The Problem: Women are more vulnerable to economic and social hardship than men, due to economic factors, such as "vulnerable employment, dependence on labor intensive activities, lower incomes, and limited entitlement to ownership of assets and saving," as well as social factors -- low social standing, entrenched gender discrimination, and limited access to health care and social services. Women's lower economic and social status restricts their ability to promote the health and well-being of their families and increases their vulnerability to diseases like HIV/AIDS. For example, poor women must often rely on survival or transactional sex to meet basic household needs, increasing their risk for HIV infection. Limited access to economic and social services exacerbates the impact of common illnesses on household economic security, creating and sustaining a vicious cycle of poverty, disease, and underdevelopment.

The majority of women, particularly in Africa and Asia, are employed in micro-small-to-medium size enterprises (MSMEs) in the informal sector. Women-led MSMEs must overcome many challenges to start, grow, and sustain their enterprises, including limited access to the financial sector and viable markets as well as limited business knowledge. Recognizing women as a vital key to tomorrow's progress, the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals (MDG), the World Bank, Non-Governmental Organization (NGOs), donors, and developing countries across the world are seeking innovative solutions to improve women's lives by engaging them as actors in their own social and economic development. However, while great attention has been paid to micro-enterprise development (individual or small group activities), especially among women, little attention has been paid to upgrading Small-to-Medium size Enterprises (SMEs) into dynamic, sustainable, and growth-oriented social enterprises as a means to foster and sustain community development and mitigate the impacts of poverty.

Our Background: WomenforGrowth is a non-profit organization established in the USA in 2006 by a group of professional women with years of experience in national and international business and program development. The organization promotes social entrepreneurship among enterprises, local businesses, and cooperatives (particularly with gender-focus), creating a collective force to enable women to improve their economic, social, and environmental conditions. The organization, in collaboration with local groups, International NGOs, and the United Nations Agencies and in recognition of the many micro- and macro-level barriers has examined a variety of development models to develop an innovative and sustainable approach to resolve the problem explained above.

Our Solution: WomenforGrowth's core belief is that given viable resources and opportunities, women can effectively mobilize their communities to address economic, social, and environmental challenges. To assist that, WomenforGrowth developed a unique model called Collaborative Incubation Model (CIM) to encourage and promote incubation of social enterprises as an effective and sustainable tool to help women improve their socioeconomic conditions.

Using this model, WomenforGrowth partners with local NGOs, women-groups, United Nations Agencies, donors, private sectors, microfinance institutions, and other stakeholders to identify and transform Community Based Organizations (CBOs), cooperatives, and businesses with a particular social agenda into sustainable social enterprises, which trade in goods or services and link that trade to a social mission.

The model allows women and disadvantaged groups to use social enterprises as a development platform to improve their socioeconomic conditions while providing vital services to the whole community and improving living standards. The CIM has two stages:

Stage I: Knowledge Transfer: WomenforGrowth assists local partners to incubate enterprises with sound business ideas, partners with various stakeholders to provide economic and social resources and to help the enterprises to evolve into sustainable Social Enterprises.

Stage II: Community Outreach: Resources provided during incubation will enable the social enterprises to attain their economic and social objectives and to emerge as community change agents; sharing learned knowledge and expanding effective social empowerment methods among their communities.

This staged approach creates a foundation for scale up and replication. For example, the incubation stage might directly provide economic and social resources to 100 people in stage I, facilitating them to share knowledge and resources with their community in a sustainable manner.

Please refer to the following web pages and documents to get more information about the Collaborative Incubation Model:

1. Collaborative Incubation Model (Powerpoint)
2. Collaborative Incubation Model (Word doc)
3. Explaining Collaborative Incubation Model through an example (Word doc)
4. How to sustain Collaborative Incubation Model (examples) (Word doc)