August 1, 2018
Dean Katia Passerini was a panel speaker at the International Council for Small Business MSME Forum at the United Nations.
Read sections of her speech below, or click here to watch her speech at the U.N.
"I am sure that is not a surprise to anyone in this room to hear that the full potential of women entrepreneurship is yet to be reached. In fact, I believe we have the experts in this room who have studied women entrepreneurship over the years and articulated the significant progress but also the obstacles that persist.
We are far from achieving the desired outcomes. A 2015 study by the Global Entrepreneurship Development Institute (thegedi.org) found that more than half of the countries reviewed scored less than fifty points (on a 100 points scale) in female entrepreneurship index worldwide. The top 10 countries for female entrepreneurship include the US, Australia, UK, Denmark, Netherlands, France, Iceland, Sweden, Finland and Norway. And while the report shows that the percent of female entrepreneurs who are highly educated has increased over the years, many aspects can be improved across regional boundaries.
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Many elements need to be in place in the ecosystem for women entrepreneurship to thrive. Mastercard 2017 Report on Women Entrepreneurship details that financial inclusion, ease of doing business, quality of governance that avoids regulatory restrictions and inefficiencies, and training are among the structural factors that need to be in place to truly overcome socio-cultural barriers.
The title of this session is “Financial Inclusion.” And this is what we also need to focus on. Give loans to women, promote women entrepreneurship through financing. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), based in Rome, does this in agricultural and rural Africa (and beyond): it gives access to funding and resources to many African women. Why? Because this builds the economy. Over and over again, we have seen that women invest the financial resources to support their families and to share the wealth.
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In the US, the Small Business Administration has several programs for financing women-owned or majority women-owned enterprises.
But we need a lot of more progress in this area. However, we can start with two things:
- “Show women the money” provide access to financing and offer loans to women so that they can spread the wealth outside of the household.
- We need a new hashtag, one that creates another collective movement. A positive movement not of “reaction” to abuse, but to “action” and empowerment founded and supported by the sheer size of the network that we can build. We need “#wetoo” hashtag.
Women are more than half of the population. We need to stop competing and we need to be able to rely on each other to build those “old and young ladies networks” that will make us run the many profitable but also sustainable and socially focused businesses that are so desperately needed around the world to increase well-being, achieve a more equitable wealth distribution, and fully sustain the implementation of the SDGs. The sustainable development goals cannot be achieved and will not sustainable without increasing women involvement and participation. Thank you."