SL ahead of neighbours in women-led SMEs: ADB

• However, calls for more focus on improving financial literacy and access to finance

• By Nuzla Rizkiya 

Sri Lanka is performing good in terms of supporting women-led businesses but needs to address the challenges

such as access to finance and improving financial literacy, according to the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

“Women, representing 20 percent in the SME sector, is quite high for the South Asia subregion; so, Sri Lanka is definitely ahead of most of its neighbours,” ADB Senior Development Specialist Keiko Nowacka told Mirror Business.
She added that the ADB is also “very impressed” by the activities of the financial intuitions going out proactively to support the women entrepreneurs.

However, access to finance and financial literacy among the women entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka should be treated as priority issues, in addition to the cultural barriers almost all women entrepreneurs in all the countries face, she shared.
Nowacka went on to stress that it is important for the island nation to focus on establishing gender-responsive policies to support the women-owned businesses and collect accurate and gender-segregated data to analyse the gender-based disparities in the sector. 

“Any policy should be gender responsive, which means taking into account all the different challenges that women have, if we are to think about transformative solutions that can redistribute inherent inequalities. These are long-term solutions. I think it’s great that the banks are beginning to use date to design tailor-made products and services to cater to women entrepreneurs,” Nowacka said.