Women founders play an important role in the Indonesian entrepreneurship ecosystem. Micro, small, and medium enterprises account for more than 99.9% of businesses in Indonesia, creating 119.6 million jobs nationwide, and women lead 60% of those businesses. Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has encouraged more women to start their own businesses, with the number of women-led business increasing 1.5 times more than their male counterpart.
Nevertheless, women founders face greater barriers to launching and growing their businesses when compared to men. Women typically struggle with gender biases, time and mobility restrictions due to traditional family roles, as well as limited access to senior business networks and opportunities to improve their business skills.
Those who can overcome these hurdles must then contend with a lack of funding and appropriate support for their early-stage businesses. Startups led and owned by women receive only a tiny fraction of the venture capital funding available. Additionally, less than one in five participants in accelerators and incubators are women, with most programs not catering to their needs.
In order to address these gaps, the Sasakawa Peace Foundation (SPF), through its Gender Investment and Innovation Program, is supporting one of the largest programs in Indonesia dedicated to helping women-led startups, SheDisrupts.
Launched by Creatella Impact and Moonshot Ventures, SheDisrupts Indonesia 2023 is now accepting applications from early-stage startups with at least one woman among the founders or in a leadership role. Businesses must have a clearly developed product idea and some traction, and target Indonesia as their primary market.
Also, their commercial solutions need to be tech or innovation-driven and contribute to one or more of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. However, the program is industry agnostic, and teams may come from domains such as health-tech, edtech, fintech, sustainability, or other fields.
Women entrepreneurs from rural provinces and cities beyond Jakarta as well as minority groups are encouraged to apply.
This program will use the Gender Lens Incubation and Acceleration (GLIA) Toolkit, developed by SPF, ygap, and DFAT Frontier Incubators. Additionally, the program is also supported by UN Women and UNDP, and implemented with partnership with Instellar, Patamar Capital, and Angel Investor Network Indonesia (ANGIN) as community and investment partners.
How To Apply
Applications to SheDisrupts Indonesia 2023 are open until January 15, 2023. The program will run from January 30, 2023, to November 30, 2023. Teams can learn more and apply at the SheDisrupts Indonesia 2023 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.
Moonshot Ventures is a venture capital firm that addresses development challenges faced by emerging economies in Southeast Asia. We invest in disruptive innovations and mission-driven entrepreneurs, in order to achieve large-scale impact.
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.
UN Development Programme (UNDP) is the leading United Nations organization fighting to end the injustice of poverty, inequality, and climate change. Working with our broad network of experts and partners in 170 countries, we help nations to build integrated, lasting solutions for people and the planet.
Founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Peng T. Ong and Kuo-Yi Lim, MHV is a venture capital firm investing in early-stage tech companies, primarily Series A, in Southeast Asia. Backed by institutional investors and family offices worldwide, MHV works with great entrepreneurs to use technology to improve the lives of millions of people in the region.