In the Philippines, micro, small and medium enterprises account for up to 99.6% of total enterprises and employ at least 62% of the Philippines workforce. Twenty five percent of these enterprises are women-owned, with women entrepreneurs making up most of the top sectors, including retail, food, manufacturing, and agriculture. However, women founders in the Philippines face higher barriers than their male counterparts, including lack of access to finance, limited access to networks, and greater responsibilities outside of the business.
On March 8, 2022, International Women’s Day, the WE Rise – SheDisrupts Philippines (SDP), an entrepreneurship training and pre-acceleration program for women entrepreneurs in the Philippines, was launched with the support from the Sasakawa Peace Foundation (SPF). SDP, founded by Creatella Impact and Villgro Philippines, will deliver a fully virtual training program for women entrepreneurs in the Philippines in partnership with Investing in Women (IW) and UN Women alongside SPF.
SPF, through its Gender Investment and Innovation Program and its flagship initiative, Asia Women Impact Fund (AWIF), has been supporting the development of inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystems in Asia that work better for women entrepreneurs. Starting from April 2022, SPF will intensify its efforts in the Philippines through a new three-year project that focuses on building on the WE Rise Community Asia digital platform for women entrepreneurs and increasing capital inflow to women-focused businesses. SDP is one of the initiatives to create a vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem in the Philippines and to provide capacity-building opportunities for women entrepreneurs.
SDP will be designed to accommodate the needs of women entrepreneurs in the Philippines by providing technical support as well as creating a safe space for women entrepreneurs to connect, learn, collaborate, and grow with each other. During the program, the Gender Lens Incubation and Acceleration (GLIA) Toolkit developed by SPF, ygap and DFAT Frontier Incubators, and the WE Rise Acceleration Toolkit developed by UN Women, will be used.
Working with investors, ecosystem enablers, and other government agencies that support women's entrepreneurship, this program focuses on facilitating more gender lens investments (GLI) into women-led businesses in the Philippines to help scale their businesses and raise growth capital. AWIF has been promoting gender lens investing in Asia as a practitioner in order to effectively bridge the supply and demand of capital towards initiatives that support women entrepreneurs and gender equality.
For more details, please visit the SDP website.
For early-stage social enterprises in emerging markets, committed to providing entrepreneurial innovative solutions for the achievement of SDGs by generating measurable social and environmental impact, Creatella Impact provides venture building, technology execution, mentorship, advisory support, other acceleration programmes, impact investment including financial capital, deal syndication, blended funding and diverse financial instruments.
Villgro is the oldest and largest social enterprise incubator in the world. In its 20-year journey, Villgro has funded 340+ enterprises, which have gone on to raise US$ 72 million in follow-on capital, impacting 36 million lives. We inspire, fund, and mentor innovative enterprises that are building solutions to impact the lives of the poor. We focus on supporting early-stage companies to test and validate their models and prepare them to raise capital from institutional investors. Villgro Philippines is a franchise partner of Villgro, we currently support 34 impact enterprises in the Philippines. What makes us unique is our expertise in early-stage investments and hands-on incubation support. Radical collaboration is at the core of our ethos, and we have partnered with more than 40 entrepreneur support organizations and funders to bring the right support to high-potential impact entrepreneurs in the Philippines and Southeast Asia.
Investing in Women, an initiative of the Australian Government, catalyses inclusive economic growth through women’s economic empowerment in South East Asia.
Established in 2016, Investing in Women tackles one of the most critical social and economic issues of our time: gender inequality. Investing in Women uses innovative approaches to improve women’s economic participation as employees and as entrepreneurs and to influence the enabling environment to promote women’s economic empowerment in the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and Myanmar through: Workplace Gender Equality (WGE), Impact Investment for Women’s SMEs, Influencing Gender Norms.
UN Women leads UN’s advocacy to further promote gender equality by enhancing women’s economic empowerment, ending violence against women and girls and improving women’s access to justice, and making gender equality a key part of the national legal framework, policies and plans.
During the program, WeRise Acceleration Toolkit developed by UN Women will be used.