Getting past microfinance: Women’s Business Associations in Africa

Women and girls have been the subject of renewed international attention as the most promising yet most overlooked catalysts for development. Although new resources and opportunities for women and girls are useful, many broader institutions still continue to provide resources and opportunities almost exclusively to men.

These broader institutions remain infected with formal and informal barriers preventing the full participation of women in the private sector. Despite the ubiquity of women entrepreneurs in developing countries, such barriers persist. Left alone, these barriers will continue undermining efforts to address women’s issues and empowerment.

The challenge of removing these barriers calls for approaches that go beyond educating more girls, beyond microfinancing for more women, and beyond special attention from the international community. Removing them calls for women currently subject to them to organize explicitly for the sake of examining such barriers and advocating for reform.

As daunting as that may sound, women in developing countries have been organizing to undertake this challenge. The Ghana Association of Women Entrepreneurs (GAWE) is one such organization. GAWE and other women’s business associations are helping to identify barriers and build better institutions. In so doing, each association increases the local and communal sense of accomplishment for women in business, becoming resilient institutions unto themselves that support women entrepreneurs instead of stifling them.

In the second installment of this series, CIPE has released a case study containing a regional barriers assessment for women’s business associations in Africa and an in-depth profile of GAWE.

Some highlights:

• Founded in 1991, GAWE has grown to over 2,000 active members.
• GAWE has chapters in all ten regions of Ghana, providing broad access to its services such as business training, trade mission support, and information sharing.
• Eighty percent of women who have completed GAWE’s business training modules have gone on to successfully apply for business loans above the micro- level.

Download the full study at www.cipe.org/womeninafrica.