Purpose on its own is not a business model

This story has significance for readers across Kenya and beyond.

Men are often taught to pitch around profitability while women go around purpose.

It is a simple distinction, but it reveals something much deeper about how we teach both gender to understand ambition. A man presenting a business idea is often encouraged to explain the opportunity: the size of the market, the revenue potential, the margins, the growth trajectory and return an investor can expect.

A woman with an equally ambitious idea is more likely to explain the problem she is solving, the people she will help, the communities she will transform and the social impact she hopes to create.

Both conversations have value. But they are not the same.

For too long, women have been taught to make their ambitions useful before they are allowed to monetise them. We are comfortable hearing women speak about purpose, impact, resilience and service. We are less accustomed to hearing them talk, without qualification, about wealth, profitability, valuation, compensation, ownership and return.

This is not an argument against purpose. Purpose matters. Businesses can solve important problems, create employment and transform communities. But purpose should not become the price women have to pay for being taken seriously when they express ambition.

A woman should be able to say that she wants to build a company worth millions because she sees an extraordinary commercial opportunity. She should be able to negotiate a higher salary because she knows the value of her work, seek equity because she wants ownership, or pursue a senior position because she is qualified and wants the authority that comes with it.

She should be able to say that she wants to become wealthy without first explaining what she intends to do with that wealth for everyone else.

There is nothing inherently selfish about wanting to make money. There is, however, something economically dangerous about teaching half the population to be uncomfortable talking about it.

Perhaps nowhere is this contradiction more visible than in the way we support women entrepreneurs. We have become very good at mentoring them.

We have built programmes around leadership, entrepreneurship and confidence, organised networking sessions, pitch competitions and workshops; and encouraged women to develop their personal brands, find mentors and strengthen their communication skills.

These interventions have value. Soft skills matter enormously in business. The ability to communicate, negotiate, build relationships, lead teams and persuade others can determine whether an opportunity is won or lost. But soft skills cannot compensate for a structural shortage of capital, market access or decision-making power.

There comes a point when another workshop is not the missing ingredient.

Women can be over-mentored and underfunded. They can have a mentor, a coach, a business plan and a network and still be unable to buy the equipment required to fulfil a large order. They can know how to pitch and still lack the capital to hire the person they need. They can attend every entrepreneurship seminar in town and still be unable to access a corporate procurement contract.

According to the International Finance Corporation, women-owned small and medium enterprises in emerging markets and developing economies accounted for only 19 percent of outstanding SME loan volume in 2024, despite representing more than a third of MSMEs.

The average loan to a women-owned SME was also 28 percent smaller than the average SME loan. In Kenya, IFC estimates that only about seven percent of women-owned micro, small and medium enterprises have formal access to finance.

These figures should change the emphasis of the conversation. And capital is not only money. It is access to customers, procurement, investors, decision-makers and the networks where large opportunities are discussed before they become public.

A woman does not need another introduction if the person she has been introduced to has no authority to open a door. She needs access to the person who can.

Perhaps the next phase of women’s economic empowerment should involve less instruction on how to make ambition palatable and more education on how to make ambition economically powerful.

The questions we ask matter

The financing gap is also about how commercial potential is perceived. Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that investors asked male and female entrepreneurs systematically different kinds of questions.

Men were more likely to receive promotion-focused questions about aspirations, achievements and gains, while women were more likely to receive prevention-focused questions about risks, losses and safeguards.

The distinction is subtle but consequential. One entrepreneur is invited to describe how large the opportunity can become; the other is asked primarily to explain how she will avoid failure.

This does not mean every investor consciously discriminates against women, nor does it mean women should simply learn to behave more like men. It does, however, demonstrate that gender can influence the frame through which commercial potential is assessed.

Women should therefore become more comfortable presenting their businesses as commercial propositions. Not because purpose is irrelevant, but because purpose alone does not establish viability. A strong pitch should be able to answer both questions: why does this matter, and why will it make money?

This is also an employment story

The same issue extends beyond entrepreneurship. We have become so accustomed to speaking about women’s economic empowerment through the language of entrepreneurship that we sometimes forget that economic ambition also lives in employment.

Yet women are often encouraged to frame these ambitions through their usefulness to others. We ask how they will mentor younger women, create opportunities or become role models.

Those are worthwhile outcomes, but they should not displace the economic questions: What is her work worth? What should she be paid? What level of responsibility should she hold? What ownership should she have? What wealth can she build?

The World Bank estimates that women accounted for 47.4 percent of Kenya’s labour force in 2025. Participation, however, is not the same as economic power. The quality of employment, remuneration, security, progression and access to leadership determine whether participation translates into genuine economic independence.

A woman should not have to explain that she wants a promotion because she wants to inspire other women.

Perhaps she wants it because she is qualified and wants the authority that comes with it. She should not have to justify negotiating a higher salary by explaining how the additional income will support her family. Perhaps she simply wants to be compensated according to the value she creates.

This is not selfishness. It is economic agency.

We need a different kind of fluency

Perhaps the next phase of women’s economic empowerment should involve less instruction on how to make ambition palatable and more education on how to make ambition economically powerful.

Women should certainly learn to communicate, negotiate, build relationships, lead teams and present themselves with confidence.

But alongside these skills, they need the harder commercial vocabulary of financial statements, pricing, valuation, equity, investment and capital. An entrepreneur should know her margins and understand what it costs to acquire a customer. A professional should understand her market value.

A senior executive should understand the financial performance of the organisation she leads. A founder should be able to explain not only why her product matters, but why customers will pay for it and why the opportunity can scale.Soft skills open doors. Commercial fluency determines what you can negotiate once you are inside.

We should therefore be careful about an empowerment model that teaches women how to speak confidently in rooms without teaching them how the economics of those rooms work.

Confidence is valuable, but confidence without financial literacy can still leave a person negotiating from a position of weakness.

Networking cannot substitute for access to capital, and mentorship cannot substitute for an actual opportunity.

Purpose and profit belong at the same table

We should also reconsider the way we celebrate women when they succeed. We are quick to describe successful women as inspirational, resilient, selfless, community-minded or empowering. These qualities may be entirely deserved, but sometimes they obscure the achievement itself.

A woman who builds a profitable company has built a profitable company. A woman who negotiates a significant salary has negotiated her value. A woman who accumulates wealth has accumulated wealth. These achievements do not require an additional moral explanation before they become legitimate.

A successful man is often allowed to simply be successful. His company grew. His valuation increased. He acquired another company. He built wealth. We rarely ask whether his ambition was sufficiently altruistic.

Women deserve the same freedom.

The answer is not to replace purpose with profit. It is to refuse the false choice between them. A business can be deeply purposeful and fiercely commercial.

A company can create jobs, solve a social problem and generate extraordinary returns. A professional can care deeply about meaningful work and still negotiate hard for compensation. An entrepreneur can want to transform her community and become wealthy from doing it.

There is no contradiction. Indeed, the strongest form of purpose may be one that is commercially sustainable. A profitable organisation has more capacity to employ people, innovate, withstand shocks, expand into new markets and continue pursuing the work that gave it purpose in the first place. Purpose may be the reason a business exists, but commercial discipline is what allows it to endure.

This is why the language we use matters. If we continue telling women that their greatest contribution is the impact they make on everyone around them, we risk overlooking their ability to accumulate economic power for themselves.

We need to talk about women owning companies, not simply starting them; entering supply chains, not simply attending networking events; being promoted, not simply mentored; and accumulating assets, not simply earning incomes.

The real test of empowerment is not how many women have been trained, mentored or invited into rooms, but what those interventions enable them to do once they leave them.

A woman who emerges from a programme with greater confidence but no greater access to capital, markets, decision-making or economic security has gained something valuable, but the structural barrier remains.

We should be interested in the conversion of support into economic power: whether knowledge becomes enterprise, whether networks become opportunity, whether employment becomes advancement, and whether income ultimately becomes ownership and wealth.

This is where the conversation needs to become more ambitious. We should not be satisfied with preparing women for opportunities that remain scarce or inaccessible. We should be equally concerned with changing the systems through which capital, contracts, promotions and investment are allocated.

Otherwise, we risk becoming very sophisticated at preparing women for rooms in which the most important decisions about their economic futures are still being made without them.

Women do not need to be taught that their ambitions should matter. They need to be taught that their ambitions are allowed to matter to them.

So the next time a woman walks into a room to pitch an idea, let her tell us why the problem matters, whom it will help and what difference it will make. But let her also tell us the size of the market, what customers will pay, what the margins look like, what the business is worth, what she needs and what return she expects.

She should not have to choose between being purposeful and being profitable.

Purpose may tell us why something matters. Profit determines whether it can endure. Women deserve to be fluent in both.

Lynette Etemesi is a Lawyer & Public Policy Specialist

Reporting originally appeared via Business Daily. Read the full source for additional context.