to have children, enter and continue in the work force, however, the proportions of firms providing subsidized childcare are particularly low.

**While female and male owned businesses face similar barriers, female entrepreneurs are more likely to have reduced access to finance.** The amount of collateral a woman entrepreneur needs to provide to secure a loan is larger than the amount needed by men business owners, by an overage of over one million Myanmar kyats<sup>24</sup> According to the ILO-Sasakawa report, not only are women entrepreneurs asked to provide higher collateral, but they are disadvantaged in meeting those higher collateral requirements because they are less likely than men to hold title to land and property.<sup>25</sup> Group-lending through microfinance institutions (MFIs) is the most commonly reported lending methodology used by women in Myanmar (amounts of ~USD 400), with individual loans, by law, capped at USD 10,000. This type of borrowing presents a significant financial gap for women business owners interested in taking their microenterprise to the next level of growth because the minimum threshold for bank lending is ~ USD 50,000. Another limiting factor is that women entrepreneurs use their own personal savings and informal sources of external financing to finance their entrepreneurial activities more than men.<sup>26</sup>

**Women-owned businesses are less likely overall to use financial services.** The survey shows a low proportion of women-owners with bank accounts compared to men-owners. This difference is statistically significant, as can be seen in Table 4. Women-owned businesses are less likely to have a bank account, borrow less, and are more often required to provide higher collateral as security, making access to finance one of their main challenges.

**Family responsibilities and household work are the biggest challenges for growth reported by both genders, but**

**more so for women.** This can be explained by the fact that women spend disproportionately more time on household work and looking after family than their male counterparts. On average, women spend almost two more hours per week caring for dependents and six more hours doing household chores, as can be seen in the descriptive statistics table (Table 3a) reported below. More than twice as many women entrepreneurs report gender as a barrier to business growth than male entrepreneurs.

**Conflict, a key aspect in the context of Myanmar, affects respondents in different and non-uniform ways.** As mentioned above, conflict areas in Shan have more access to banking than those in non-conflict areas, while Kachin presents the opposite scenario. Moreover, education attainment is lower in conflict-affected areas; indeed, entrepreneurs operating in these areas report fewer years of schooling. In the conflict areas of Kachin and Kayin, business owners on average have completed less than high school. Shan is once again the exception as respondents in these conflict areas report quite high levels of education completed: on average respondents in Shan conflict areas have completed high school and some university. This is most likely due to Lashio, a conflict area in Shan, having a university and teachers’ college, while Mogaung, in Kachin, has neither.

> 24 736 USD as of August 2020.

> 25 ILO and Sasakawa, National Assessment of Women’s Entrepreneurship Development Framework Conditions – Myanmar, Draft executive summary. 26 Ibid.

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