With women comprising more than half the population in Bangladesh, accelerating women entrepreneurship is pivotal to its socioeconomic development. Nevertheless, women entrepreneurs continue to constitute less than 10% of the total business enterprises in Bangladesh. This can be attributed to the many barriers that disproportionately impact women entrepreneurs, both, when starting and scaling up a business – legal and regulatory environment, firm/owner-specific characteristics (e.g. education, training, size of firm, etc.) and cultural barriers. However, their greatest disadvantage is their inability to access finance. Bangladesh was observed to be amongst the worst performing countries in terms of women’s access to credit, property other than land, inheritance practices and social rights – ranking 97 out of 1061.

Given this backdrop, the key objectives of this study were to:

• Map the potential opportunity in facilitating finance to women SMEs in Bangladesh and estimate the current financing gap
• Develop comprehensive sectoral knowledge of the ecosystem that women SME entrepreneurs operate in
• Identify the major challenges faced by women SME entrepreneurs in availing finance from financial institutions
• Identify key areas of focus, which could improve financing for women SME entrepreneurs