This September, the World Bank organized a roundtable focusing on women in entrepreneurship at the World Bank Headquarters in Washington, D.C. “Women Entrepreneurs on the Rise” brought together stakeholders from the private, public, and nonprofit sectors to discuss the challenges and opportunities in promoting women entrepreneurship. During the event, the technical approaches and evidence of programs that have been supporting women entrepreneurs were also highlighted.
As part of her keynote speech, Kristalina Georgieva, chief executive officer of the World Bank Group, highlighted the importance of women entrepreneurs to drive some of the World Bank’s main objectives of boosting economic growth and increasing shared prosperity. Women in entrepreneurship has gained increasing attention over the last few months at the World Bank, culminating with this summer’s launch of the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative, a facility that aims to unlock more than $1 billion USD in financing for women entrepreneurs worldwide.
Discussants of the first panel included panelists from the MeNA region as well as representatives from international organizations including Dr. Soundouss Bouhia, a special advisor, Royal Cabinet of the Kingdom of Morocco; Luiz Ros, special advisor for innovation, Office of the Presidency, Inter-American Development Bank, IDB; and Penny Lee, chief strategy officer of 1776 Global Startup Incubator and Yara Yassin, WeMENA Winner & Co-Founder of Up-Fuse. The World Bank’s WeMENA Initiative is a business model competition powered by YouNoodle, aimed at empowering and supporting women entrepreneurs in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) working on an innovative and financially sustainable solutions to address challenges in urban resilience.
During the second half of the event Torsten Kolind, CEO of YouNoodle and Geoffrey Barrows, Researcher Ecole Polytechnique, discussed the findings of the recent research they carried out on more than 10,000 entrepreneurs who took part in the entrepreneurship competitions and innovation challenges organized around the world in the past seven years. According to the results, which will be published in forthcoming weeks, the top 10 percentile of the entrepreneurs who were recognized by a jury and received monetary or mentorship support have performed significantly better than the next percentile in succeeding with their businesses.
During the second panel discussion panelists from various initiatives provided insights fromtheir programs that have helped women entrepreneurs succeed globally. Merin Rajadurai, chairman of Secretary of State Open Forum at the U.S. Department of State, talked about this year’s Global Entrepreneurship Summit’s focus on women entrepreneurship and the Road to GES activities taking place around the world.
Buke Cuhadar, vice president of global operations at GEN Global, talked about the contribution of women to GEN's network emphasizing the importance of female actors in the ecosystem. She also talked about the success of Global Entrepreneurship Week in highlighting women entrepreneurs locally. Phil Auerswald, co-chair and executive director of GEN's Global Entrepreneurship Research Network (GERN), discussed various methods of framing outcome metrics and evaluation methods for women entrepreneurship programs.
Session 1 and Session 2 of the event are available for viewing.