I’m beginning to work on a project that promotes women’s entrepreneurship, and focuses on employment challenges and opportunities for women in Nigeria. Investing in women is crucial to global economic development because women in growth economies often have limited opportunities, and can therefore be vast pools of untapped potential that when included in the economy generate benefits not only for themselves and their families, but for society as a whole.
Investing in women helps reduce gender inequality and poverty, and helps increase education, empowerment, and rights. But to do it successfully there are a couple of things to consider first.
Current challenges
In Nigeria, there are almost 40 million nano and micro businesses, 33% owned by women. Furthermore, 20% of female employment in Nigeria is provided by Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs). Women-led businesses are both critical opportunities for women and critical to the Nigerian MSME ecosystem. Even so, in this country (and I suspect in other growth economies as well), there are major challenges that women entrepreneurs face.
Challenges such as structural inequities, lack of access to finance, restrictive cultural and social norms, and regulatory and legal barriers.
Structural inequities in Nigeria include limited access to education, financial resources, networks, and mentorships in comparison to men. The lack of access to finance and financial resources is usually due to a lack of collateral, shorter credit histories, and perceived higher risks by financial institutions. Restrictive cultural and social norms refer to women’s tendency to carry a heavier burden of family responsibilities and the restrictions they face with land ownership and inheritance, contributing to increased economic dependence. And finally, regulatory and legal challenges affect both men and women but affect women disproportionately due to women’s smaller representation in political decision-making groups and business organizations.
Suggested solutions
These challenges have been and are currently being addressed. For example, the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN) published a Roadmap to Foster National Conditions for Women’s Entrepreneurship Development and Enterprise Formalization in Nigeria.
In this roadmap, there are six pillars meant to address these challenges over a three-year time frame. The roadmap aims to create access to gender-sensitive markets and technologies, as well as business development support and financial access. It aims to promote a gender-sensitive legal and regulatory system, strengthen the representation of women entrepreneurs and participation in policy dialogue, and bolster effective policy leadership and coordination.
These are great goals with clearly defined steps that you can read more about in the linked document, but sometimes in large and important initiatives such as this one, it’s easy to charge ahead full speed, therefore increasing the risk that any immediate benefits may not be sustainable, which I go into further detail below. Slowing down to consider how to best implement change can be key to ensuring success, and I believe there is a very specific innovative way to frame these and other women empowerment initiatives that could make a significantly positive difference.
Innovative frameworks
Specifically, three theoretical frameworks jump to mind when I think about empowering more women to be in business and creating more job opportunities for women. These theory-based frameworks are Tools of Cooperation, schools of experience, and nonconsumption.
In this piece, I’d like to apply the Tools of Cooperation (ToC) Theory to SMEDAN’s Roadmap.
Our Tools of Cooperation Theory helps organizations and leaders identify which change management tools—power, leadership, culture, or management—to use to reach consensus depending on two questions: what people want (goals) and how they’ll get there (cause and effect).
This ToC framework is critical to success because most change management strategies don’t work most of the time due to the lack of assessment of the level of agreement. As a result, leaders often fail when trying to manage change, as the tools they use waste credibility, energy, and resources.
Leaders seeking a specific change will find that figuring out their constituents’ placement on this diagram is time well spent. Getting the diagnosis right has profound implications for how to roll out any proposed change.
When we think about the strategies necessary to include more women in entrepreneurship efforts and be able to create dignified and fulfilling opportunities for them, we need to consider three aspects of this broader initiative. The first is the actual specific goals within the broader initiative; for example, in SMEDAN’s Roadmap, the goals are the objectives under each pillar. The second is how these objectives will be achieved. And the third is the main actors who will be making the decisions and following the processes that ensure the goal’s success.
Where the main actors fall on the vertical and horizontal axes of the goal consensus, and cause and effect consensus will determine the tools they must employ. For example, the first pillar of the SMEDAN roadmap is to create access to gender-sensitive business development support. To do so, SMEDAN has to work with several other organizations, including but not limited to the National Directorate of Employment (NDE) and Nigeria Employers’ Consultative Association (NECA). The goal is already clearly defined for all the main actors involved, and because there is broad consensus on what the goal is the actors can look to the higher quadrants of the graph to Leadership Tools and Culture Tools.
Now, although the steps to achieving this goal are also defined and categorized—building foundations, scaling opportunities, and sustainability and advocacy—because these steps include developing new programs, facilitating connections, and collaborating with other associations, there might not always be consensus on the how. So perhaps the actors will find themselves employing leadership tools at some point, and potentially culture tools at later points, once clear processes have been established and are followed almost subconsciously.
This same framework can be applied to the rest of the pillars, other initiatives, and by any organization that may be struggling with implementing change. As noted, assessing the level of agreement first can save organizations time, resources, and energy. And knowing the right tools to use will only accelerate an organization’s end goal—in this case, greater success and more opportunities for women and society at large.
