Female Entrepreneurship can help fuel a fairer, more productive future

Each March, we mark International Women’s Day with a month of activities – calling out the barriers which too often exist in women’s professional and personal lives and collaborating across all three sectors in order to achieve greater equality. This year’s debate is different, as we contemplate the long shadow cast by Covid, in addition to the more immediate impacts on health and the economy. We did not enter this crisis with a level playing field, which means some segments of our society are at particular risk of falling further behind. I feel especially strongly about those underrepresented in our business community, as we are missing out on their enterprise and are the poorer for it. We know that up to ￡250 billion could be added to the UK economy, if women started and scaled new businesses at the same rate as men.

Two years ago, HM Treasury and UK banks set-out to address this need with the Rose Review. We wanted to identify and break-down some of the most common blockers – whether access to and awareness of business-funding, risk appetite, or the importance of tailoring support for those managing caring responsibilities. As you may imagine, a lack of formal investment can inhibit ambition and growth-potential, or mean a business is never born in the first place. 

Last year’s events triggered exceptionally high demand for funding by women-led businesses. At NatWest Group, we exceeded our ￡1 billion target of ring-fenced debt-financing for female entrepreneurs and have therefore doubled it, with a further ￡1 billion. This runs alongside support from our 600 Women in Business Advisers and free mentoring programmes with Be the Business, which are helping entrepreneurs like Ella Mesma of Business Yoga. Ella reports a huge boost to her confidence as well as the business itself, enabling her to rethink the way she reached clients during lockdown and create a membership site for remote-access services. Meanwhile, through Coutts, we have supported the launch of the UK Enterprise Fund which helps direct growth capital and non-financial support to diverse, high-potential companies with founders from different backgrounds, ethnicities and genders.

These are important investments in the recovery and regrowth of those who have experienced enormous challenge this past year, often due to critical duties of care and the blurring of boundaries between work and home lives. Like most big businesses, NatWest Group created and evolved a range of measures to keep our colleagues up and running, in order to serve our customers when they needed us most. But what if you are a start-up or small business, without these resources to fall back on? The demands on your time can become unmanageable, and an immense deterrent for early-stage entrepreneurs.

In recent months, our research has found that nearly three quarters of female entrepreneurs reported additional strain from urgent caring responsibilities, in comparison to half of male business owners. This is a reality which should be of concern to us all. Now more than ever, we need to reach further to clasp the hands of female-led businesses and ensure they’re part of our economic recovery. We will not build back better without them.

During the pandemic, we pivoted NatWest’s financial Experts in Residence programme to reach more entrepreneurs virtually; working with Local Enterprise Partnerships and tech platforms to disseminate digital skills and sector-specific knowledge, and piloting the use of AI technology to target more women-led businesses. We know we must also start earlier on the journey, which is why we’ve partnered Facebook to create a virtual coaching platform for NatWest Dream Bigger – supporting 15,000 young women to gain entrepreneurial knowledge and skills. 

As we launch our second Rose Review progress report, with combined insight and intent across the private and public sectors, we’re proud to be enabling more women than ever to start-up, grow and scale their businesses. In addition to each bank’s activity, we are collaborating to combat imbalance in venture capital for female-led businesses and, in just one year, have tripled signatories to the Investing in Women Code to nearly 80 financial institutions, including most major UK banks and investment firms. This kind of partnership-initiative between business and government represents a landmark moment for gender transparency in funding, and the World Bank is now developing a global code for greater empowerment of female entrepreneurs. 

As we’ve witnessed in recent months, our economic and social challenges are complex and interconnected. In order to achieve truly effective and sustainable solutions which benefit a broad spectrum of communities, we must not disenfranchise a diversity of entrepreneurs from making their economic contribution. We need to keep this at the forefront of our agendas, and ensure female entrepreneurship helps fuel a fairer, more productive future.