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| The SEEP On-Line BDS & Gender Discussion Synthesis, Alison Haight, 2004 |
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Description
Low-income women in developing countries rely heavily on commercial, small-scale farm- and home-based microenterprises for their family livelihood. BDS practitioners attempt to help microentrepreneurs stabilize and grow their businesses by providing them access to critical services, e.g., training, technology, market access, and infrastructure. The most sustainable way to reach large numbers of microenterprises is to develop commercial, business-to-business service markets, but this “BDS market development approach” often is not effective at reaching low-income microentrepreneurs. Women in particular are seen as disconnected from BDS markets due to cultural and social constraints.
To explore these assumptions and ways BDS market development programs could benefit low-income women, the SEEP BDS Working Group invited practitioners and others to participate in an email listserve discussion to:
* Exchange experiences, frameworks, and strategies from all development fields and brainstorm innovative solutions to the challenge of reaching low-income women and helping them access appropriate business services;
* Facilitate better understanding, relationships, and dialogue among practitioners in different fields concerned with improving the lives of low-income women; and
* Develop a research agenda for the next steps needed to further these objectives.
Summary of results
Providing or facilitating commercial business services to low-income women microentrepreneurs is not, and never will be, easy. Practitioners must be flexible in applying the market development approach and not marginalize these clients. If BDS is to reach low-income women, services and delivery must consider their household, family, and business responsibilities and be custom-tailored to respond to them. The fact that management of a business and all household issues is considered “normal” for many women echoes the need for practitioners to look beyond the business and address broader social, personal, and gender issues when possible.
The questions posed by the discussion moderators about the potential for BDS practitioners to address these and other challenges constraining low-income women were not fully during the listserve discussion. Many participants cited examples and offered case studies of programs that are attempting to overcome them, however these studies and programs responded primarily to business challenges and those programs delving into social/ cultural challenges often did not apply the market development approach. This led participants to question the applicability of commercial BDS to situations low-income women microentrepreneurs experience. Though payment options were suggested, they were discussed only briefly and were rarely supported by case studies.
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