websites. Second, women entrepreneurs have lower levels of digital skills, with skill upgrading limited by time and mobility constraints (Campos et al. 2019).<sup>31</sup> There is still a scarcity of causal evidence on the effects of digital skills training for women entrepreneurs. Alhorr (2023) studied the effect of assisting female entrepreneurs in Jordan with creating and managing Facebook pages for their business, and of offering women digital marketing training. The findings indicated that the Facebook business page intervention had positive effects on business outcomes for women more affected by mobility constraints. However, women with higher mobility constraints were also less likely to apply for digital marketing training, resulting in muted average effects.

Business-to-business distribution platforms can assist women entrepreneurs in connecting with corporate manufacturers and improve their integration into corporate value chains.<sup>32</sup> Additional research is needed to determine how to encourage women entrepreneurs to join these platforms and to assess the impact of training designed to help women better navigate and use these platforms.<sup>33</sup> Jin and Sun (2020) found that a program in China, which trained over 2 million new sellers on a large e-commerce platform, had small positive effects on revenues for both men and women; however, women sellers were less likely to participate in the training. Finally, recent research cautions that merely bringing many firms onto e- commerce platforms may not be sufficient to foster their growth due to significant demand-side frictions. Policies such as the creation of premium market segments or focusing on promising newcomers might be necessary to enhance market efficiency (Bai et al. 2021).

# 6. Interventions that Address Contextual Constraints

According to the 2023 World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law dataset, in 101 of 190 economies, women face at least one legal constraint that prevents them from operating a business in the same way as men (World Bank 2023). Significant improvement over the last 50 years has led to most economies allowing women to sign contracts, register a business, and open a bank account in the same manner as men. However, only 47 percent of economies prohibit gender discrimination in access to credit, and nearly 40 percent of economies limit women’s property rights, including right to inherit assets.<sup>34</sup> Furthermore, socio-cultural factors linked to restricted gender norms are still pervasive in some regions and hinder the implementation of laws; for example, Braunmiller and Dry (2022) observed this in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

One crucial gender norm concerns the division of time for household activities. If women are overburdened by care responsibilities and domestic work, their ability to work longer hours in their business is limited. This can partly explain the gender gap in profits (World Bank 2021). The prevalence of gender-based violence (GBV) may also affect women’s choice of business sector, location, and networking activities. Promising interventions include legal reforms, information campaigns and discussions around

> 31 For example, a survey with informal retailers on a digital platform in Egypt shows that, compared to male retailers, women retailers are less likely to know how to use the mobile application and are more likely to end up with stockouts due to not tracking inventory (Mignano and Kipnis 2022).

> 32 IFC (2022) describes the experience of digital business-to-business distribution platforms in Nigeria, Egypt, and the Philippines.

> 33 See Burga et al. (2021) for a toolkit providing practical guidance to help teams working on women's entrepreneurship projects apply digital solutions to project design and policy advice.

> 34 Based on the author’s own calculation using the WBL 2023 dataset (World Bank 2023).

17