"Expansion of Support for Women Entrepreneurs"... Ministry of SMEs and Startups Announces Implementation Plan to Promote Activities of Women-Owned Businesses

Reorganization of Women's Startup Support Program
Expansion of Future Women Entrepreneurs Development Project, etc.

The Ministry of SMEs and Startups will strengthen support for women who have experienced career interruptions (Gyeongdan-nyeo) and promote activities of women-owned businesses.

The Ministry of SMEs and Startups announced the 2024 Implementation Plan for Promoting Women-Owned Business Activities on the 7th to carry out the Basic Plan for Promoting Women-Owned Business Activities (2020?2024).

The major new or enhanced projects for this year are as follows. First, the Women’s Startup Care Program will be reorganized to focus on Gyeongdan-nyeo rather than female university students, and the Future Women Entrepreneurs Development Project, which nurtures female students as women entrepreneurs together with women CEOs, will be expanded to increase women’s accessibility to startups.

[Image source=Yonhap News]

Additionally, a new global accelerating project will be launched to support the global expansion of women-owned businesses, and the scale of public procurement of women-owned business products will be increased by 900 billion KRW from 11.3 trillion KRW in 2023 to 12.2 trillion KRW to promote the growth of women-owned businesses.

The Ministry plans to expand the pool of experts in various fields to resolve management difficulties faced by women-owned businesses and incorporate agricultural and fishery cooperatives, which were not previously recognized as women-owned businesses, to enable diverse forms of women entrepreneurs to be active.

Finally, in collaboration with local governments, region-specific programs for discovering and nurturing women entrepreneurs, preferential loans exclusively for women-owned businesses, and other growth programs tailored to regional characteristics will be expanded and operated.

Park Jong-chan, Director of SME Policy at the Ministry of SMEs and Startups, stated, “Promoting women’s participation in economic activities is a very important task for the sustainable growth of our economy amid low birth rates and aging population,” adding, “We will thoroughly implement and monitor the plan to promote women-owned business activities so that women-owned businesses can be nurtured as new key players.”

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