Vital Voices Global Accelerator for women entrepreneurs

The Vital Voices (VV) GROW programme is an established global acceleration programme that targets women owners of small and medium growing businesses who take responsibility in improving their respective societies. In 2018, Argidius partnered with Vital Voices, providing a grant enabling them to continue expanding their services and elevate their work more prominently in the SME space, while allowing learning and the potential creation of collaborative partnerships within the ecosystem. 138 enterprises have participated, representing a wide variety of countries and sizes (from $1k to $17M). Fundraising only reached 50% of the total intended target, resulting a reduction of services to the enterprises and a lower cost per enterprise of c.$20k per enterprise. Two and a half years into the three-year project, Argidius initiated an evaluation to assess the effectiveness of the model and how the programme contributed to the success of supported women-owned businesses and how these women are in turn becoming role models and leaders in their communities. 

Key findings

• The GROW program was found to be quite effective. Contributions to important changes in participants businesses were evident in five of the eight case-studied entrepreneurs with evidence the program contributed to an increase in business resilience and finding new avenues to generate income. However, participants had a difficult 2020, with companies' revenues decreasing by 50% on average, and 70% of companies overall constricting. Net employment increased due to the growth of a couple of large outliers, and there was at least one notable investment helped by the increased visisbility the program brought. 
  • Participants particularly valued the strategic planning module, which supported half of the interviewed entrepreneurs to improve their business models and value proposition. The 2019 cohort found the in-person training contributed to improvements in leadership skills, such as mind-set shifts that fed into key business decisions, and enabled participants to form valuable connections with peers.
  • However, the Growth Services and Support (GSS), reduced significantly in scope by the fundraising shortfalls, were not recognized as a valuable service, the one-on-one support, while valued, was too limited, and the networking and leadership aspects suffered as a result of the program moving online in 2020.
  • The applicability, relevance and coherence of different aspects of training program, and the ability of entrepreneurs to navigate available services and the alumni network depended on their profiles, which varied considerably.
• Most entrepreneurs are ‘’paying it forward’’ as active community leaders carrying out activities such as women’s empowerment projects, and a subset are influencing policy in their communities.