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.