Many women business owners around the world can’t get access to the financing they need. The Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative, a World Bank–housed partnership, estimated that 400 million female entrepreneurs struggle to get loans, and serving them could lead to as much as $6 trillion in added value to the global economy.
Yet across the Asia-Pacific region, banks hesitate to lend to women entrepreneurs. That’s partly owing to stereotypes, but it’s also because lending criteria weren’t designed to capture how female-led small and medium-size enterprises operate. As Diana Tjoeng, head of Asia for Sydney-based NGO Good Return, points out, female business owners may lack official identity documents and formal credit histories, even if they have run their businesses for decades.
