Peru is the only country in Latin America where 22.5% of women report rates of entrepreneurship at an early stage higher than men, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) for Latin America and the Caribbean.
In addition, those who lead the activity of doing business are women, since in the country 6 out of 10 enterprises are theirs, thus having 2 million businesses run by women.
In addition, 3 million micro and small businesses (70%) are also run by women. However, a gap that still exists for them to succeed is the lack of education in finance, ecommerce, business, and digital marketing.
This reality also comes up against a difficult one for entrepreneurs: more than 900,000 young women do not study or work and 67% of them do not have the skills to access quality jobs or start their own businesses.
In this context, a group of women leaders and entrepreneurs who will be panelists at the Shecommerce event of the Peruvian Chamber of Electronic Commerce (CAPECE), provide recommendations for all women who want to undertake or improve their professional training in an industry that is increasingly digital.
HOW TO START SUCCESSFULLY?
Find your purpose. Fiorella Contreras started the fintech Tappoyo at the age of 26, which provides group loans to rural women, based on a personal experience with her mother who, with 4 children, could not access credit to finance her business because the bank did not give her. This gave her a very young purpose, she specialized in banking and with constant training she was able to create her own business.
“The new generation seeks to undertake with purpose and generate an impact. That is why the current entrepreneur is committed and passionate about what he does and also has a certain autonomy to create his own processes. Having a work team that believes in the culture”, says Fiorella Contreras, CEO of Tappoyo.
Finance and business. Every venture must know the profitability of its company and that it is scalable in the long term, or bankruptcy will be inevitable. Estephanía Ramírez, Operations Manager of Bamboo Payment, who is also a financial specialist, tells us that whoever enters the journey of undertaking “needs to learn and reinforce their knowledge of finance and have management in the face of errors”, because it is something that will be inevitable.
Ecommerce and digital marketing. Without sales there is no business. If you already have the product or service, now it is necessary that you can communicate it using digital marketing tools and strategies, for this it is necessary to train. On the other hand, ecommerce is essential so that your product or service can be sold online according to the objectives of the company and its campaigns.
“You can have the best product, the best service, but if nobody knows about it, it loses its value. There are several disciplines of digital marketing with which you can start, among them: social networks, content, email marketing, ecommerce, among others. It is important to migrate your knowledge of selling physically and now doing it digitally”, adds Contreras de Tappoyo.
SOFT SKILLS
Resilience. It is important to understand that an entrepreneur will always encounter difficulties and you have to know how to face them, take advantage of them, and see strategies to overcome any adversity.
Communication. You have to learn to communicate to be able to make alliances, businesses, and other activities.
Discipline. Organizing yourself to achieve your goals is something that will define the success of your business. For this you must focus, always deliver the best product, and have courage so that you can do it without fear of failure.
THE FINANCIAL GAP FOR WOMEN
A main gap for women when undertaking according to the IEP is the lack of access to technical education, including financial and ecommerce to increase the productivity of their ventures.
In the case of Tappoyo, they created their network of allies in action to provide financial education to rural women, which has benefited the regions of Ucayali, San Martín, Huánuco, Junín and Lima, and in this way they can safely access loans .
In Latin America, of every 10 credits, 3 are given to women. And in rural areas of Peru, only 1 out of 10. This happens because they are women with little income or no credit history, and there is no bank in their area.
“For the banks, these women are invisible because they focus on seeing the past of the entrepreneurs and they cannot reach these areas because there are operating costs. On the other hand, for more than 90% of this population, fintechs are unknown because they focus on serving the same target audience and these women are afraid of operating digitally and that makes more than 80% of these women resort to informal loans with usurious interests that bleed their businesses and that physically and psychologically violate them at the time of collecting them.” adds Contreras de Tappoyo.
