projects with local governments to tap communal resources for women focused programs

For further details on the IWWG's activities and findings, please refer to the full report published in April 2010.

With special thanks to the IWWG's Regional Coordinators:

• Africa: Mbarou Gassama Mbaye, National Council of Negro Women/ International Division, Senegal
• Asia: Annuar Mohd Saffar, Kulim Technology Management, Malaysia
• Europe & Central Asia: Rosita Djambazova, Business Incubator Gotse-Delchev, Bulgaria
• Middle East & North Africa: Nejiba Khalfallah, Elgazala Park of Communication Technologies, Tunisia
• Latin America & the Caribbean: Noelia de León, Entrepreneurs Forum of Costa Rica