Entrepreneurship is widely considered an effective pathway to women's economic empowerment, poverty alleviation, and sustainable innovation. In many parts of Asia, lack of gender-sensitive entrepreneurial support leads to gender disparities in entrepreneurship and disproportionate challenges for women entrepreneurs and other minority groups.
To address this issue, the Sasakawa Peace Foundation (SPF), the Australian Government's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), and ygap have partnered to support the development of an inclusive and gender-sensitive entrepreneurial ecosystem in Asia. The Gender Lens Incubation and Acceleration (GLIA) toolkit was developed with the goal of supporting entrepreneurship support organizations (ESOs) to experiment with approaches to integrate gender lens to their work, and ultimately provide more women and minority entrepreneurs with support, at scale.
GLIA has applied a user-centered design approach to ensure that the resources created are relevant and easy to use, leveraging insights from GLIA partners who have tested a wide range of gender approaches in the field. In addition, the community of GLIA partners and users continues to grow organically and see value in sharing learnings.
A study, with research support from Capital Human, analyzed the progress made by ESOs and practitioners engaged with GLIA. We hope this report will provide practitioners, funders, policymakers, and other ecosystem players with insights into the progress ESOs in Asia have made over the past 4 years as they worked towards advancing gender equality.
| Contents | 1. Introduction 2. The Impact 3. The Approach |
