Leveraging International Trade to Increase Women’s Economic Participation

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Digitalization has quickly become the go-to strategy for improving the performance of Latin America’s micro and small enterprises (MSEs). Many governmental and private initiatives have supported their technological transformation over the last few years, primarily since COVID-19 restrictions drastically altered their way of conducting business. It is well known that implementing digital solutions in a firm’s operational processes can provide numerous benefits: expanding its customer base, boosting productivity and creating efficiencies, thereby accelerating revenue growth. But we know little about how MSE owners themselves experience these changes. For example, how do they think that digitalization has affected their sales? And which digital solutions have improved their business, and by how much?

To answer these questions, Decodis — a social research company using tech-led listening to provide nuanced insights into vulnerable populations — has been tracking the digital journey of a sample of 114 mostly women-led MSEs in Colombia, Mexico and Peru since late 2021, through four automated surveys. This study aims to help inform the decisions of the DigitAll program, an initiative led by Fundación Capital and supported by the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth. Through DigitAll, Fundación Capital has been promoting and facilitating the adoption of digital solutions for over 50,000 MSEs in these three countries since 2020, with the goal of integrating them into the digital economy. The findings presented in this article reflect the results of the first two surveys of the study, which were executed australia whatsapp number data between December 2021 and August 2022.



Social media and digital payments are front-runners in MSEs’ digitalization
Chart 1 below compares the results of our first survey — conducted between December 2021 and February 2022, several months after the start of the DigitAll program — to the results of our second survey six months later. The first survey showed that there was already high uptake of social media and digital payments in early 2022, with considerably lower uptake of marketplaces and business management systems — e.g., digital systems for financial and inventory control. In August of that year, there was continued progress in the adoption rates of all digital solutions. Social media and digital payments continued to be the most widely used, with 86% of the total sample taking up one or both of these tools. In contrast, marketplaces and business management systems remained the least adopted.