Mekong InstituteMarket Access Through E-Commerce Promotion for Women-Led SMEs Mekong area
Sep. 2020 - Nov. 2020ThailandWomen’s entrepreneurship has been recognized as an important untapped source of economic growth.
Women entrepreneurs create new jobs for themselves and others. They also provide diverse solutions and approaches to management, organization, and business problems, as well as innovative ways in
maximizing entrepreneurial opportunities.
Women entrepreneurs assume an important role in the economies of the Mekong countries. In Cambodia, 55 percent of all businesses are owned by women, whereas in Lao PDR and Vietnam, women-owned businesses represent 40 and 25 percent, respectively. A common issue with women-led SMEs is that while they work under the same macroeconomic, regulatory, and institutional environments as their male counterparts, they face additional gender-specific barriers such as social acceptability and gender biases, time constraints, credit barriers, limited access to networks and infrastructure, and lack of experience and capacity1. According to a study carried out by the International Finance Corporation, women-owned businesses rarely grow from micro to small- and medium-size enterprises.
The emergence of e-commerce has provided ample opportunities for SMEs to grow and take advantage of new markets. Although most of e-commerce transactions take place in developed countries, developing countries have recently started to catch up. For example, People’s Republic of China (PRC) is now the largest e-commerce (business to consumers – B2C) market in the world, surpassing the United States of America. The Alibaba Group of PRC has grown by 120 percent since 2013. Other than PRC, B2C market segment is growing at a fast rate in Indonesia, India, Thailand, and Vietnam. Even Cambodia, Lao PDR, and Myanmar have shown relatively small but real progress in online business development.