Virginia Littlejohn announces a W20 showcase for women entrepreneurs, tracing how U.S. policy evolved from NAWBO's 1975 founding through the 1988 Women's Business Ownership Act, which created women's business centers and the National Women's Business Council. The U.S., Canada, and UK rank highest globally because of decades of shared policy work.
Chapters
Hello, I'm Virginia Littlejohn. This is a panel from the W20 Women's Entrepreneurship Working Group, of which I'm the chair. At this summit, we're announcing the kickoff of a showcase of women entrepreneurial best practices, peer learning networks, and emphasizing the importance of advocacy and coalition building including with regard to COVID. The Mastercard Review of Women's Entrepreneurship 2019 had 3 of the G20 countries in their top 10: the US, Canada, and the UK. Because stakeholders in these countries collaborated closely for several decades and shared models, strategies, and good practices. It's not a surprise that these countries all scored high on MasterCard's rankings. Our working group wants to do the same thing across all W20 countries. In the United States, we created the National Association of Women Business Owners in 1975. We organized public affairs days to learn about public policy and first became political players with the 1986 White House Conference on Small Business. There we had 12% of the delegates, 15 of the state chairs, wrote a publication called Framework for the Future and got 26 of our 27 policy recommendations adopted. This initiative was entirely based on strategy and was not women-focused. It was designed to give women entrepreneurs visibility and credibility. In 1988, NABO organized legislative hearings on women's entrepreneurship. And helped craft legislation that got the Census Bureau to count all women-owned businesses, created 5 demonstration projects to train women entrepreneurs, made it possible for a woman entrepreneur to get a loan in her own name without a state being able to require that a male relative co-sign the loan and created the National Women's Business Council to provide recommendations to the legislature, the head of the Small Business Administration, and the President of the United States. The legislation passed almost unanimously. The Women's Business Ownership Act of 1988 is often called the Big Bang of women's entrepreneurship in the US because so much of our women's business ecosystem grew out of that legislation with the assistance of superb research done by academic researchers and the Center for Women's Business Research. One of the 5 demonstration projects became the Women's Business Enterprise National Council, which certifies women entrepreneurs for corporate and public procurement. Another became the Women's Presidents Organization for multimillion-dollar women-owned companies. Also, the 5 demonstration projects turned into more than 100 women's business centers located around the country, which have given birth to hundreds of thousands of women-owned businesses. The National Women's Business Council has provided leadership and trailblazed in dozens of areas, often in collaboration with Women Impacting Public Policy, or WIPP, which grew out of NAWBO. Early next year, we'll be launching our showcase on women entrepreneurial best practices Several peer learning networks, including one on public procurement and another on COVID recovery strategies for women-owned businesses. We'll also have programming that emphasizes the importance of advocacy and coalition building. Our objective is to accelerate women's enterprise development. And to keep countries from having to reinvent the wheel. Thank you very much, and I recommend that we clap for ourselves since we're virtual instead of in Riyadh.
