WESTART

WEstart is the first research project on women's social entrepreneurship in Europe... Through this research, we aimed to understand the national contexts in which women social entrepreneurs were operating. We were interested in the details of their social enterprise in terms of revenue, legal status, job creation and sector, but we were also interested in their journey with social entrepreneurship... We asked them about their motivations for starting a social enterprise, the barriers they faced and the social impact they had created. We invited them to tell us about their care responsibilities and grapple with notions of women's empowerment and gender equality. From this information, we pieced together a rich and diverse portrait of women's social entrepreneurship in Europe, characterised by ambition to create societal change, sensitivity to social needs and persistence in the face of discrimination.

Primary location: Brussels Belgium