To help women-led MSMEs is to understand them first

You probably know someone in your neighborhood: the woman who built a small business out of nothing, who knows every one of her regular customers by name, and who has spent years running that business at exactly the same size it was when she started. She doesn’t lack ambition; she’s just operating within a system that makes it difficult for her to grow.

This is the story behind most women-led enterprises. Micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) create six out of every 10 jobs in the Philippines and generate more than a third of the country’s gross value added. A meaningful share of them are run by women. And yet many stay small: informal, undercapitalized, confined to one neighborhood, and dependent entirely on the owner’s own two hands.

Ask any MSME owner why, and you’ll hear the same complaint: doing business in the Philippines is hard mode. Government programs are generous with getting a business started, offering training, seed funding, or livelihood grants. But the moment that business formalizes, it runs into a maze of tax compliance, labor rules, permits, and reporting requirements built with large corporations in mind.

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For women, that burden comes stacked on top of another one. Take a mother who runs a small catering business out of her home. Her food is good enough that she could easily be supplying three times as many events as she does now. But she’s also the one who takes care of the house and looks after the kids, the one who has no property to put up for a loan, and the one whose entire client list came from word of mouth in her own barangay because no one ever introduced her to the buyers, bankers, or officials who could help her take the next step. Her business isn’t struggling. It’s just stuck, for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of her food.

Cutting red tape for small businesses is the right instinct. But it’s not enough without support designed to address the specific challenges women entrepreneurs face. If we want more women-led businesses to grow past the neighborhood level, the support has to be built around how these businesses actually run.

A few changes would make a real difference.

Lend against the business, not the paperwork. Plenty of women run businesses that work with steady customers, consistent sales, and real cash flow, but have no land title to put up as collateral and no formal credit history. Assessing cash flow, digital transaction records, purchase orders, and repayment behavior instead of property ownership would open real capital to entrepreneurs who have already proven they can manage it.

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Meet women where their time already is. Training and mentoring sessions that only happen during office hours exclude anyone who can’t step away from a shop or a household. Evening sessions, recorded modules, or shorter blocks that fit around a school pickup allow more women to participate without sacrificing family or business.

Don’t just open the door, clear the path to it. A free training program means nothing to a mother who has nowhere to leave her kids for the afternoon. Childcare allowances, family-friendly venues, or schedules that align with the school calendar remove barriers for women.

Build the networks that don’t currently exist. Business, at its core, runs on relationships; many women entrepreneurs, especially those outside Metro Manila, simply don’t have those relationships to draw on. Mentorship programs, peer networks, and regular access to the people who make purchasing and lending decisions would do as much for a woman’s business as any grant. As part of Network for Enterprising Women (NEW), we created Women Entrepreneurs for Economic and Regional Advancement (WEERA) to augment this gap and support women entrepreneurs in the region.

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Women aren’t starting from the same place as everyone else, and support that ignores that will keep missing the people it’s meant to help. The payoff compounds from there. Women tend to reinvest what they earn straight back into their families—food, school, and health care—so when their business grows, so does everyone around them. This is what inclusive growth looks like in practice.

Women entrepreneurs already show up in the places big businesses overlook: smaller towns, informal markets, communities that mainstream investment rarely reaches. Help them grow, and growth stops being something that happens mainly in major cities. It starts reaching the rest of the country too.

Women-led MSMEs deserve to be treated as a starting point, not an afterthought. The national government, business regulatory agencies, and local governments each hold a lever they can pull directly to remove hurdles that were never fair to begin with. Get this right, and inclusive growth stops being a slogan. It becomes the natural result of letting the majority of the country’s entrepreneurs actually grow.

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Mitzi Sabando is PRO of NEW and founder of WEERA. She advocates for women-led enterprises, regional entrepreneurship, and inclusive economic growth.