The Role of CDN in Empowering Modern-Day Women Entrepreneurs

neuCentrIX - 17/06/2022 10:00

Women entrepreneurship has been on the rise around the globe. In Southeast Asia, the women entrepreneurship rate is 12-21%, considered high when compared globally with the highest rate being shown in Thailand and Indonesia.

In Indonesia, the contribution of women entrepreneurs to the country’s economic growth has been significantly increasing. Today, women entrepreneurs contribute 9,1% to Indonesia's GDP, especially UMKM, supported by the fact that 43% of formal UMKM in the country are owned by women. This contribution is expected to raise to 20% by 2030, increasing Indonesia’s GDP to Rp26 thousand trillion.

The Challenges Faced by Today’s Women Entrepreneurs

Unfortunately, the majority of female-owned enterprises in Indonesia are informal, owner-operated or microbusinesses and expect to stay small in scale, according to a recent study. Based on a report by the World Bank, women tend to stick to informal and smaller businesses because this type of entrepreneurship has low barriers to enter and exit, low capital and skills requirements, and low technology needs.

The fact suggests that the majority of women are still facing challenges to scale their businesses and grow as business owners. We’ve summarized the four major barriers faced by today’s women entrepreneurs.

  • Women face socio-cultural norms that often lead to gender discrimination as well as limit the recognition and support they receive as entrepreneurs.
  • Women face time and mobility constraints related to domestic and care work that limit their ability and flexibility to pursue business opportunities.
  • Women face challenges in accessing formal finance, larger markets, and effective networks which are all essential for business development.
  • Women face an entrepreneurial skills gap by gender related to creating, sustaining, or growing a business

Looking at these challenges, we believe that there must be ways to support the growth of female entrepreneurs so they can fulfill their maximum potential and contribute to Indonesia’s economic development.

The Role of Technology in Supporting Women Entrepreneurs

Luckily, the digital era has brought changes that benefit today’s women entrepreneurs: e-commerce, digital marketing and CRM, social media, etc. Technology, as the biggest driver of these changes, plays a big role in enabling women entrepreneurship.

Technology helps women entrepreneurs by overcoming barriers to entrepreneurship and delivering platforms, apps, and tools that help them grow their business. With technology, women now have access to knowledge, flexibility, mobility, networking, financing, and digital capabilities needed to develop.

CDNs and How It Enables Women Entrepreneurship

A piece of technology that plays a key role in business growth is Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN is a group of servers, distributed in multiple locations, that work together to provide fast delivery of internet content. Each server, called point of presence (PoP), has the ability to cache your content and deliver it to your audience around the area. Through this mechanism, a CDN minimizes the distance between your server and your audience by providing them a cached version of your content at a closer point to them.

Running a business in the digital era means attracting and retaining customers through excellent digital experience; most of the time, it means delivering high-quality content. A CDN allows women entrepreneurs to utilize content to improve their brand awareness, build reputation, sell their products/services, and finally grow their businesses.  

A CDN does it in five ways.

  • It improves website load times, allowing for better conversion rates and sales.
  • It increases content availability and website reliability in the case of traffic spikes.
  • It improves SEO ranking by improving site speed and enabling the use of rich media.
  • It improves website security.
  • It reduces bandwidth costs, freeing up valuable resources for other initiatives.

These are how Telkom CDN can help you ensure your business growth. Contact us now to talk about how we can support you!