This final section will discuss recommendations not discussed previously and will continue to highlight the ILO’s role in supporting women’s entrepreneurship.
• Recruitment is a vital first step in women’s entrepreneurship promotion. Current and potential female enterprise owners must be made aware of programmes. This requires knowing where women are in the community so information can reach them through networks they trust. The information should be attractive to women and should advertise programmes matching the assistance they need. It may be harder to recruit women into entrepreneurship in cases when women do not believe they are able to take on the challenge.
• One strategy to improve recruitment is to increase awareness within the local community regarding women’s contributions to the economy. Gaining the support of local government actors and educating them about the importance of women’s economic contributions could mean that they will be more likely to refer women to MSE support programmes. The ILO can play a central role in this aspect of recruitment by designing and implementing awareness campaigns targeting local representatives in charge of enterprise development.
• Entrepreneurship support strategies aiming to move women into new or male-dominated sectors must recognize the risks to women’s well-being and survival involved. Agencies should design programmes which decrease this risk as much as possible. Providing intensive skill training in the new sector, one-on-one support, or incubator services all can help women make the move to higher value sectors.
• Sustainability of support programmes is an important issue. There are some types of programmes that will be easier to sustain than others, particularly those given in group format and programmes offering minimalist services. Using a mixed model, as well as partnerships arrangements, can help in achieving programme and institutional sustainability. The ILO can assist agencies in achieving sustainability by promoting the benefits of a mixed model for improving outreach, maintaining impact and decreasing costs. It also can disseminate partnership-based service delivery models and offer training materials on methods of sustaining and monitoring partnerships. Supporting networks between agencies for information and material exchanges is also an important activity for the ILO in supporting good practice in women’s entrepreneurship development.
• Little is known about the different outcomes of targeting moderate-income women as opposed to low-income women for entrepreneurship support. This is an area where more research on employment generation and income creation is needed. Do enterprises started by moderate-income women survive better than those started by low-income women? Who do they hire and in what numbers? Can low-income women be trained to fit these job requirements? Evaluations of mixed service models can be a part of this research to determine the benefits of interactions between the various levels of users of an agency’s services. The ILO is in an excellent position to promote such research enquiries.
• Charging for services offered is part of a market-led, business-like approach to service provision. It can have a positive effect on clients by making them perceive the agency in a business-like manner, and on service providers as they will receive feedback on programme effectiveness and demand through clients’ willingness to pay. Care must be taken in setting fees as they should not be prohibitive. The ILO can assist in this by continuing to disseminate information on best practices and training guides on how to charge for services in light of the cost of inputs and what the local market can bear.
• Services must be designed to meet client needs. Gender sensitive needs assessments play a key role in this. The ILO can continue to develop appropriate training materials in these assessment methods.
• Ensuring women have access to training in the new and rapidly growing ICT sector is important to their entry into this high value sector. This should be a particular goal of ILO strategies to promote women’s entrepreneurship in developed and developing nations.
• Overall it was difficult to find good quantitative evaluations of entrepreneurship support programmes. Agencies often do not have the time, money or skills to perform this function. The ILO should assist agencies in this task by developing easy-to-use management information systems for monitoring outcomes.
• The ILO has a central role to play in coupling programme actions with policy work supporting women’s entrepreneurship. Programmes are designed to address practical needs such as access to financing, technology or training. They also may include the awareness raising necessary for women’s empowerment. However, in order to make long-term changes in women’s ability to participate freely in the economy, the socio- cultural constraints on women must be addressed. Advocacy work should be directed at policy-makers in order to raise their awareness of the important role of women in the economy, and the positive effect of economic participation on women and their families. It is as vital to the support of women’s entrepreneurship as providing services directly. The ILO’s tripartite structure, which brings together governments, employers and workers, as well as its international recognition, makes it well suited to this role. It must ensure that the needs of women entrepreneurs are strongly represented within its meetings.
In designing and delivering entrepreneurship support programmes for women, an awareness of the heterogeneity of the client group, the implementation of a gender-aware needs assessment, and the use of its results in programme design and delivery will go a long way to ensuring that programmes are gender sensitive. Combining gender-aware support programmes with advocacy and research related to women's contribution to the economy makes for a cohesive strategy in support of women's entrepreneurship.