Building a gender-smart entrepreneurial ecosystem across Southeast Asia

The GLIA toolkit fits into the Gender Investment and Innovation Department's broader work guided by the central idea that entrepreneurship unlocks opportunities for women. “Entrepreneurship provides a very important venue for women to be economically independent and economically empowered, especially in Southeast Asia where formal employment is very much limited,” explained Ayaka Matsuno, Director of SPF’s Gender Investment and Innovation Department. “For entrepreneurship to blossom, these entrepreneurs need to have support, so we would like to work with the intermediaries that can provide that critical support.”
 
To this end, the GLIA toolkit targets ESOs – organizations like incubators and accelerators – that provide business guidance and mentorship, networking opportunities between key stakeholders in their local ecosystem, and overall support for early stage enterprises and small growing businesses (SGBs) to facilitate their growth and investment-readiness. ESOs are uniquely positioned to provide support to early stage entrepreneurial ventures and connect the relevant players across the entrepreneurial landscape, amplifying the potential for inclusive impact.

To put the toolkit in the hands of practitioners at the AVPN summit, Ms. Matsuno and Dr. Lily Yu, SPF Senior Advisor, helped facilitate an interactive workshop with summit participants alongside the implementation partners. To begin the session, Ms. Matsuno and Dr. Yu gave presentations about the work of the Gender Investment and Innovation Department as well as the background for the creation of the GLIA toolkit. “We developed this toolkit very much with the needs of practitioners in mind,” explained Dr. Yu. “It’s the first toolkit of its kind in Southeast Asia, and we hope it will help intermediaries to experiment and develop their own customized gender strategy based on their specific needs and interests.”

The workshop continued with a discussion led by Audrey Jean-Baptiste, Regional Director and Gender Lead for ygap, and featuring two of the toolkit’s pilot partners with hands-on experience using the toolkit: Erika Tatad, Director at xchange in the Philippines, and Ian Jones, Executive Director of Agile Development Group based in Cambodia. Agile and xchange were two of the six intermediaries that participated in the pilot testing phase for the toolkit to contextualize and validate the materials.
 
For Ms. Tatad and her team, the GLIA toolkit pushed her organization to reassess how to incorporate gender issues in their work. “Even though we thought we were in a good place, we realized there was so much more we could do to be more deliberate,” she said, explaining that xchange is now working on creating an organizational statement on diversity and inclusion to guide the work they do at all levels. “[Using the GLIA toolkit] provided the space for us to talk about what we thought were simple issues, which are more complicated.”
 
Mr. Jones found that the toolkit and its interactive format made the materials and strategies easy to implement. The team at Agile used the toolkit to reassess the types of outreach materials they present to women in different areas of Cambodia, which Mr. Jones said allowed them to address the issue at an early stage before it grew into a larger problem down the road. “You can't deny that you're doing yourself or the community you serve a disservice by not just touching upon the toolkit lightly,” he said.
 
Looking to the future, the team at SPF is hoping to build upon the GLIA Toolkit framework with new topic-based modules to address specific challenges faced by women entrepreneurs such as unconscious bias, lack of negotiation skills, or confidence building, to ultimately close the gender gap in entrepreneurship. In addition, the team is in discussions about creating ways to measure the impact of the guidelines and strategies from the toolkit to help ESOs to track their progress as the resource continues to be applied in countries across Southeast Asia, with the hope of continuing to build momentum toward creating more inclusive and gender responsive ventures and a gender-smart entrepreneurial ecosystem across the region.

For more from the Gender Investment and Innovation Department, please visit the program page.