She’s Next: Shining a Spotlight on Women Entrepreneurs

Highlights from the MENA region
In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, for example, Visa last summer awarded grants of $10,000 each to 20 women business founders, along with a year's mentorship from the US-based funding platform IFundWomen¹.

These included Hafsa Qadeer, CEO of ImInclusive, which provides recruitment and training services to help companies become more inclusive - she was inspired to start the company by her wheelchair-using brother, she says².

Meanwhile, Laila Hasaballah, whose company Bellies En Route offers food tours in Cairo, hopes to use her grant to broaden her business³.

"We're working on expanding to other parts of Egypt to be able to expand in terms of opportunities for the locals, as well as foreigners' experience of Egypt, especially through cooking experiences," she says. "We're also working on expanding existing products to make them accessible for a wider market, and that's why we are offering our tourism in French⁴."

Supporting women entrepreneurs in Ukraine
Meanwhile, a survey of countries across Central Asia, as well as Ukraine, Serbia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, reveals just how much women strive for professional and financial independence. While half said their main motivation was to make more money, three in ten said it was a desire to work for themselves, and one in five that it was the fulfilment of a dream⁶.

In Kazakhstan, Visa has teamed up with Halyk Bank to issue cards with low fees for women entrepreneurs, and provide business development loans of up to 20 million tenge (US$44,467) at just five percent per annum – the first initiative of its kind in the world⁷.

But it’s Ukraine that has become a particularly urgent focus for the She's Next program, following the Russian invasion in February 2022, which led to millions of women losing their homes and jobs.

Within weeks, Visa began supporting Ukrainian women through a partnership with Projector Creative & Tech Foundation, a local initiative aimed at providing 5,000 displaced women with the educational opportunities to start a career in the creative and tech industries⁸.

Visa has now financed education grants for 56 Ukrainian women to launch a new career by studying motion design, mobile apps design and IT project management, and has offered internships to two⁹.

Nataliia Ievtushenko, who had worked in the travel industry for 15 years, was one of these, and was able to make a major career shift to become part of the Visa Products team.

"My team and everybody I met at Visa were very helpful and open and always ready to explain everything I needed to know," she says. "I felt myself more confident, brave, open-minded. Now I am convinced that everything I can imagine is real¹⁰."

Meanwhile, grant-winner Antonina Orynenko, the other internship winner, has joined Visa's marketing team. She says the experience has broadened her horizons, particularly by allowing her to work on marketing projects on a far larger scale than she'd experienced before.

"I was absolutely impressed with how the team helped me learn new things about business processes, tasks and rules at every stage," she says. "I have never seen colleagues so invested into newcomers at any other company¹¹."

As the She's Next program continues to grow, in CEMEA and beyond, Visa expects to see many more such stories of success.