Led by a team of Black female professionals and supported by our gracious partners, we raised $150,000 in funding and assembled a team of researchers and analysts to deliver this report over five months. Then, guided by academic collaboration, we prepared to travel across Canada to connect with small Black female-led businesses to develop an ethics-approved quantitative survey. But with the onset of the global Covid-19 pandemic and ensuing restrictions, we were forced to take our survey digital. Leveraging our robust network, existing connections, and social following, we ran our bilingual survey for three weeks, receiving over 600 responses in our first week. Connecting with founders from coast to coast across Canada, we closed the survey with 1545 unique respondents. We then began to review our findings, breaking similar founders into clusters and identifying 126 high potential female founders we wanted to speak with to better understand individual market barriers.
“COVID-19 has laid bare many inequalities in Canadian society, including in the business community. Women and racialized Canadians have suffered disproportionately from the COVID-19 recession, but we know that many of these inequalities were pre-existing. The FoundHers report provides important insight into this issue.” – Chrystia Freeland, Minister of Finance & Deputy Prime Minister of Canada
Our talented team, resulting from the extensive funding, allowed us to dive into locations
that had not sufficiently been explored prior. As a result, we made valuable insights into
clear market sectors and generated personas based on critical characteristics, allowing us
to paint a clear and dynamic picture of the Black female entrepreneurship community. At
the end of five months, our outcome was the first and largest open market national
analysis of more than 1500 Black female-led charitable, for-profit and not-for-profit
organizations
42% of Newly Registered Businesses are owned by Black Women
With 42% of newly registered women owned business being founded by Black women, we are are actively contributing to the Canadian economy as business owners, however: - 38% of Black business owners identify as women. - Less that 50% identify their business as being in a growth phase - Nearly 50% of report that the global pandemic significantly impacted their business
The lack of gender diversity in the Canadian business ecosystem costs $150 Billion annually
With only 0.006% of Canadian government grants
earmarked for women entrepreneurs recently going to
black women, it's no surprise that Black entrepreneurs
are over mentored and underfunded.
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