Share your good practices in supporting women entrepreneurs.
WEgate and its community of women entrepreneurs need your wisdom, skills and resources, so get involved now!
Setting the stage – the challenges.
Women’s entrepreneurship (WE) is a powerful, yet insufficiently utilized, mean for women’s economic independence and empowerment. In the European Union (EU) women constitute 52% of the total European population, but only 34.4% of the EU self-employed and 30% of start-up entrepreneurs. When establishing and running a business, women face challenges such as:
- Limited access & control over financial & productive resources
- Limited access to collaterals,
- Cultural norms & attitudes towards women as entrepreneurs,
- Smaller and less effective entrepreneurial networks and policy frameworks that discourage women’s entrepreneurship,
- Access to training, info, markets – occupational segregation and
- Competing demands on time (double burden of home and work responsibilities).
WEgate (https://wegate.eu/) is a European Commission’s supported platform initially launched in Autumn 2016 as a one-stop-shop for women entrepreneurs and WE stakeholders. The next round of WEgate started in February 2020, focused on:
- Transforming WEgate platform into sustainable WEgate community
- Improving the functioning, accessibility and content of the platform
- Making the new WEgate responsive, interactive, reliable and informative.
- Securing long- term viability of the WEgate brand
The WEgate community is the European WE community of practice that focuses on engaging a growing and diverse number of stakeholders supporting women entrepreneurs across Europe. The main objective of the WEgate community is to enhance WE by facilitating networking, peer-learning, and sharing good practices between actors to improve the support effectively delivered to women entrepreneurs and motivate more women to start their business or support the development of their business across Europe. At the same time, contributing to the public policy processes for improving WE-related conditions, advocating and representing the women entrepreneurs’ interests in front of WE-related institutions and relevant stakeholders.
Objectives of the call for good practices
Why partner on women entrepreneurship development?
The strength of the WEgate community lies on the vast experience of its members. Promoting the partnering around WE development is a question of efficiency and doing what we as WEgate members do best. Joining efforts means achieving a better impact and building momentum to support women’s empowerment. Finally, sustainability is to hard to achieve alone.
WEgate offers an ideal environment for the transferability of good practice because a) the community members have a common objective – supporting WE, and b) they have a common platform to share good practices (i.e. the WEgate e-platform).
With this call for submission of good practices, WEgate aims to facilitate the process of surfacing good practices within the community with a potential for replication and transferability. More concretely, we aim to:
- Gain insight into WE initiatives: Exploring what initiatives are learning and reflecting on from practical experience.
- Strengthen practice: Focusing on reaching scale and effective uptake and facilitation approaches.
- Strengthen coordination: Building awareness of other initiatives / WE practices /strategies that would be beneficial to coordinate with.
- Strengthen collaboration: Building relationships among WEgate community members, incentivizing improved collaboration.
- Strengthen a culture of learning: Building relationships and demonstrating practical benefits of sharing.
What is a good practice?
A good practice is a process, initiative or working method that has proved successful to a) meet the needs of the women entrepreneurs or to b) optimise the operational performance of the WE stakeholders. A good practice is practically a successful response, developed by the WEgate community members, to address different WE development challenges, ranging from policy development, promotion of WE, capacity building, through services for women entrepreneurs, to intra-organisational tools for improved operational performance.
Why participate?
Get a chance to promote your best practice and share it with the whole community via the WEgate e-platform and social media channels! Be an example of how others can replicate your initiative and support women entrepreneurs.
Who can apply?
Stakeholders supporting women entrepreneurs to start-up and growth and/or organisations implementing different WE – related initiatives.
How to participate?
The application process is now open!
Please apply with your good practice and share it with the world! Fill the good practice application form here.
This is a continuous call for submission of good practices.
Do you need more information?
Should you have any doubt or enquiry do not hesitate to contact us:
WEgate – European gateway for women entrepreneurship
Elena Stojanovic
Knowledge transfer expert
e-mail: elena@mir.org.mk
Phone: 00 389 2 3103 660
Gabriela Kostovska Bogoeska
WEgate community coordinator
e-mail: gabriela@mir.org.mk
Phone: 00 389 2 3108 891
