Low-income women in developing countries rely heavily on commercial, small-scale farm- and home-based microenterprises for their family livelihood. The field of business development services (BDS) attempts to help microentrepreneurs stabilize and grow their businesses by providing them with access to a range of critical services from training to technology, market access, and infrastructure. Best practices in BDS recommend developing commercial, business-to-business service markets as the most sustainable way to reach large numbers of microenterprises. One critique of this “BDS market development approach” is that the approach is not effective at reaching low-income microentrepreneurs. In particular, low-income women microentrepreneurs are perceived to be largely disconnected from BDS markets due to cultural and social constraints.

The BDS Working Group of the SEEP Network sought to explore these assumptions and effective ways for BDS market development initiatives to benefit low-income women.