Finclusion: Supporting Small Business Women

Context

Women-led small medium enterprises (W-SMEs) in Indonesia often lack access to receive financial training, services, and loans from banks to grow their businesses. Banks and other financial service providers maintain a gender neutral approach in promoting and providing their services, and as a result, they do not recognize and address specific barriers faced by women entrepreneurs.

Women entrepreneurs, constituting nearly half of small and medium enterprise owners, plays a vital role in Indonesia’s economic resilience and recovery. However, they often face hurdles such as limited financial knowledge, property ownership, networking opportunities, mobility constraints due to household responsibilities, and dependence on spouses for decision-making.

Business Training and Loans to Small Business Women

To bridge the gap, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and PT Impact Credit Solutions (ICS) / Nikel Academy are collaborating to offer a range of financial training and services to expand their businesses. Nikel will engage banks to understand their lending challenges, identify, and implement mutually beneficial solutions including investing in digital lending solutions to unlock W-SMEs potential as borrowers.

Results

By end of 2024, USAID, through Nikel, aims to achieve the followings:

Develop and launch a public web-based platform for 180,000 Indonesian W-SMEs to access business and financial training;
Develop a closed-loop web-based platform that is integrated with banks to train 8,000 bank-nominated W-SMEs to attend in-depth online-and-offline SME business, digital literacy, and financial management training. Out of 8,000, the goal is to approve fifty percent (approximately 4,000) W-SMEs for local bank loans;
Partner with local banks and other financial institutions to take part in the training program and to commit in providing approximately $50 million in loans to eligible WSMEs graduates.