ICTs, entrepreneurship and employment: new challenges for women

We must take advantage of the opportunity that introducing ICTs allows, by ensuring that as women engage with ICTs in entrepreneurship or employment, their knowledge and experiences are valued and that they are meaningfully engaged as equal partners in shaping the knowledge economy. The global context: employment and entrepreneurship The globalisation process has, in most economies, pushed policy strategies in favour of removing barriers to trade and financial flows, privatising state-owned enterprises, and in many cases, lowering public spending, particularly on social services. These policies are transforming patterns of production, contributing to accelerated technological advances in information and communications and impacting the lives of women, as producers, providers, and consumers and increasingly as distributors of wealth and knowledge. While many women have been able to take advantage of greater economic opportunities and independence – either through establishing their own businesses or securing employment, many more have been marginalisation and are struggling to make ends meet, owing to deepening inequalities among and within countries which push women to the margins of the economy. Trends in entrepreneurship and women-owned enterprises Gender differentiated data is difficult to come by and almost non-existent in the micro-enterprise sector. A 1994 survey of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Asian Pacific Economic Community (APEC) economies found that they account for 90 per cent of all enterprises. Between 1978 and 1996, women-led enterprises accounted for a quarter of all business start ups in the region. These businesses typically specialised in small farming, retail, or craft-work sector(1) . More recent figures in Asia suggest that women head 35 per cent of small and medium sized enterprises in the region(2) . The typical small-scale woman entrepreneur is de facto a social entrepreneur. Her business motivations are driven by a double bottom line: social mission and financial objectives. These include underwriting the costs of household and community care, creating employment within her community, engaging local resources and knowledge in her production value chain. At the risk of making broad generalisations, we can distinguish between push and pull factors that draw women increasingly into entrepreneurship. The push factors include: withdrawal of or decline in state expenditure on social programs which result in a disproportionate burden on women to service the social needs of their communities; women de facto underwrite the costs of the social services they provide, including earning an income to finance care of children, the aged, the ill, the mentally unstable, and other marginalised sections of the community; the effects of casualisation and flexibility of formal employment and resulting insecurity of income(3) the scarcity of other income alternatives that women can engage in. The pull factors are expectation led. Women are turning to innovative private and cooperative means of livelihood through selling products, services and know how. Increasingly women are taking advantage of ICTs and new knowledge sources to create business opportunities in expanding markets and taking advantage of trade liberalisation and potentials for expanded market access new business alliances and new entry points in the value chain of production.(4) Bottlenecks and points of intervention There is a fertile playing field for introducing ICTs to women entrepreneurs. In many ways, precisely because of the business challenges that women face, women recognise the quantum differences that ICTs could make to their business activities and are ready to adopt the new technologies. e-Business adoption by SMEs face a number of challenges and bottlenecks, these include lack of information, uncertainty surrounding the costs and benefits of e-business, unavailability of strategic business resources, lack of confidence around e-security issues, and unsupportive government regulations. To counter these challenges, women need access to training that specifically meet their needs, including: business management training that includes an ICT underpinning to management practices; client-oriented, participatory and dynamic methods of training (as opposed to the traditional lecture style of training) that offer a women-only course; certified business ICT training approaches tailored again to the specific client context; know how on the internal dynamics and business networks and contacts that are critical to the launch of successful ventures.(5) ICTs do not flatten trade barriers Current arguments for the adoption of ICTs by SMEs point to their potential to become more competitive using the Internet to access information about cheaper finance or markets for instance, by improving customer service and by reorganise procurement processes. While the Internet may make it easier for SMEs to access new, better quality suppliers as well as to market their own businesses(6) a constant obstacle to the participation of SMEs in international trade continues to be the lack of adequate trade-supporting services, including finance, insurance, transport and business information. Time and again, however, it is the terms of international trade and national regulations that work against the aspiring SMEs exporter. The average poor person selling into global markets(7) confronts barriers that are roughly twice as high as those facing the typical non-poor worker. Since the larger proportion of the poor is women, it is clear that women-run SMEs face even more stringent business conditions than most. ICTs do not flatten trade barriers. The flip side of this is also true, which is that ICTs do not automatically take SMEs to overseas markets, the aspiring SMEs exporter has to reinvent its supply chain to cater to new markets. Trends in employment in the ICT sector The ICT sector is defining a new global division of labour. Trends in today’s ICT hardware sector are outsourcing and globalised production networks. World-renowned brands like Dell, HP and IBM increasingly concentrate on their core competencies, such as sales, marketing and branding, while the production of their products is sourced out to the contract manufacturers, who offer flexible production operations, predominantly in low wage countries. Appalling work conditions and environmental degradation exist in many of these production facilities. Through research done by the Centre for Research on Multinational Companies(8) a picture emerges of predominantly women workers working up to 72 hours a week, with compulsory overtime, insecure working contracts, unsafe factories and inadequate protection against hazardous materials, minimum wages that legalise poverty, suppression of union rights and degrading treatments. Conditions that, up until a few years ago, were mostly associated with the garment industry. Many developing countries turn to the ICT sector as a means to attract new foreign direct investment - primarily in data entry and call centre facilities. These facilities, however, are located in a small handful of countries, such as India, Philippines and increasingly China. The projected development of this aspect of ICT “grunt work” seems to be no different from the route followed by the long established garment and electronics sweatshops – poor wages, poor work conditions, no negotiation power, little to no skill or technology transfer, absence of career growth, and feminisation of the low-end low-pay jobs. Employment in the ICT sector requires training There is a general assumption that both literacy and digital literacy are essential skills to working in the ICT sector, however this is not necessarily the case if illiterate women are taken directly onto the factory floor and trained in narrow applied ICT skills. As jobs and functions continue to evolve – with the emergence of new Internet and multi-media related occupations - traditional ICT professions are constantly changing. In ICT services, and increasingly in e publishing, market growth is in value-added services oriented toward the specific requirements of markets. Hybrid profiles that marry ICT related skills with other competencies have grown around traditional computer-related work. It is imperative then, that the mobility of women in the ICT sector is supported and this entails training in literacy as well as digital literacy. Transformation of financial services delivery One of the most critical areas for the application of ICTs for the direct benefit of women and women-owned enterprises is in the arena of extending and managing micro loans and saving schemes. As yet, this area is in its infancy. The shortage of affordable capital is one of the most critical, if not indeed the most critical factor constraining the sustainability of micro-enterprises. According to Women’s World Banking(9) , to reach just 10 per cent of the low-income entrepreneurs by 2025 requires about US$12.5 billion. To reach a target population of about 180 million low-income entrepreneurs by 2025 would require about US$90 billion. ICT applications can be applied to the micro-finance and savings sector through: Adapting and simplifying accounting and loan tracking software Computerising financial reporting and performance measures making them cost effective, secure and accessible to both borrowers and lenders Providing individual borrowers with secure userfriendly account access through access points in local banks, post offices, and other community centres Taking savings and credit schemes through mobile banking Introducing innovative user-friendly IT channels including smart cards and modified ATMs, to bypass the traditional methods of providing bank services Conclusion We have to be alert to the reality that ICTs can either reinforce gender differences or can help to diminish them. More importantly, we must take advantage of the opportunity that introducing ICTs allows, by ensuring that as women engage with ICTs in entrepreneurship or employment, their knowledge and experiences are valued and that they are meaningfully engaged as equal partners in shaping the knowledge economy. Endnotes 1 Women in a Global Economy: Challenge and Opportunity in the Current Asian Economic Crises. Bangkok: Joint Effort of the UNFEM and the CIDA South East Asia Gender Equity program 2 UNCTAD 2002 E-commerce and Development Report: Chapter 3 3 Suggested further reading on women in informal sectors and income implications are available from fact sheets put up by “Women in Informal Employment Globalising and Organising” at www.wiego.org 4 To use e-terminology: disintermediation is the process of cutting out the middleman. When web-based companies bypass traditional retail channels and sell directly to the customer, traditional intermediaries (such as retail stores and mail-order houses) may find themselves out of a job. 5 further information available from www.unido.org 6 UNCTAD 2001 E-commerce and Development Report 7 World Bank’s Global Economic Prospects 2002 8 www.somo.org 9 Nancy Barry, “The missing links: financial systems that work for the majority” June 1995 Author: Nidhi Tandon is the founder and principal of Networked Intelligence for Development (NID), Canada.

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