What women-owned enterprises need more than grants to grow
This story has significance for readers across Kenya and beyond.
Across Kenya, there are many organisations investing significantly in women micro-entrepreneurs through grants, training, financial products, business development and market access initiatives.
Individually, these interventions achieve what they set out to do. Yet, they are often designed and delivered independently, each addressing a specific constraint, rather than forming part of a connected ecosystem that supports an entrepreneur's long-term growth.
MSMEs are central to Kenya’s economy. According to Kenya’s 2025 Economic Survey, about 90 percent; 782,300 new jobs created in 2024 were in the informal sector, where MSMEs predominate. When women-owned micro-enterprises grow, they create employment, strengthen local supply chains and provide more reliable incomes for families.
A grant can help a woman buy initial equipment. Training can build her skills.
A loan can help her increase stock and meet growing demand. But what happens when the grant ends and the business needs working capital, a bigger market or another form of support to take the next step?
Enterprise growth rarely depends on a single intervention. Micro-entrepreneurs need clear pathways to access the right support from one stage of growth to the next.
The first pathway is capital. Micro-enterprises need different forms of finance at different stages, and those needs change as a business grows.
Take a woman producing peanut butter from her kitchen. She may start with a small grant to buy basic equipment, improve packaging, draw on working capital to fulfil larger orders and later require asset finance for commercial processing equipment. Eventually, the business may qualify for commercial debt or other growth finance instruments.
This is not a rigid ladder. Different businesses will follow different journeys, and not every micro-enterprise needs to scale. The gap tends to appear where a micro-enterprise becomes too advanced for another small grant but remains too informal for conventional bank finance. The question, therefore, is whether those ready to progress can identify and access the next appropriate form of finance.
The next pathway is market access. Finance alone does not produce enterprise growth; a business also needs somewhere reliable to sell what it makes.
A woman making natural skincare products might begin by selling to friends and neighbours, move to repeat orders from salons, and later supply a supermarket or hotel group. But large orders often come with other requirements such as certifications, better packaging, consistent quality and the ability to wait for payment, creating a financing problem of its own.
A market opportunity can therefore create a financing need of its own, but a capital pathway without a market pathway is incomplete. Women can access finance and increase production, but without stronger demand, additional capacity does not automatically become sustainable growth.
Institutional support pathway
Many of the organisations needed to support enterprise growth already exist: NGOs train entrepreneurs, foundations provide catalytic funding, banks offer working capital, investors provide growth capital, corporates create procurement opportunities, and government provides infrastructure or incentives.
Yet they often operate through different systems, criteria and objectives, leaving the entrepreneur to navigate the transitions alone.
We frequently ask whether a micro-entrepreneur is credit-ready, investment-ready or market-ready. Perhaps we also need to ask whether the ecosystem itself is progression-ready; able to support her through the different stages of her enterprise life cycle.
Connecting the Pathways
A woman leaving a grant-funded programme may not need another grant. She may need working capital, a reliable buyer, asset finance, a procurement opportunity or an introduction to another institution.
Closing these gaps requires deliberate action across the ecosystem.
Funders should design programmes with exit pathways, banks build products for enterprises graduating from grant support, and corporates open procurement opportunities while helping suppliers meet their requirements.
Development organisations should strengthen referral relationships with financial institutions and buyers, while the government tackles infrastructure and regulatory barriers to growth.
The opportunity is not simply to create more interventions, but to create clearer pathways between those that already exist. If more women micro-entrepreneurs are to build sustainable businesses, we need to think more deliberately about how to bridge the gaps across the ecosystem.
Nathalie Ngatia is an impact strategy adviser with over 20 years of experience in financial inclusion, women’s economic empowerment and cross-sector partnerships across Africa | Email: [email protected]
Reporting originally appeared via Business Daily. Read the full source for additional context.