Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with you today. It's a pleasure to be here.
The Women's Enterprise Organizations of Canada is an association of resource centres across the country that support women entrepreneurs. Our diverse membership directly impacts their growth and success by providing them with business supports including advising, training, mentorship and networking.
I'm going to start calling it WEOC, because Women's Enterprise Organizations of Canada is quite the mouthful. Throughout the year, WEOC offers a variety of resources, professional development supports and events that are specifically designed for those who advise, guide, mentor and counsel women and non-binary entrepreneurs. Our goal is to ensure that the advisers have the knowledge and experience to support the entrepreneurs in the best possible way.
As you all know, access to capital remains a significant barrier for many women entrepreneurs seeking to start or grow their businesses. I began working in the women's enterprise ecosystem in 2002. At that time, women entrepreneurs faced significant barriers when attempting to access capital for their businesses. I'm sad to say that over the past 20 years, that situation has not changed dramatically.
In 2021-22, we conducted a two-year study on women entrepreneurs' access to capital. This research was an opportunity to speak directly to women entrepreneurs and learn about their experiences accessing or attempting to access business capital. In total we connected with 1,024 women from across the country, who responded to our survey and participated in focus groups and one-on-one interviews. We published the findings in the report called “Bootstrap or Borrow?”. The resulting data identified systemic barriers that prevent women entrepreneurs from accessing growth capital.
During the research we had some powerful messages from the women we spoke to. Many of the respondents have mental models of Canada's funders that render them pessimistic about the chances of successful funding outcomes. Of the respondents, 40% believed that, “they won't lend to [someone] like me”. Racialized and indigenous entrepreneurs are at least three times more likely than their non-intersectional counterparts to feel that banks would be biased or would discriminate in their dealings with them.
For many women, the default option is either personal savings or credit cards. These were the only sources of funding used by 50% of the survey respondents. The decision to use credit cards or deplete personal savings can have long-term effects that may not be fully appreciated at the time that they are used to support a start-up or growth.
In the long term, our goal for funders is to examine the ways and the processes that they use that may negatively impact women entrepreneurs, who often have a value-based approach to business that doesn't necessarily align with a key funding ecosystem that is not considered to be responsive to their needs, lacks products for women who do not meet the customary criteria for creditworthiness and at times is biased against them.
Perhaps, serendipitously, as we were finishing the 2022 research, we learned that WEOC was selected to deliver a portion of the new national microloan fund, which is part of the women entrepreneurship strategy. The loan fund is for women as they start, scale, grow and maintain their businesses.
What we learned during the research has been foundational in the processes and procedures that we have implemented in the management of the women entrepreneurship loan fund that we administer.
We had our first loans out in November 2022, and this fund is a game-changer for women entrepreneurs, many of whom are unable to access financing from other sources. We work with loan partners across the country, who prepare the women entrepreneurs to apply for the loan, helping them to prepare a business plan and financial projections to work through the processes and apply for the loan. Our goal is to reduce the barriers that prevent them from borrowing, such as credit scores and security.
As you know, injections of capital have—