Increasing access to finance for women entrepreneurs

Investors require entrepreneurs to provide them with a crystal clear overview of their current operations and future business plans. Most women-led SGBs lack the basis within their business to produce these documents. In practice, OTW and Bopinc experience that less women-led businesses than male-led businesses apply for acceleration programs and they tend to start at a lower level of professionalism when applying. Women need more support preparing for pitching, especially for delivery, putting their growth plans on paper, learning about accounting and financing options, etc. This is not surprising as both practice and literature show that women-led businesses generally face more challenges than their male counterparts.

There is a need for gender-smart adjustments and add ons to current accelerator models to make sure women benefit as much from the offered support services as their male counterparts. By inserting the WE Ignite Booster, we aim to have more women-led SGBs enter the process and pass the expert gap analysis stage of the model. Therefore, we believe supporting women-led businesses to arrive well prepared at the gap analysis, will lead to a high certainty of accessing growth capital.