WOMEN IN BUSINESS - Paving the way for young women in business

10-08-2021

Only 10% of young women in the Danube region are at an early stage of business development and only 2% of them establish a business that lasts more than 42 months. The WOMEN IN BUSINESS project partners worked together to identify existing barriers as well as potential remedies to encourage more women into business with concrete policy measures and transnational cooperation platform.

May 10, 2021

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In the Danube region, women represent 52% of the population, while 30% of them are self-employed. However, their entrepreneurial potential is well underdeveloped. To address this, examining factors that affect the women's ability to establish business was essential. According to the transnational study conducted by the project partners in 9 countries of the Danube region, the biggest obstacle for young women entrepreneurs is access to finance, followed by a lack of savings. Not having enough information about how to start a business and lack of entrepreneurial skills were also found to be significant barriers.

"The first component of the Women in Business project aimed to analyze the current situation, namely identifying the needs and barriers encountered by young women who want to create and develop their own business."

Silvia Cangea-Digolean from the Organization for Small and Medium Enterprises Sector Development

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Exploring new ways of overcoming barriers

Some policies and programmes for gender equality, which are having a positive impact on promoting women's rights as well as women entrepreneurship already exist in the Danube region, especially in the EU member states. Exploring new ways of overcoming the barriers, and applying them to all the project countries, 15 partner organisations elaborated a set of policy recommendations, such as the development of specialised programmes for business-women start-ups or designing government strategies to harmonise the business environment with the family environment. In addition, the project partners developed a collection of 43 good practices, featuring different tools, measures and activities for fostering young women entrepreneurship, which can be transferred from one country to another or outside the Danube region.

Get inspired!

To promote women's entrepreneurship even further, a new online learning platform to educate and support young women willing to start and develop their own businesses was launched as well. Next to training materials, the platform provides young women entrepreneurs with an opportunity to exchange experience with other women as well as with their coaches. The project partners also created “Get Inspired!” awareness campaign with 27 young women entrepreneurs from the Danube region sharing their inspirational business success stories.

"Policy makers cannot make a direct change, but they can provide accessible education for everyone, opportunities for parents to raise they children offering a verity of extracurricular activities, sports and travelling."

Ajla Fijuljanin, E-commerce Entrepreneur

Programme co-funded by European Union funds (ERDF, IPA, ENI)