Within the scope of YOU GO; a project about the upskilling of young women with basic or more expert craft skills in digital entrepreneurship, we try to teach young women what self-entrepreneurship is. We try to educate young women to be more courageous, and innovative, pursuing their passions in crafts.
Self-entrepreneurship became synonymous with risk. Yet, this is not necessarily the case. An Entrepreneur uses their critical thinking skills to achieve their goals, make smart business decisions, along with, utilizing marketing skills. In contrast to being merely self-employed, an entrepreneur "invents" her own product or service. It usually takes a lot of time, patience, and perseverance to see the results of this innovation. In the 21st century, the prospects of a successful entrepreneurship idea without the utilization of digital tools are limited. This is why, in our Project YOU GO, in which our organization is involved, we are occupied with digital entrepreneurship, focusing, in particular on a disadvantaged minority; young women.
The way women prepare for a business is by training themselves (43.3% versus 31.8% for men). In contrast, men are looking for potential clients (45.8%) and writing a business plan (42.5% versus 34.6% for women). At the same time, market research is carried out only by 1/4th of women (in contrast by 1/3rd of men). Although women seek specific training before starting a business, women entrepreneurs are much less experienced than their male counterparts: 37.5% have less than 3 years of experience versus 25.7% of men. 82.5% of women start businesses alone (compared to 69.8% of men). In addition, women are less risky than men, with only 5.3% of women have tried to create a business (in contrast to 18.4% of men).
The aforementioned demonstrates that women need more support, courage and confidence in the field of entrepreneurship. This is why the YOU GO project is about socially including young women by providing them with the necessary digital skills everybody should know for a successful beginning and implementation of their businesses.
Being able to access digital platforms and make use of social media, e-commerce, and digital payments allows women entrepreneurs to expand their access to new customers, suppliers, and partners (Rajahonka and Villman, 2019). Empowering women entrepreneurs overall could add as much as €28 trillion USD to the global economy (Woetzel et al., 2015) while closing the entrepreneurial gender gap could boost the global economy by €5 trillion USD (Unnikrishnan and Blair, 2019).
