Hello, and thank you very much for allowing me to present to your standing committee.
I am Laurel Douglas, the CEO of Women's Enterprise Centre in British Columbia. I'm also on the board of the Women's Enterprise Organizations of Canada, which is our national association of service providers to women entrepreneurs.
I thought what I would like to do today is to give you a little bit of background about Women's Enterprise Centre. I think you heard from my colleague Sandra Altner last week, so I won't go into too much detail about that. I'll also talk a little bit about our national association, some barriers that women entrepreneurs face, some solutions, and some recommendations.
As you might already know, the Women's Enterprise Initiative was created in 1995, so we've been around for a little over 20 years now. We provide business loans of up to $150,000, training on business skills, and business advisory services. We also respond to inquiries for business information.
Every year, we help about 3,000 women business owners in B.C., provide a couple of thousand business advisory services, and lend a couple of million dollars. This lending is actually really important for us because one of the main barriers women entrepreneurs face is access to capital. In addition to the lending we provide, we also help women business owners access capital from other sources.
The loan program—this entire initiative—was created by a federal government regional development agency, Western Economic Diversification. The reason is that at the time we started, and since then, they've done studies to determine whether there are gaps or challenges that are specifically unique to women business owners, and if so, what they are and how the federal government can help.
Basically, women entrepreneurs start businesses with less business training and management experience than their male counterparts, so that's something we can help with. In addition, they do have some barriers in terms of accessing capital that men don't typically face. They also have some attitudinal and motivational differences in terms of why they start their businesses and what motivates them to grow.
Overall, obtaining financing is repeatedly the most common barrier that women entrepreneurs face to grow their businesses. Some of the reasons that is the case are their own perceived need for financing and their tendency to borrow smaller amounts.
Our organization does two things. It helps with the hard skills, but it also helps change attitudes so that the women entrepreneurs understand that if they borrow an adequate amount of money to finance their growth, they will end up succeeding much better.
Even at start-up, they have a different pattern of financing. The average woman business owner right now borrows $65,000, and the average male business owner has $350,000 of debt. You might perceive that as a higher exposure, but it also means that male-owned businesses have more capital with which to expand their businesses and invest.
Women also have lower approval ratings for short-term credit, and they feel that their limited track record makes it harder for them to access financing from traditional sources.
There are numerous barriers that we try to help them overcome. These include their own confidence levels and their own resources and skills.
The national association that we have, WEOC, works hard to make sure that those resources are available across the country. Personally, I just got back from the W20, the summit related to the women's engagement group, which is part of the G20 and which you may have heard about in the news. It was very high-profile this year because Ivanka Trump was one of the participants at it.
We have a communiqué, which all G20 countries agreed to, calling on G20 member states to support women entrepreneurs, to help them start and scale their operations, build capacity, ensure equal access to finance and markets, and ensure their fair share in global value chains.
Global value chains are definitely an opportunity for women business owners. Procurement from large corporations and government agencies is a major part of the economy, and it's an area in which women have typically been left out because of a lack of networks and lack of experience in that area.
Overall, I think my colleague would have mentioned that right now we'd like to help women entrepreneurs across the country access the same services that WD has helped us provide in western Canada through a national loan fund, working with our member organizations. We really think it's important to share best practices across the country, so that women anywhere in the country can access the far-reaching holistic services we're able to provide and achieve the performance we're able to help them get.
Thank you very much for your attention.