At FATE Institute’s 10th policy dialogue, experts give insight to ending challenges of women entrepreneurs

Poor access to market, processing technologies and other infrastructures, low access to finance, and poor enabling business and policy environment have been identified as factors inhibiting the productivity of women entrepreneurs from competing equally in the market space.

The UN Women Country, Beatrice Eyong, who revealed this in her keynote address at the 10th Annual FATE Institute Policy Dialogue Series On Entrepreneurship, at the Ecobank, Pan African Centre, Victoria Island, Lagos, with the theme: “Nigeria in the Next Decade: Building a thriving Entrepreneurship Ecosystem for the future,” asserted that identifying the challenges of women in the entrepreneurship sector, is never enough, but the issues should be prioritised and given critical attention, ensuring that everyone is carried along.

The first day of the event, featured a session tagged: “Shaping the Future of Women’s Entrepreneurship in the next Decade,” moderated by National Consultant on Gender for UN Women, Hansatu Adegbite.

The session featured focused on the dialogue of women Entrepreneurs, explaining the full potentials of women and also citing challenges of women in business sector, alongside solutions required to bring these challenges to a stop.

Eyong said: “To achieve the theme of today’s dialogue, it is expedient that these challenges are not only addressed but that priority and cross-cutting areas are further prioritised as critical focus areas by all relevant stakeholders, while further ensuring that we leave no one behind.”

She enumerated the challenges faced by women in the economic and social aspects of the country, saying the challenges have hindered the productivity of women and has reduced their strength to compete equally in the market space.

“Women are faced with multiple levels of economic, and social challenges that inhibit their productivity and ability to compete fairly in the market space…”

In the rural communities, women face additional challenges such as illiteracy and limited education, traditional restrictions, cultural practices, financial exclusion, early child marriage and other discriminatory norms.”

The Executive Director of FATE Foundation, Adenike Adeyemi explained that investing in entrepreneurs covers all sectors in the society, and has great impacts from generations to generations. She further buttressed the huge benefits of entrepreneurship in all various levels of life. “When you invest in entrepreneurship, you are investing in communities, generations and families.”

Still on the view of business for female entrepreneurs, the CEO of Cherie Blair, Dhivya O’conor explained that technology is not enough for woman in business to work effectively, but the skills are also required, saying that these gaps need to be addressed crucially.

In her words: “Simply having access to the technology is not enough because women need the skills to leverage these tools effectively. So 39 per cent of women entrepreneurs surveyed in our research said they felt held back by lack of technical skill skills that prevented them from fully utilising the tools and talking about AI, our research shows that 44 per cent of women entrepreneurs currently use and have adopted AI tools within their businesses.

“But there’s a real need for training and learning in this space and 66 per cent actually say they want more training to effectively use AI and beyond basic digital literacy skills in areas like e-commerce, digital marketing, data analytics and cyber security are also important.”

“So, together with partnership with the FATE foundation, the Cherie Blair foundation for Women currently offers Road to Growth, Road to Finance, Road to Leadership, Lender training programmes, we have mentoring programme that we’ve mentioned, as well as an award winning mobile phone app per venture. And all of our programmes enable women to build digital skills and confidence so that they can use digital tools to improve their business outcome,” She explained