I am CEO and Co-founder of Collective Changes, a collaborative effort including the best tools, templates, resources, corporations and people mentoring women in emerging markets to become economically empowered by growing businesses, jobs and attaining leadership skills.
Working with “resourced” women in emerging economies, who have access to technology and some education, we help them grow skills that allow them to launch their businesses, build networks, find mentors and complete business plans to enable them to access credit beyond micro-finance. The mentees are then able to become mentors in their community after they graduate, building sustaining groups of businesswomen that support each other.
My motivation for this work came when I was reading The Coming Jobs War by Jim Clifton that pointed out, if we failed to grow jobs, we would fail the coming generations, leading to social, political and economic unrest. I then read an article about the number of women who started businesses and failed – 127 million women from 63 global economies with an 80% failure rate in the first year – due to a lack of five main skills – access to networks, mentors, “just in time” business and leadership skills and access to capital.
I realized that the resources were available and, if we pulled them into one program, we could stem the failure rate. It became evident that something had to be done rather than continue to talk about it. So I and my husband invested our retirement account into developing the program.
United Nations (UNDP 2008) reports show programs like these reduce gender-based violence, increase GDP in emerging markets and contribute to social, civic and economic stability. We are currently working with another global company to bring broadband connectivity to potentially 500,000 post office hubs around the world to make our programming available to women entrepreneurs, providing them access to connectivity, curricula, technology, networks, volunteer business leaders and mentors.
We work with the World Bank SME Toolkit, Chronus Mentoring Software, GLEAN Leadership Skills, Ministers of Gender and Youth from UN, human resource and corporate social responsibility programing from multinational corporations and foundations which provide our mentors, and the scholarships, to support our programming.
In doing this work, we certainly are a lot richer in experience (although poorer in retirement funds) and have met some amazing people who wanted to engage in similar efforts. We have traveled the world and spoken at numerous global women’s summits, international economic conferences and universities on the importance of growing networks for successful business development, mentoring and the need for credit beyond micro-finance for jobs growth.
The life cycle of humanity is a circle of beginnings and endings. We are born without the ability to walk or talk, we learn, we grow, we develop, we create, we explore and we become vessels of knowledge, wisdom and experience. We have the time and ability to share the acquired skills of a lifetime. It isn’t enough to sit back and waste those talents and skills – we become valuable natural resources for the world to harvest and cultivate. It is incredibly shortsighted to let these natural resources lie undiscovered and below the surface.