Entrepreneurship & Small Business Development

"Local minority businesses are pushing for reforms they say will get more of the Los Angeles city government's $1.1 billion in annual contracts into the hands of such firms and those owned by women and service-disabled military veterans.  A report advocating the reforms "The Case for Minority Business Contracting Reform in the City of Los Angeles," was released Oct. 19 by the Greater Los Angeles African American Chamber of Commerce. It argued that the proposals would contribute to the city's overall economic recovery.

The report called for the city to steer 35% of the contractual funds to small, local businesses owned by racial minorities and women. An additional 8% would go to businesses owned by service-disabled veterans. Minority-owned firms now get 7% of those funds.  Still, small firms said they have trouble even finding jobs to bid on because the city's several dozen departments often post contract opportunities separately. The small businesses also say that all too often business contracts are awarded based on relationships that deep-pocketed firms have an easier time establishing.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa  who spoke at the news conference where the contract reform report was unveiled, has promised more transparency in awarding contracts and said his office would complete an executive directive by the end of the year to implement changes to procurement policies.  'This isn't just the right thing to do; it's a smart, business-savvy thing to do in a city that's probably close to 70% of color," Villaraigosa said. "A larger pool of qualified bidders will result in more competitive bidding, and thus the goal is more savings for the city and a recycling of dollars in our community.'"

"Women...are the economic backbone of today's Rwanda. The 1994 genocide left behind a population 70 percent female and when the bloodshed stopped it was women who picked up the pieces and started to rebuild. 

Today there are more women in Rwanda's parliament than any other country in the world. Laws have been passed so they can own land and wives can legally keep their assets separate from their husbands. All steps the government is taking to help Rwandese women gain an equal hand at politics and business.

Entrepreneur Joy Ndungutse is another woman who uses basket weaving to earn a living. It's a tradition passed on from mother to daughter in Rwanda and after the genocide it was the one skill women all over the country had in common. When the violence ended, Ndungutse gathered the wives of victims and killers, so they could weave together.This was not about a gift, this is not a donation, this is about putting women to work," Lundgren said. "Women who have been impacted, lost their families, their husbands, their sons to genocide. They had this skill and this was just translating that skill into a product that could be sold to create a living for these women.

You can see that the women are now thinking beyond only digging, cooking, staying home. They are now thinking like entrepreneurs," she said.  Ndungutse wants women to leave her company to start their own businesses. But there are challenges. Many will need loans, and with high interest rates and Rwandan banks still dominated by men, startup money is still not easy to access."So now we are looking, how can we overcome that problem? We must have women in these financial institutions who can understand these problems," she said."

"Only 14 women in the world have amassed personal fortunes of $1 billion or more--just 2% of all self-made billionaires. Why so few? By contrast, 665 men are self-made billionaires including the three richest people in the world.

All of these self-made female billionaires have impressive personal stories, but the dearth of them is itself a story, and begs the question of why so few? One explanation has to do with the fact that while women in the United States start their own businesses at roughly twice the rate of men, they are still playing catch-up in most parts of the world.Women are still at the beginning of their journey to entrepreneurship or higher levels of entrepreneurship, says Sharon Hadary, the former and founding executive director of the Center for Women's Business Research. According to that group, only 20% of all businesses over $1 million are women-owned enterprises.

Then there are more fundamental issues related to personal goals. It seems that men more often define success in monetary terms while women focus on vision and mission. "Men tend to start businesses to grow them to be large and to be the boss while women start them to do something meaningful and to make a difference," notes Hadary, who now consults on women's leadership through her firm Sharon Hadary."