By Corey Binns
In 2010, Madhu Chandrika realized
that her commercial art
business—Earthen Symphony,
based in Bangalore, India—had
reached a point of stagnation. The company,
which she founded in 1995, still held potential
for growth. But without proper management
expertise, she didn’t know how to expand.
Chandrika struggled in particular with pricing
the products (murals, pottery, carved furniture) and services that she sold. Being the
only woman in a company with 14 employees
took a toll on her sense of confidence as well.
“I had apprehension about whether I was
doing right by following my dream of running
my own business,” she says. Chandrika
scouted the newspaper, hoping to find information
on a long-distance MBA program, and
came across an advertisement for something
called the 10,000 Women Initiative. Through that initiative, she would be able to enroll in
a program conducted by the Indian School
of Business. Chandrika applied immediately.
Upon acceptance into the program,
Chandrika
took more than 100 hours of
coursework in networking, marketing, and
other relevant skills. She met with a local
businessperson who served as a mentor, she
garnered invitations to dozens of networking
events, and she partnered with a paid consultant
who acted as a business advisor. “Until
then, I had been working in isolation,” says
Chandrika. “I started feeling proud of myself. It was the first time that I acknowledged
myself as an entrepreneur.” By 2012, just two
years after she graduated from the program,
Chandrika’s company had doubled its number
of orders, doubled the size of its workspace,
and doubled its number of employees (half
of whom were now women).
The 10,000 Women Initiative began
in 2008 as a five-year program sponsored
by the investment bank Goldman Sachs. Funded with a $100 million commitment
from the Goldman Sachs Foundation, the
initiative aims to provide training and support
to women entrepreneurs. Participants
receive full scholarships for specially tailored
short-term instruction at leading business
schools. The program operates in 43 locations
worldwide—from Afghanistan to Brazil to
Rwanda—and by the end of 2013, it had produced
10,000 graduates. In surveys funded
by Goldman Sachs, 73 percent of graduates
reported that they had created new jobs, and
83 percent reported that they had seen their
revenues increase, since going through the
program. The women selected to participate
in 10,000 Women return the favor by helping
colleagues: In a survey, 90 percent of
graduates reported that they mentor other
businesswomen in their community.
This past March, the 10,000 Women
program renewed its commitment to women’s
entrepreneurship by partnering with
the International Finance Corporation to
launch the Women Entrepreneurs Opportunity
Facility, a $600 million fund that will
provide capital to as many as 100,000 women
business leaders in emerging markets. The
Goldman Sachs Foundation has pledged $32 million to this phase of the initiative,
and the firm plans to continue operation of
the 10,000 Women training program as well.
Big Bet
The idea for 10,000 Women grew out of
research done by Kathy Matsui, a Goldman
Sachs strategist based in Japan. In 1999, she
began writing a series of reports based on
the concept of “womenomics,” which focuses
on the impact of increasing labor-force participation
by women. A report that Matsui
issued in 2005 caught the eye of senior
executives throughout the firm, including
Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and CEO. “This
research showed that investing in women
was truly the smartest possible investment
that we could make—and the idea of 10,000
Women was born,” says Noa Meyer, global
program director for the initiative.
The design of 10,000 Women charted new
territory, according to Jeri Eckhart Queenan, who leads the global development practice at
the Bridgespan Group and who consulted to
Goldman Sachs on launching the program.
“They found a new intersection in the field by
combining small- and medium-sized enterprise
development with women’s economic
empowerment, and they got the leading business
schools of the world to partner with
them,” Queenan says.
Women in developing countries who aspire
to build small- and medium-sized enterprises
encounter a wide range of barriers. Often
they don’t have formal business training, they
don’t have a professional network, they don’t
have mentors, and they can’t access capital.
“Goldman figured out what all of the hurdles
were and made a program to help women get
over every one,” says Queenan. “That is why
they have been able to get such extraordinary
results.”
Meyer agrees: “In this kind of training,
the transformative effect comes from
offering
an entire suite of services.”
Running a program with such a large
global footprint poses a real challenge for
Meyer and her team. They work with 89 partner
institutions worldwide, and to keep these
partners in line, they put forth global guidelines
on issues such as candidate selection
and the level of ongoing support that they
provide to each participant. (Each candidate,
for example, must operate a business with at
least five employees.) “We recognized that
we weren’t experts, we’re a financial services
firm,” says Meyer. “We identified the academic
institutions and nonprofits that were
best in their class.” Instructors and advisors
hail from the American University of Beirut,
Harvard Business School, London Business
School, and other top institutions. Partner
nonprofits include the Clinton Global Initiative,
the World Bank, and the International
Center for Research on Women (ICRW).
In 2011, Goldman Sachs hired ICRW to
prepare an independent evaluation of the
10,000 Women program in India. According
to the ICRW report, about half of all
participants in the India program had at
least doubled their revenues since graduating
from the program. The ICRW report
included some important caveats: The rise in business revenues came at a time when
the Indian economy was growing at a rate
of more than 8 percent annually. In addition,
the women selected for the program
were owners of businesses that already had a
high potential for growth. Still, the researchers
concluded, the 10,000 Women program
had provided entrepreneurs in New Delhi
and Hyderabad with critical tools needed to
manage and grow their companies.
Due Diligence
Goldman Sachs applied its own best assets—including its commitment to research and
measurement—to the creation of 10,000
Women. “Goldman was very fact-based in
their decisions,” says Queenan. “That’s in
their DNA.” Leaders at the firm were rigorous
in defining the goals and scope of the
initiative, and in determining exactly which
population they would serve, the impact that
they wanted to achieve, and how they were
going to measure that change.
Before launching the program, Goldman
Sachs developed a performance monitoring
and evaluation system with support from the
Bridgespan Group. (Experts from organizations
such as Acumen, the Center for Global
Development, and TechnoServe also provided
technical assistance.) The process involved
collecting data on each participant and her
business at certain milestone points—before
she started the program, and then 6, 18, and
30 months later. Goldman Sachs’s IT department
collated those data so that Meyer’s team
and the 10,000 Women partners could gain
insight on which aspects of the program were
working and which aspects required adjustment.
“It was a vital tool at the beginning to
get the kinks out of our model,” says Meyer.
Many participants, for example, struggled
to provide the kind of data on their companies
(revenues, employment levels, and so
forth) that the measurement system itself
requires. That flaw in financial reporting
indicated a flaw in the training program.
“Women weren’t graduating with the depth
of knowledge in certain subjects that they and
we thought they should have,” says Meyer.
Her team shared that finding with program partners, and together they changed the curriculum
to improve the sessions that cover
financials. The new lesson plan trains participants
to feed more-accurate data into
the measurement system. More important,
it strengthens the program.
The measurement system also revealed
some interesting points about participants’
access to capital. On one hand, graduates
as a whole had a loan-approval rate that
was much higher than the rate among a
comparable population. On the other hand,
many graduates still could not access capital
to expand their businesses. Although the
direct funding of graduates lay outside the
scope of the program, Meyer and her team
worked to improve that aspect of the 10,000
Women experience. The brought in bankers
and venture capitalists to speak with participants,
for example. This finding, meanwhile,
informed the design of another Goldman
Sachs project—the 10,000 Small Businesses
program, launched in 2009.
Instructors at some partner institutions,
including the Indian School of Business and
the American University in Cairo, discovered
early on that 10,000 Women participants
have much less interest in business theory
than in case studies of companies similar
to their own. For that reason, coursework
now often includes discussions about businesses
owned by program graduates—or
even by fellow classmates. “While you’re
teaching, they’re applying lessons in their
heads,” says Maha ElShinnawy, professor
of leadership and ethics at the American
University
in Cairo and director of the 10,000
Women program at that institution. Another
change to the program came in the form of
language. Originally, ElShinnawy and her
fellow instructors
taught courses in English,
but students found that the business jargon
was too complex, so she and her colleagues in
Cairo switched to teaching in Arabic.
One of the greatest challenges faced
by leaders of the 10,000 Women initiative
has involved managing the sheer volume of
applications.
“The hunger for business training
is enormous, especially among women,”
says Meyer.