Business Link Pacific partners with yher Pacific to support women-led business ventures in the Pacific region.
The Business Link Pacific programme supports and promotes social inclusion and gender equity in the work that we carry out in Fiji, Vanuatu, Samoa and Papua New Guinea.
We are very proud to announce our partnership with yher Pacific, a women-led, women-facilitated accelerator program for the world’s most promising female social impact entrepreneurs.
This young partnership is key to BLP’s Gender Equity and Social Inclusion strategy, in place to ensure that where possible the BLP programme is actively supporting the growth of socially inclusive and female-led enterprises.
This week we chatted with Kaitlin Tait, Director of yher and one of the co-founders of ygap about what this new partnership with Business Link Pacific means for her programme and why backing women-led social impact enterprises is a good bet.
Women are pursuing entrepreneurship more than ever, however, statistics show that gender equality in the startup space is still far from balanced. This is according to Kaitlin Tait, one of the co-founders of ygap, an international development programme offering support, guidance and funding for local entrepreneurs with solutions to local problems, also known as ‘impact ventures’, in some of the world’s toughest communities. Kaitlin is also the Director of yher, which is one of ygap’s four accelerator programmes.
Kaitlin explains that ‘impact ventures’ are enterprises with social goals at the centre of their business model. Also known as social enterprises, they aim at improving the lives of people living in poverty in some way, and are also aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The success of these ventures is measured by the number of opportunities that are provided for someone to lift themselves out of poverty, e.g. employment, access to affordable healthcare or creating pathways to quality education.
Originally developed as a pilot programme in 2015 by Kaitlin and Katleho Tsoku, a colleague in South Africa, the yher programme (formerly SHE by Spark* International) was specifically created to close the gap in opportunities for women in the Pacific, South Asia and Africa, who have devised scalable and sustainable solutions to social or environmental challenges within their communities.
“We see so much potential in what female led businesses can do for creating jobs and balancing the scales in terms of opportunities for men and women across the region, and then hopefully the flow on effect of that equality is huge for any country,” explains Kaitlin.
yher was initially trialled in South Africa and Kenya in 2015 and 2016, born out of Kaitlin’s desire to provide an accelerator programme for women entrepreneurs after observing the different challenges women face in the startup phase of a business.
“A lot of it was my born out of my own entrepreneurial journey. I had gone through the process of starting a business alongside my husband and it was interesting for me to see how we both navigated and experienced that journey differently. He was very confident and more comfortable promoting himself, whereas I was on the other end of the spectrum, quite self-conscious about my own ability to lead in this startup space.”
From L-R: The yher Pacific team – Kaitlin Tait, Millicent Barty, Audrey Jean-Baptise (image credit: ygap)
“…One of the reasons we thought having a female programme for the social entrepreneurship sector would be really powerful was because we knew that naturally when women start a business, they’re thinking about their family and their community and how they can support beyond just themselves. I definitely think they are more inclined to run a social business, and also more inclined to run a non-profit. It’s been a good challenge to get women to shift their thinking and understand that you can still run a really great social business AND support your family.”
After the initial trial of the programme in Africa, Kaitlin and her team decided to expand the programme to the Asia Pacific region, in an effort to extend the reach of the services they were offering.
Kaitlin shares that when she first began work in the Pacific region, it was in Papua New Guinea several years ago. She noted that there was almost no entrepreneurship ecosystem, and a lot of education had to be done around the concept of social enterprises and entrepreneurship, locals were unaware they had the power to start their own successful business. She found this to be true across the region.
It was also apparent that women were facing significant discrimination in the startup business space, compounded by traditional value systems that created barriers for women to do simple things like gain access to startup finance, purchase land and open bank accounts.
yher ran their first accelerator programme for Pacific-based female entrepreneurs in 2018, “We were really pleased with how it went. The curriculum landed well with the ventures, and we’re excited to run it again this year with a more robust support phase, which is why this partnership with Business Link Pacific has been so wonderful. That’s one of our biggest challenges running a regional programme, that we can’t be there on the ground in each country,” Kaitlin says.
As part of our new partnership with yher, Business Link Pacific will be working with six businesses that have been selected as the 2019 yher Pacific Impact entrepreneurs. Each business will be taken through the Business Health Check and then connected with a BLP approved business advisor who will support them in different areas of their growing business.
“BLP is a dream partner for us – you are doing what we don’t have the capacity to do – finding all the local partners across the region and connecting them to all of our entrepreneurs. Providing that face-to-face support in their country is going to have a much bigger impact than if we were limited to remote mentorship.”
Kaitlin is also a strong advocate for quality business advice, especially at the early stages of starting a business:
“I think it’s crucial. In those early stages, it’s important to get that foundational strategy right and getting that support at an early stage can really accelerate the growth of the business.”
“I know as an entrepreneur, you’ve got all these ideas going through your head and it can be quite a lonely journey. To have advisory support or experts coming in and giving you a sounding board, sharing their knowledge and encouragement, and guiding you through the early days is extremely valuable.”
Business Link Pacific is excited to be working with Kaitlin Tait and the yher Pacific team to support women-led social impact enterprises, by providing an avenue for them to access quality business advice. We’ll be spending time with each entrepreneur over the next few months, and sharing each of their journey’s with you.
You can learn more about yher Pacific and ygap by visiting their website: https://ygap.org/
To learn more about the BLP Portal and how you can transform your business with quality advice, visit https://businesslinkpacific.com/