Women making progress in entrepreneurship

Bangladeshi businesswomen have come a long way overcoming social barriers to joining business in the past three decades or so, say many of them.
Some of them have transformed themselves from housewives to entrepreneurs and even to business leaders, showing the way for a generation of female businesspeople to take new ventures, reports NewAge.
Today, according to the businesswomen, they have built confidence of the policymakers in them and become entitled to policy and financing supports from the government.
A recent Bangladesh Bank report proves increasing interests of women in business as the credit disbursement from the central bank’s refinancing scheme rose 224 per cent for medium-term loans, 118 per cent for short-term and 100 per cent for long-term loans.
‘Unlike now, female officers were hardly seen in the banks when I joined business. There were rarely any women entrepreneurs,’ Rokeya A Rahman recalled her days of the early 1980s when she embarked on banking career before initiating her own business.
She said the women, especially the rural ones, at that point in time had to break the people’s mindset that the ‘women are born for staying at home, not to work for making money’.
Rokeya, founding president of Women Entrepreneurs Association of Bangladesh, started with a 2,000-tonne capacity cold storage in North Bengal. She now owns two units with combined capacity of preserving 10,000 tonnes of potato and has stakes in insurance and capital financing companies
More than 50 per cent contemporary women entrepreneurs have begun their career in business immediately after completing academic studies, found a survey by Bangladesh Women Chamber of Commerce and Industry headed by Selima Ahmad.
About one-fourth of the businesswomen were just housewives before they entered businesses earlier run mainly by their husbands, showed the survey which covered 500 businesswomen in urban and semi-urban areas.
‘It is an encouraging sign that more and more women are becoming managers or entrepreneurs,’ said Selima, also a director of Nitol Group.
‘I see women here contribute a lot of success stories to the economy,’ said Heather Vairava, deputy chief of economic section at the US embassy in Dhaka.
Heather, who has been staying in Bangladesh for than two years and a half, pointed out that several million female garment workers had taken Bangladesh to its present position in the global market. ‘The country can take pride of the smart entrepreneurship of the rural women who proved success of the micro-credit as a global model,’ she added.