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A new generation of CEOs: Businesswomen in Africa discuss gender inclusion in the private sector

Alexandre Laure's picture

As we saw in our second blog, entrepreneurship plays a critical role in promoting sustainable growth. Yet, in many West-African countries, long-standing stigmas against the private sector are still big obstacles for women and young people who aspire to become entrepreneurs.
 
Family support, in particular, remains critical for women’s career choices, and the private sector doesn’t always enjoy a good reputation among parents. “It’s very hard for them [parents] to understand why we want to do this instead of getting a steady government job,” says Binta Ndiaye, MakeSense Africa CEO. “My mother is an entrepreneur, but she did that on top of her regular job and raising a family in France, so it’s not seen as a career in-and-of-itself.”
 
“Entrepreneurship is inherently risky, so if you don’t have that support and encouragement, or even your family’s blessing to go for it, I can understand that it could be extremely challenging for some women,” says Mariem Kane, founder and president of Mauritania’s incubator Hadina RIMTIC. “It’s up to us to educate them on this potential and to have the resolve to follow-through. If you can convince skeptical parents, you can convince any investor.”
 
Considering that these incubators are run by women, do they make special efforts to recruit women entrepreneurs?
 
Lisa Barutel founder and CEO of La Fabrique, acknowledges that even though La Fabrique received a huge response to a recent call for proposals targeting women, far fewer apply to general calls that do not have a specific focus on women entrepreneurship. “Normally we don’t go out looking for candidates, as we can be inundated with applications, but when we noticed this discrepancy, we did launch a program to identify women with potential,” she says.

Leveraging start-up ecosystems for development

Mutoni Karasanyi's picture

“What can we do today to prepare students for the labor force in 20 years?” the director general of Israel’s Ministry of Finance, Shai Babad, asked. At an Annual Meetings event last Friday, Babad was asked for his thoughts about successful government policies to enable start-up ecosystems. However, he answered the question with one of the many questions that policymakers continue to wrestle with in the new digital economy.


In recent years, many of the World Bank Group’s country partners have posed similar questions. As Trade & Competitiveness Director Klaus Tilmes commented, “Many clients are now less interested in our money, and more in our knowledge around best practices and effective incubator models. They’re asking ‘How can we create our own start-up ecosystems?’ So we are trying to become more systematic and leverage tools to expand our programs and build them into our lending projects.”

No state is more renowned for its success in building such ecosystems than Israel. The small country contains the highest number of start-ups outside of Silicon Valley and receives the most VC investment per capita. With a population of only 8 million, Israel has over 6,000 start-ups, and 1,000 new start-ups are launched every year. In 2016 alone, Israeli start-ups raised over $4.8 billion.

A new generation of CEOs: Businesswomen in Africa discuss incubation, development, and the start-up mindset

Alexandre Laure's picture

As we saw in our first post, our six CEOs are very optimistic about incubators and their potential support to their countries’ economic development. You don’t get far in the private sector without being realistic, though, and they cautioned against seeing entrepreneurship as a catch-all remedy to West Africa’s youth unemployment and skills deficit issues.

Re<Boot>: A more inclusive approach to rapid skills training programs

Alicia Hammond's picture

Digital technologies—mobile phones, computers, and the Internet—are reshaping our world. But to leverage this transformation, women and men will need to have the right mix of skills. Coding bootcamps, a type of rapid skills training program, have emerged as one approach to filling the gap.
 
Yet little is known about what works. In response, the World Bank Group developed Decoding Bootcamps, an initiative that evaluates the impact of coding bootcamps, with a focus on youth employment in emerging markets. Impact evaluation results from Lebanon, Colombia, and Kenya are forthcoming, but one important lesson has already become clear: To attract and retain women, bootcamps need a reboot.
 
With the support of the Umbrella Facility for Gender Equality, teams working on innovation and entrepreneurship, social inclusion, and gender equality have come together to design and test the impact of a different approach: coding bootcamps centered on the needs of women.
 
As groundwork, we set out to learn from providers who are trying to achieve this goal. Their experiences highlight three ways in which ICT skills training can attract, retain and help women thrive.

A new generation of CEOs: Six businesswomen discuss entrepreneurship and start-ups in West Africa

Alexandre Laure's picture

Across West Africa, it’s very difficult to find a workplace as innovative and diverse as business incubators. Known for their young, energized, and often gender-balanced staff, these organizations are an encouraging indication of what’s in store in the coming decades, as the region presents a younger, more open, and increasingly female workforce to the world.

In francophone West Africa—where there was not a single incubator at the beginning of 2011—six young women are currently leading major incubators, some of which have World Bank Group support.   

With backgrounds in computer science, engineering, finance, logistics, project management, and social entrepreneurship, these women have profiles that are just as varied and impressive as the start-ups they support. Given the World Bank Group’s commitment to promoting gender equality, as laid out in the Gender Strategy, our team talked to them to learn more about their work and leadership experience.   

From Policy Dialogue to Implementation: How to Solve Public-Private Coordination Failures?

Steve Utterwulghe's picture
Modern industrial policies (IPs) or productive development policies (PDPs) are about identifying and removing constraints to the growth of productive sectors, such as agriculture, tourism, forestry, etc., which implies providing public goods and fixing market failures related to those sectors. Coordination and structured public-private dialogue are critical tools for developing and implementing such policies.



Incentivizing Bangladesh’s shoemakers to be greener

Nadia Sharmin's picture


“200 pieces of Selfie are ready, please call them to collect,” Nurjahan, an entrepreneur selling a local brand “Selfie” shoes, tells her husband to call a local shop owner to pick up his order.

We recently visited Bhairab to get a first-hand look at one of the important industrial clusters in Bangladesh, where Nurjahan’s shoe microenterprise is located.

Bhairab is about 85-kilometer from the capital Dhaka, and its shoe cluster is well organized into around 7,000 factories of which 40 percent are micro factories (employing between two to seven workers). They are mostly family-run, producing low-cost shoes, mostly for the local market at prices as low as just Tk100 – or around $1.25 a pair. Virtually none of these factories have access to bank financing, although some access credit from NGOs. In Nurjahan’s shoe factory, about 45 women and 12 men work in five sheds. Over the last 30 years, her micro business has grown into a small enterprise.

Businesses for the Business Environment: Harnessing Private Sector Incentives for Economic Transformation

Andreja Marusic's picture
Those of us interested in private sector development as a way of achieving sustainable growth and shared prosperity are often confronted with two harsh truths: public sector partners are constrained by limited resources and capacity, corruption and rent-seeking; and private sector partners are ultimately driven by profit maximization. Squaring that circle is of particular importance in developing economies, where successfully leveraging private sector incentives in support of public interest can have outsized impact.

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