Empowering Lives in Rural Nepal: a local perspective on female entrepreneurship

Abstract

Women in Asia are an increasingly significant entrepreneurial force and strongly contributing to local, regional and national economy as they represent the majority of informal traders in most developing countries. However, women still remain the largest under-represented group in terms of visibility as entrepreneurs and micro-enterprises owners. Particularly in South Asia, the entrepreneurial process still mirrors several constraints and vulnerabilities that might confine to traditional patterns people willing to take the risk and invest on their own. The self-employment status and women in entrepreneurship have been growing in less developed economies, as a form of livelihood for women themselves and usually to help support their families. Nevertheless, the entrepreneurial process is exceptionally critical for rural women as they face deep embedded structural and socio-cultural constraints, such as female seclusion and gender segregation, which strongly limit women’s abilities to lead prosperous and profitable businesses.Therefore, due to gender discrimination, women tend to be granted an inferior status over time in nearly every aspect of life. With regard to human poverty, one should define it as being much more than income poverty. People are poor not only because of low income, but also because of their low access to opportunities or their participation in them. Therefore, apart from the effort to facilitate financial access to the poorest of the pyramid, there is also a need to change traditions and ensure equal and greater social, political and economic opportunities for poor women, so they can fully make use of female potential in contributing to household livelihood, local development and societal participation. As a livelihood strategy, an increasing number of Nepali women are now part of local rural non-farm economies through entrepreneurial processes and businesses. Living in such a patriarchal society with an estimated unemployment rate of 46 per cent rural women have decided to step into their own sustainable future through involvement in owned non-farm economic activities. When economic independence and/or access to self- generated income are major concerns, it is widely recognized that involvement in income-generating activities can effectively empower rural women to reshape their lives. Subsequently, female entrepreneurship in general is often seen as a potential way out of poverty and a march towards gender equity with the potential to empower lives of women on a multidimensional basis. This observation appears especially accurate if one considers Nepal as being one of the most gender unequal and poorest countries in South Asia. However, as the idea of women in business has only recently become more common and socially accepted across the country, it is not surprising that encouragement and recognition of women in the private sector have increased over the last decade, backed by growth in the microfinance sector. In this sense, while struggling to improve their lives in an environment of high unemployment and political unrest over the past ten years, more Nepalese women have entered into private enterprise. Given this background, in order to empower rural women to realize their full potential as independent economic actors in the non-farm sector, it seems relevant to address the struggles faced by rural women and to understand the different needs that women in the private sector have along the entrepreneurial process. However, instead of looking exclusively at what is still preventing women from increasing income and expanding ongoing microenterprises, it is important to emphasize what kind of strengths have enabled women to achieve success and contribute to improved livelihoods across rural landscapes. For this purpose, a field research was conducted in Makwanpur District, Nepal in order to get insight into opportunities, constraints and key factors influencing the success of microenterprises of rural women involved in non-farm sector, and to assess how female entrepreneurship contributes to women economic empowerment.