Women entrepreneurs are leading the country’s small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) business, overcoming various obstacles in the male-dominated society.
Their participation in the SME fairs is also increasing. In the National SME Fair 2018, the participation of women entrepreneurs was higher than the men ones, official data shows.
It also shows that out of 268 participants in the fair, 183 were women entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, the rate of women SME entrepreneurs was about 68 per cent.
A total of 85 entrepreneurs—56 women and 29 men—took part in the fair. They all set up 100 stalls in the SME fair, reports BSS.
SME Foundation has been organising the fair every year since 2012, drawing quite a good response from the sector-wise businesses.
Their participation in the country’s SME fair was 56 per cent in 2013, while 74 per cent in 2014, 66 per cent in 2016 and 61.5 per cent in 2017, according to the data.
M Safiqul Islam, managing director of the SME Foundation, said, "Women entrepreneurs are taking all challenges to work in a male-dominated, competitive and complex economic business environment."
"Women entrepreneurs are now able to promote their products at local and international levels through the fair...there are huge participation of women entrepreneurs even at district level fairs" he said.
Safiqul urged both public and private sectors to give more efforts for increasing the number of women entrepreneurs in the SME sector as they are doing well in business.
"There are a huge potential of the women entrepreneurs as they are sincere and committed to their business," he added.
SME Foundation and the Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FBCCI) jointly organised the SME Fair-2018 for the sixth time in the capital during April 4 to April 8 this year.