Trade and Women’s Economic Empowerment: Survey Results for SMEs Across Six Developing Countries

Abstract In this chapter, the authors present and discuss the survey data on trade and women’s economic empowerment that was collected for this project in 2021–2022 from 610 SMEs across the six developing countries selected for the study, namely Cambodia, Ghana, Madagascar, Nigeria, Senegal and Vietnam. The chapter includes basic contextual country-level information about trade, development and gender equality in the selected countries. The discussion of the survey results includes a comparison with secondary data from World Bank Enterprise Surveys. The authors find that SMEs face various challenges that are often context-specific and recommend that policy options be tailored to address these differences. Women-owned SMEs across the six country cases face varying levels of both gender-related and more general constraints. Among the recommendations in this chapter is the need for more gender-disaggregated data to understand the difference between women-owned exporting and non-exporting SMEs.