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Although female participation in the country’s information technology (IT) sector has grown gradually, the number of women entrepreneurs has not increased significantly compared to the total of individual IT professionals.
More female entrepreneurship has become necessary to empower more women, ensure the sector’s inclusive development and reap the benefits of digitalisation boosted by the Fourth Industrial Revolution, according to industry people.
According to the Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Service (BASIS), around 2,000 IT firms are BASIS members but women own only 1 per cent of them. The number of women holding top posts at IT companies is also very small.
“Some 1.5 lakh women currently work in the software and IT services industry, which is around 15 per cent of the total,” BASIS President Russell T Ahmed told The Business Post.
“Women’s participation in this sector is quite good in terms of numbers but what we now need is more female entrepreneurs as their current number is very low to reap the benefits of the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” he added.
According to the Women and e-Commerce Forum (WE), the country has more than 4 lakh female entrepreneurs who run F-Commerce (businesses based on Facebook) and e-commerce based businesses. The forum also has over 1,000 women entrepreneurs as subscribers and more than 11 lakh members in its Facebook group.
Currently, Bangladesh has around 6.5 lakh IT service exporters or freelancers, with roughly 1,600 team-based freelancing organisations.
According to the Online Labour Index of the Oxford Internet Institute, Bangladesh is currently the second most favourite country with a 15 per cent share of the global online worker population. The first is India with 21 per cent.
Countries like the US, Pakistan, the Philippines, the UK, Russia, Ukraine, Egypt, Indonesia, Vietnam, Venezuela and Sri Lanka are also lagging behind Bangladesh.
Syeda Khadiza Dina is an entrepreneur who ventured into the IT sector in 2005 with business process outsourcing of accounting. Her firm ZS Solutions Ltd currently has around 30 employees and provides various IT services, including software and app development, to many local and foreign companies.
Talking about the challenges, Dina said, “It’s very difficult for a woman-led tech firm to gain the trust of clients. I have faced questions like whether I inherited the company from my father or I manage it because my husband owns it.”
“When it comes to getting any services like trade licence or SME certifications, I have to send a man to deal with it. This is just another barrier for my firm,” she added.
Alifa Zerin, a freelancer-turned-IT-firm-owner in Dhaka, said, “I started freelancing through my Fiverr and Upwork accounts five years ago. Since then I have worked for seven such international marketplaces. Now I have an IT firm with 40 employees, providing around 20 different services to domestic and international clients.”
“Women can do freelancing easily because of the flexibility of time and location and the freedom to choose clients or projects,” she said. “But women face many obstacles while establishing a physical business entity.
“The problems I had to confront revolve around one issue — our families and society are still not ready for the fact that a girl or a woman will do business on her own, let alone an IT-related business.”
To boost the SME sector and create more female entrepreneurs, the government has taken various initiatives that include tax exemption on up to Tk 70 lakh turnover. Bangladesh Bank has also directed banks to give loans up to Tk 25 lakh to female entrepreneurs without security and mortgage.
Besides, the government is running the “She Power Project,” involving around Tk 253 crore, in a bid to create 25,000 new female entrepreneurs around the country.
However, Zerin said, “Banks don’t want to give loans to IT firms because it is complicated to prove that IT firms are SMEs and deserve loan sanctions. On top of that, we need to go to different divisions and bodies, and sometimes we even need a male person to deal with these issues. “The system to get the benefits is flawed and not compatible with the labour law.”
“My firm has many clients with a large volume of work orders right now. We need support from the government and access to finance to expand our infrastructure, capacity and employment,” she added.
BASIS President Russell said, “When it comes to the limitation in local access to finance for tech companies, I think IT firms can get soft loans up to Tk 50 lakh. However, it would be to their benefit if they apply for the loan after becoming BASIS members. “But we are working to make easy loan sanctions possible for the companies. We are working with a couple of banks to introduce such loans to help the IT firms.”
“BASIS has a plan to raise awareness among the people. We have also planned to revive the BASIS Institute of Technology and Management (BITM) to build a skilled human resource base,” he added.
