Gender Dimensions of Rural Entrepreneurship

Last month, 29 May, DEBUTING partner Sodena attended an interactive workshop organized by Interreg Europe in Burgos, Spain, to discuss how to promote entrepreneurship in rural areas.

Entrepreneurship is an important component of place reinvention and economic diversification strategies in stabilizing or reverting population trends in rural areas experiencing population decline. The workshop aimed to promote individiual entrepreneurial initiatives but also to maximise their chanves of having a lasting positive effect on local economic prosperity.

The workshop was divided in several sessions and one of them focused in gender dimensions of rural entrepreneurship, covering for example whether rural areas should make full use of the entrepreneurial potential of women, what obstacles still persist and how can gender perspective on entrepreneurship make a difference?

After some discussion and some good practice, the participants agreed on the importance of promoting entrepreneurship among women in rural areas as a solution to relocation and improving gender inequality. Here are some conclusions of the session:

• To promote entrepreneurship for women, it is important to give a complete training to people who want to become entrepreneurs and to support them not only at the beginning but also in the first years of their business.
• A woman who starts her own business acquires a better self-esteem, which can help in the fight against gender inequality.
• It was also detected that rural women should have a certain level of services to help support e.g. with childcare.
• Infrastructures and telecommunications are vital in the rural environment, there should not be such a big gap between cities and villages.
• Giving visibility for successful women in rural areas is one of the recommendations that emerged, which has also come up in DEBUTING project.