CHAPTER 01

Executive Summary
1. Executive Summary

Womens economic empowerment is an inevitable part of development discourse. Excluding

women from the mainstream development program, institutionalization of a sustainable
development process is just unthinkable. Peoples long lasting thrust for a participatory
democracy in Bangladesh also requires a sustainable economic growth. Nevertheless, this growth
would always be untouchable without active and meaningful participation of the countrys
women folks. Having proper information is always a power. Lack of this power has made
women entrepreneurs unable to claim their rights in a justified and structured way.

By nature, it is an explorative study aiming at having an overview of the situation of women

entrepreneurs in Sylhet and Dhaka , Bangladesh. The main thematic issues covered by this study
are perception of women entrepreneurs-A study in Sylhet and Dhaka region of Bangladesh.
The study also focused womens access to finance, business management, product and design
development, marketing and the issues related to business promotion. The study tried to explore
the perceptions of women entrepreneurs, their conditions and position in family. Overall
perception of women entrepreneurs about existing business environment were also tried to
discover through this study. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods adopting
participatory data collection processes were applied to explore information from 15 women
respondents of this district in Bangladesh. A semi-structured questionnaire survey was conducted
from November 25 to November 29, 2017. Data we reanalysed using various statistical software
including MSWord and Excel.

The survey findings also show that women entrepreneurs, particularly the local women, lack the
capacity of business management. They are in need of building capacity in marketing, business
promotion, accounting and bookkeeping, product and design development, ICT, e-commerce and
regulatory process, etc. The opportunity of training was found to be very limited. The roles of
public training providing agencies were not satisfactory. NGOs are providing some training with
limited scales.
Regarding overall business environment for women entrepreneurs, most of the women
entrepreneurs were found to be satisfied and they mentioned that, despite traditional negative
attitudes, the overall business atmosphere is becoming favourable for women. It is also observed
that the involvement of women in business does not emancipate them from the traditional roles
in family. As a result, being involvement in business creates double burden and increase working
times for women. In terms of marginalization, the local and rural women were found to be more
vulnerable as most of them lack access to necessary information. They also do not have access to
public and private institutions. Respondents also expressed their dissatisfaction about the roles of
the local chamber of commerce; even some respondents mentioned that they did not know
anything about the activities of the chamber of commerce in their localities.

This report is an output of a descriptive study on the situation of women entrepreneurs in Sylhet
and Dhaka . The report is divided into six distinguished parts.

The first chapter is executive summary.

The second chapter describes introduction, objectives of the study. It also highlights on major
thematic areas of the study.

The third chapter focuses research methodology, sampling process, data collection tools, data
processing and analysis.

The fourth chapter presents data analysis obtained from questionnaire survey.

The fifth chapter presents recommendations. Conclusions