InfoDev has released a report examining women’s entrepreneurship in the Caribbean:
Profiling Caribbean Women Entrepreneurs: Business Environment, Sectoral Constraints and Programming Lessons
There is a paucity of information on women entrepreneurs in the Caribbean region. This InfoDev report seeks to redress this and seeks to develop an understanding of the main issues facing women in their businesses and their future growth potential.
Three main concepts are used throughout the report: entrepreneurship, innovation, and growth-orientation. Entrepreneurship is used in its widest sense in relation to the support environment and the process of starting and running businesses. Innovation is considered the launching of new or improved products, services, processes, or business models to drive differentiation and/or efficiency for enhanced competitiveness. Growth orientation relates to individual drive, ambition, and potential to grow a business, while growth potential relates to the potential of the sector to grow.
Information on entrepreneurial activities is available at a global level. For example, the World Bank’s Doing Business and Enterprise Surveys and the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM). However, information for the Caribbean region in general, and gender specifically, is lacking. The World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys cover most countries in the Caribbean. Information on enterprises with females in ownership1 is also available.
Again, this data has not been used enough to unearth issues facing female entrepreneurs in the region. The Women Innovators Network in the Caribbean (WINC) required this information to target the region’s growth-oriented and innovative women entrepreneurs in technology-oriented and technology-enabled businesses.
