By Sanjana Govindan
Ease of Doing Business for MSMEs: “Information will never replace illumination,” said author Susan Sontag. To truly understand a complex issue, acknowledgement is necessary. Acknowledgement, almost always, comes from data. When it comes to women’s participation in the Indian economy, there are a limited set of indicators and data points from outdated surveys that cannot provide real-time insights.
Moreover, in the absence of meaningful data and information, any evidence-based policy-making and programming are at best, ad hoc. India ranks as one of the lowest places for entrepreneurial activity globally. As per the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2021, India ranks among the bottom three countries, globally at 41 out of 43, in terms of female entrepreneurial activity. There is a dire need to focus on data-driven policies to broad base women entrepreneurship. The first step in that direction is to understand the root cause of the problem.
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Insufficient understanding of a woman entrepreneur’s journey: There is a lack of definitional clarity around ‘who’ is a woman entrepreneur, coupled with an incomplete understanding of the ecosystem surrounding her. Traditional surveys exclude large segments of women and cannot capture information about women’s entrepreneurship, unpaid labour or female asset ownership. Since independence, the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) has conducted only two surveys, in 1998-1999 and 2019, to look at how individuals spent their time in a day. It was observed that women in unpaid domestic work are not even acknowledged and this greatly hinders the creation of effective, targeted policy interventions toward enabling women’s entrepreneurship.
Women who are home-based workers, are ‘invisible and undervalued,’ and overlooked by policymakers: This segment is not covered by most Indian labour laws. According to Women in Informal Employment (WEIGO), a global research-policy-action network, there are only about 17 million home-based workers as of 2017-18. This accounts for just 9% of the total employment in the country. Yet, they continue to be invisible and their contribution is unaccounted for in any form.
Lack of datasets: A core challenge is that in India, there are very few nationally representative datasets that allow for the tracking and benchmarking of the performance of different types of women-owned enterprises across states. There are existing scorecards like the Female Entrepreneurship Index by Global Entrepreneurship and Development Institute and the Mastercard Index of Women Entrepreneurs 2020 that present cross-country comparisons. These are, however, unable to provide insights into intra-country differences in institutional mechanisms, business environments and entrepreneurial capabilities. These surveys are also often reactionary in nature or provide only short-term insights. Against the background of these kinds of measurement gaps, there is no definitive way to truly understand, evaluate or address gaps in the women entrepreneurship ecosystem.
One solution in the works is a scorecard to measure women’s entrepreneurship. This is being developed at a state level by Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME) and LEAD at Krea University in partnership with the Maharashtra Government, led by the Maharashtra State Innovation Society (MSINS). The aim of the scorecard is to track and integrate issues around women’s entrepreneurship across different segments and points in a woman entrepreneur’s journey. This tool will also look at entrepreneurial activity in urban and rural geographies in Maharashtra.
The scorecard will also track regional entrepreneurial behaviours and showcase institutions that have improved business performance of women-owned enterprises. Over time, it is envisaged that such a tool will provide urban and rural comparisons across geographies in India. The scorecard when fully developed, could reflect both enablers and barriers to women’s entrepreneurship. The effort could eventually lead to developing a comprehensive women entrepreneurship policy for Maharashtra, which then could inform a potential National Policy for Women’s Entrepreneurship.
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Technology can help in processing, interpreting and analysing inputs that can advance the ecosystem for women’s entrepreneurship. Thanks to increasing smartphone usage by women, uncovering trends and analysis from a huge pool of data has become possible. There is a strong push by the government to digitize and modernize its data infrastructure and platforms. The National Data Analytics Platform (NDAP) is one such effort to monitor, track and facilitate comparison of data.
Jacqueline Novogratz writes in Manifesto for a Moral Revolution, “If you want to serve, you must begin by listening, not assuming.” Data-enabled policymaking has the potential to transform the policy landscape for women’s entrepreneurship but such a movement cannot happen without political leadership and will. As India aspires to be a $5 trillion economy, enabling and advancing women’s economic empowerment will be crucial for its realization.
Sanjana Govindan is the Vice President of Women Entrepreneurship, Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship. Views expressed are the author’s own.
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