Women entrepreneurs: Challenges and opportunities

Nearly four decades ago, when I started my career, I felt strongly that women have the potential to be successful in the business world. It was like a latent force that had not really emerged. But, in India, the last few decades have seen women stepping out of their homes, to make a career, establish their identity and fulfil their own dreams.
Business ability is without gender. Given the same opportunities, women can be as good as men in business. Women are not inferior in any way when it comes to starting a business, managing it or making it successful. Entrepreneurship actually implies independence of spirit and it is this independence that women in developing countries like India have begun to express over the last two or three decades. That is why the number of women entrepreneurs has been steadily growing.
I definitely feel that education and a professional qualification give a great deal of confidence. We need to give importance to the acquiring of professional qualifications and training, so that women can express their creativity and innovativeness with more confidence. Vocational training should include aspects of business management, in order to encourage entrepreneurship. This would also increase the awareness of the incentives and loans offered to women by banks and financial institutions.
Professional beauty diploma courses include subjects like business and salon management, as well as client handling. They provide a lot of emphasis and knowledge on the kind of investment that would be needed to set up a beauty salon, the equipment that would be needed, how to make the enterprise profitable, how to keep books of accounts etc. This gives women a great deal of confidence about setting up their own salons and becoming entrepreneurs.
In fact, very early in my career I started encouraging ordinary housewives to open salons in their own homes. I trained them and offered the Shahnaz Herbal franchise. That is how we started our chain of herbal salons. I saw how shy, submissive housewives blossomed into confident entrepreneurs.
I firmly believe that a woman definitely has the qualities to be a successful entrepreneur. For one thing, while managing her different roles of wife, housewife, mother and career woman efficiently, she has learnt the values of time-management, patience and handling budgets. She has learnt how to integrate and nurture. She has quietly taken decisions and held her family together. Women have the courage, inner strength, foresight and capacity for hard work, all of which are necessary to be successful as entrepreneurs.
Marketing is an important issue in entrepreneurship. Women find it difficult to know the market and to face the competition. This is one area where they need help and encouragement. For example, they can learn about the market and how to make use of changing conditions, like the internet, commercial advertising methods, different business models, etc. With globalization, products and services are needed for the global market and this requires effort at various levels, from the Government, research institutions, vocational training institutions, export development and trade agencies, etc. Markets need to be explored. Presenting the products in a globally attractive manner is also essential, along with knowledge of the demands of the global market. With entrepreneurship, the sky is the limit, provided one has relentless determination to excel and ability for sheer hard work. Independence of spirit, creativity and innovativeness are some factors that are key to success in business.