Empowering Women Through Collective Entrepreneurship

When women come together to build businesses, something remarkable happens. It’s not just about income – it’s about shifting power, visibility, and voice. Across the world, and particularly in low- and middle-income countries, collective entrepreneurship has emerged as one of the most effective tools for lifting women out of economic invisibility and into recognized, sustained economic participation. This post explores why that matters, how it works, and what real programs like Udyogini’s WEMTOP have demonstrated on the ground.

The problem: women’s work that doesn’t count 🔗

Before we can understand why collective entrepreneurship matters, it helps to understand the problem it’s solving. Across much of the world, women perform enormous amounts of labor that the economy simply does not see. The concept of “invisible labor” – work that is uncompensated and uncounted in official economic data – was formally theorized by sociologist Arlene Kaplan Daniels in the 1980s and refers to unpaid domestic, care, and community work that women disproportionately carry.

This isn’t a marginal issue. In South Asia alone, 45% of economically inactive women are absent from the labor market because of unseen and unpaid work, compared to just 19% of men. Women in rural areas contribute to farming, food production, livestock care, and household management – yet none of this appears in GDP calculations or official employment statistics. The result is a persistent and damaging narrative: that women are economic dependents, not contributors.

UN Women documents this clearly – women make enormous contributions to economies as entrepreneurs, farmers, employees, and unpaid caregivers, yet they remain disproportionately affected by poverty, discrimination, and exclusion from formal economic systems. Entrepreneurship, particularly in collective forms, offers a concrete path out of this invisibility.

What collective entrepreneurship actually means for women 🔗

Collective entrepreneurship is not simply a group of women starting businesses. It is a structured process through which women pool resources, share skills, distribute risk, and build enterprises together. It addresses barriers that individual women cannot overcome alone – limited capital, lack of formal business education, restricted mobility, and social norms that devalue women’s economic participation.

Research published in the journal Entrepreneurship & Regional Development found that programs promoting women’s entrepreneurship and empowerment work best when they facilitate what the authors call collective agency – the ability to act together to access and use resources that would be unattainable individually. Programs that relied only on financial capital or business training, without building collective structures, showed far weaker results. The key mechanisms that drove real empowerment were self-development, resource exchange, psychological membership, and – critically – structuring around shared goals.

This is borne out globally. A study of community financing schemes for women entrepreneurs in Nigeria found that mutual support structures built on reciprocity, solidarity, and trust enabled women to collectively accrue and share financial resources in ways that formal banking systems had excluded them from. These informal networks weren’t a workaround – they were the foundation of entrepreneurial success.

Building capacity for economic independence 🔗

For entrepreneurship to genuinely empower women, it has to go beyond starting a business. It needs to build capacity – the practical knowledge, confidence, market access, and financial skills that allow women to sustain and grow their enterprises over time.

Data from the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi) shows that globally, one-third of all entrepreneurs are women, and in developing countries women represent half of all entrepreneurs. But they are concentrated in smaller, less growth-oriented firms in low-margin sectors, and are more likely to operate informally. This isn’t a result of lesser ambition – it reflects structural barriers to finance, training, and markets.

Brookings Institution research confirms that financial capital alone doesn’t move the needle for women-led microenterprises. Effective programs must also teach life skills – separating household and business finances, pricing and costing, and navigating market relationships. A training program in Peru that paired business skills with life skills showed a measurable positive impact on enterprise revenues through randomized control trials, even if modest in scale.

The shift that matters is conceptual as much as practical. The World Bank notes that women-owned businesses tend to be informal and home-based, partly due to caregiving demands and partly due to social norms that restrict women’s movement and market participation. Collective models reduce these constraints – when women organize together, they build shared transport, shared market access, shared negotiating power, and shared social legitimacy in ways that individual home-based enterprise simply cannot achieve.

The goal, ultimately, is economic independence – the ability of women to earn, control, and invest income on their own terms. UN Women’s framework on women’s economic empowerment centers this: it means access to and control over resources, income, time, and one’s own life. Collective entrepreneurship is one of the most proven pathways to that outcome.

Udyogini and the WEMTOP model: from training to transformation 🔗

Few organizations illustrate the power of collective women’s entrepreneurship as clearly as Udyogini, a registered non-profit established in India in 1992 in response to a World Bank initiative on women’s economic empowerment. Udyogini’s mission from the outset was to fill a critical gap: enterprise training for women who were already working – often hard – but without the structures to convert that effort into recognized economic activity.

What WEMTOP was and why it mattered 🔗

Udyogini’s flagship early intervention was the Women’s Enterprise Management Training Outreach Program (WEMTOP). According to Udyogini’s organizational history, WEMTOP reached over one million women and built the capacities of more than 30 NGOs across India in micro-entrepreneurship. It did this through a Training of Trainers (ToT) model – rather than working directly with every woman, Udyogini trained partner NGO staff, who then carried enterprise training into communities across different states.

This was a deliberate and scalable design. By embedding enterprise knowledge within local organizations that already had community trust and reach, WEMTOP could extend its impact far beyond what centralized delivery would allow. It also meant that training was adapted to local contexts, industries, and women’s specific circumstances – a key factor in whether skills actually translate into enterprise outcomes.

What the WEMTOP experience showed 🔗

Documentation from the WEMTOP pilot project captures what made the program significant. It demonstrated the possibility of empowering women to seek sustained earning opportunities through a collective process, by addressing enterprise issues within a gender framework. Critically, it showed that the shift from subsistence to enterprise is gradual and requires specific competencies – organizing, accessing resources, acquiring management and technical skills, and finally establishing and running enterprises, individually or collectively.

The program also revealed something important about the scope of empowerment. Starting a microenterprise was not just an economic event for participants – it initiated processes of empowerment in other spheres of life too. Women who gained economic confidence began to exercise more agency in household decision-making, community participation, and social relationships. This is consistent with broader evidence: as Udyogini has documented, as women’s income increases, they exercise greater agency and challenge the status quo both at home and outside it.

The significance of recognizing women as economic actors 🔗

Perhaps the most important conceptual shift embedded in the WEMTOP model – and in collective entrepreneurship for women more broadly – is the move from seeing women as invisible supplementary workers to recognizing them as significant contributors and actors in economic life. This reframing is not merely symbolic. When a woman moves from unpaid household production to a recognized microenterprise, she gains access to credit, market relationships, formal identity as a business operator, and social legitimacy that changes how she is treated within her family and community.

UNU-WIDER research on female entrepreneurship in developing countries has long noted that women face higher barriers to formal labor markets and often turn to entrepreneurship out of necessity. But necessity-driven entrepreneurship, without collective support structures and capacity building, tends to remain small, informal, and precarious. The WEMTOP approach – combining gender-sensitive training with collective organizing and follow-up – was designed to move women beyond survival and into sustained enterprise.

Udyogini’s evolving model: value chains and direct implementation 🔗

After the WEMTOP phase, Udyogini evolved into direct implementation of livelihood projects, particularly in rural and tribal regions. It became a pioneer in value chain-based models, working across 22 products – from honey and lac to chilli, tamarind, herbal tea, and ghee – in five Indian states: Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand, and Rajasthan. Today the organization engages over 50,000 women and youth.

The value chain model is significant because it moves women beyond production into aggregation, processing, and market access. Udyogini’s village-level retail and aggregation centers (VLRACs) and business development service providers (BDSPs) are innovations designed to give women collective bargaining power and connect them with formal markets. Mobilizing women for aggregation and trading, as the organization notes, significantly improves their collective bargaining power and incomes – something no individual microenterprise could achieve on its own.

The Udyogini Scheme, a separate but related government initiative implemented by the Women Development Corporation of India, complements this by providing interest-free or subsidized loans to women entrepreneurs – up to ₹3 lakh – paired with entrepreneurship development training in business planning, costing, pricing, and market understanding. For women from marginalized categories including widows and differently-abled women, these loans are entirely interest-free and require no collateral.

Why collective models outperform individual approaches 🔗

The evidence across contexts consistently points in the same direction: collective models of women’s entrepreneurship generate more durable, more empowering outcomes than individual-focused interventions.

A striking case study from India is Lijjat – described in research published in the International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business as arguably the world’s largest and most durable women-owned community-based enterprise. Researchers found that Lijjat’s longevity and scale were built on a democratic governance structure, organizational routines promoting social cohesion, and a business model that embedded strong collective entrepreneurship behaviors among its women members. Cultural and social capital were integral to its growth – not incidental to it.

This points to a core insight: the resources women bring to collective entrepreneurship – trust, reciprocity, community ties, shared knowledge – are not lesser substitutes for formal capital. They are productive assets in their own right. Programs that build on and strengthen these resources, rather than ignoring them, produce the strongest outcomes. We-Fi’s most recent evidence review highlights that mentoring, networking, and collective approaches are among the areas showing the strongest growth in evidence of positive outcomes for women-led enterprises.

The UNDP’s IMPULSOHN initiative in Latin America follows a similar logic – generating a sense of collective belonging among entrepreneurs, supporting them with seed capital, market access through international fairs, and specialized training in areas like digital marketing, value proposition, and business scaling. The project expects at least 1,200 microenterprises to be strengthened through access to shared physical market spaces, with a projected 20% increase in sales.

What still stands in the way 🔗

Despite powerful evidence and promising programs, significant barriers remain. We-Fi data shows that women-led businesses were more than twice as likely to have loan applications rejected than men-led businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic – a structural disadvantage that collective models can partially mitigate but cannot fully resolve without policy change. Social norms, legal barriers to property and asset ownership, and the ongoing burden of unpaid care work all continue to constrain what women can do, even when they have the skills and motivation to build enterprises.

The solution is not a single program or scheme – it’s a layered approach that combines collective organizing, capacity building, access to finance, market linkages, and enabling policy environments. Udyogini’s three-decade journey – from WEMTOP’s training reach to value chain development to the Udyogini School of Entrepreneurship – illustrates what that layered approach looks like in practice.

What do you think? If collective entrepreneurship has proven so effective at empowering women, why do most government and development programs still default to individual-focused financial support rather than building collective structures? And how might recognizing women’s unpaid labor as genuine economic contribution change the design of entrepreneurship programs in your own context?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_labor
2. https://www.asiapathways-adbi.org/2023/05/uncovering-womens-burden-of-unseen-work/
3. https://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/economic-empowerment/facts-and-figures
4. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2025.2503145
5. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014829632300320X
6. https://we-fi.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/We-Fi-Evidence-Paper.pdf
7. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/empowering-women-entrepreneurs-in-developing-countries/
8. https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/gender/publication/female-entrepreneurship-resource-point-introduction-and-module-1-why-gender-matters
9. https://knowledge.unwomen.org/en/articles/faqs/faqs-economic-empowerment
10. https://udyogini.org/who-we-are/
11. https://give.do/discover/4H0/udyogini/
12. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/60762/1/Block-3.pdf
13. https://udyogini.org/women-entrepreneurship-development-in-india-what-changed/
14. https://www.wider.unu.edu/publication/female-entrepreneurship-developing-countries
15. https://udyogini.org/
16. https://www.tatacapital.com/blog/loan-for-business/udyogini-scheme/
17. https://www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/abs/10.1504/IJESB.2024.141991
18. https://we-fi.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/We-Fi-Evidence-Paper-2025.pdf
19. https://www.undp.org/latin-america/stories/power-entrepreneurship-women-transforming-region-courage-and-vision