Women In Business (WIN) a programme launched in 2019 with the aim of creating opportunities for micro-entrepreneurs to increase their income, and at the same time, opportunities for businesses to increase their reach and profit, has contributed to the increased income of over 28, 000 women, and reached some 476,000 micro-entrepreneurs, results achieved through increased access to business management information, financial education and gender.
Beyond this, WIN claims to have inspired an estimated 62,000 women to adopt good business practices.
“This Women In Business programme is funded by the Swedish Embassy and implemented by TechnoServe. So WIN has a focus on empowering low-income women through entrepreneurship and, is done through partnerships with the private or public sector,” said Sarah Bove, Director of the Women In Business programme.
WIN does not work directly with women entrepreneurs, but helps businesses in various market sectors to best serve low-income women so that there is a win-win.
“We work in five areas that are important for women’s business development, one of these areas is the financial sector. We want to share knowledge on how companies in the financial sector can benefit by serving low-income women. We have different models for example with Moza Banco we are doing a market research to understand why women in rural areas do not use banking services and then we use the results to inform a financial literacy campaign that they are doing in rural areas in local languages, so,based on the results and the research that we have done this will enhance the financial literacy campaign to encourage more women to increase their use of banking services. We have also worked with M-Pesa with the product Xitique, we have done a market research to understand how and what they can improve the functionality of the product taking into account low income female micro entrepreneurs to make this service better for women entrepreneurs,” said Bove.
In turn Deyse Correia, Chief Executive of Marketing and Communication at Vodacom Mozambique,revealed that of the six million people use M-Pesa per month, 42% are women, but they are not the ones who hold the registration on this service.
“The number we have of registered women is 42%. We don’t necessarily have a savings service, but we have a service that M-Pesa uses as a way for clients to save money and then use it to realise their dreams, women are the ones who use this service more regularly, what I can say is that we have, in terms of regular contribution approximately 40% women, and t in terms of users we have approximately between 45% to 50% of the people who use Xitique, in this case are women,” said Deyse Correia.
O.Económico