WOMEN ENTREPRENEURSHIP | Creating A Culture Of Enterprising Women

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Women on top

( Entrepreneur Magazine , 2008 / 10 / 01 )

Women today are occupying more empowered roles in the corporate world and are themselves going into business as well. To support them in this emerging new role, the GE Money Bank and the Let’s Go Foundation have launched the Women Entrepreneurship (WE) Program, a collaborative advocacy that seeks to make women more management- and finance-savvy as entrepreneurs. The GE Money Bank is a global provider of financial products and services, while the Let’s Go Foundation is a non-stock non-profit organization that promotes entrepreneurship education. Launched last April at the Asian Institute of Management in Makati City, the WE program is in line with the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, which aim to solve poverty by transforming job seekers into job creators through entrepreneurship education.The WE program consists of four quadrants, each representing a phase in the life of an entrepreneur: the “Enterprising Student” quadrant, the “Aspiring Entrepreneur” quadrant, the “Start-Up Entrepreneur” quadrant, and the “Growing Entrepreneur” quadrant.The Enterprising Student quadrant consists of instructional and inspirational education designed to motivate participants to pursue entrepreneurship; the Aspiring Entrepreneur quadrant takes up business planning and monitoring; the Start-Up Entrepreneur quadrant teaches participants how to gather resources and learn the ropes of networking; and the Growing Entrepreneur quadrant emphasizes the need for participants to look at entrepreneurship as a continuing learning process. Altogether, they teach participants how to start a business and make it a flourishing enterprise.Currently, the entrepreneurship classes for the WE program are being provided by a Consortium of Women Colleges (CWC) comprised by the Assumption College, St. Scholastica’s College, the College of the Holy Spirit, and Miriam College.The Let’s Go Foundation created the WE Program on the basis of a survey it conducted in January 2007 on the experiences, challenges and successes of growing women entrepreneurs who had studied in these four colleges. The survey data was then used to enrich the curriculum of the existing entrepreneurship programs of the CWC. Among other key findings, the survey showed that 65 percent of women entrepreneurs had formerly worked for a private company before venturing into business; 53 percent of these women entrepreneurs said they were motivated by their parents – themselves entrepreneurs – to take the same path; and regarding the various business aspects, 31 percent of them said finance was the most difficult to learn, 26 percent said it was marketing, and 23 percent said it was strategic management. Based on the same survey, the Let’s Go Foundation also formulated “Funance,” a teaching tool designed to teach finance in an interactive and engaging way’; it uses board games, business cases, and videos to make participants familiar with balance sheets, income statements, and other financial information. The Consortium of Women Colleges is now using this teaching tool in their entrepreneurship programs.In addition to supporting entrepreneurship education, the WE Program also organizes conferences where business visionaries and growing entrepreneurs alike share with new entrepreneurship students their experiences and insights about doing business on their own. These conferences provide successful entrepreneurs a way of giving back to society what they have gained from their pursuit of entrepreneurship.In January this year, WE launched its own website, www.womenentrepreneurship.org, which features studies on women entrepreneurs as well as success stories and tips on how to manage a business. This website also provides a forum for students, housewives, and new as well as established entrepreneurs to share business insights with one another online. – Interview by Miki Espe