Female entrepreneurship programmes often seek women’s economic empowerment through opportunities and skills to generate higher-paid and more stable jobs. Income and jobs do not automatically empower women but can contribute as they generate the necessary resources that support agency. It is important that sufficient and decent jobs, and other employment and income opportunities, are created and made accessible for women. This paper is part of the MUVA Paper Series on female entrepreneurship. The question that it tries to answer is how to do this through the means of female entrepreneurship programmes within the context of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It analyses the case of MUVA, a social incubator based in Mozambique that aims to increase female economic empowerment through targeted and tailored innovative human-centred approaches.

This paper is part of the MUVA Paper Series on female entrepreneurship. Its purpose is to understand female entrepreneurship in the context of informality and the value of formalisation to improve their livelihoods and income in the context of LMICs. Mozambique-based female economic empowerment social incubator MUVA is used as a case study to show how experiences and knowledge from development projects contribute to debates on female entrepreneurship and informality.

MUVA is a social incubator dedicated to developing innovative approaches to the economic empowerment of women in Mozambique. This paper documents experiences from two MUVA projects supporting women’s economic empowerment through entrepreneurship, and draws out broader insights and principles of relevance to other similar programmes. Barriers to women’s economic empowerment and strategies to overcome these barriers are both individual and systemic, visible and invisible. MUVA’s approach to supporting women’s economic empowerment through entrepreneurship involves tailoring three core elements to the specific context of different profiles of women business owners, including urban informal vegetable and fruit traders (MUVA+) and owners of small businesses with untapped growth potential (PAM). Both are groups of low-income female entrepreneurs that are rarely eligible for acceleration and entrepreneurship support. Core programme elements are technical skills, personal development and opportunity generation. However, the project results show that no particular intervention generates impact. Rather, what generates impact is how interventions are tailored to entrepreneurs’ specific business needs, responding to both the external context and internal constraints each group faces, through adapting methodologies that are more often used by formal businesses and policymakers. To achieve this, MUVA bundled interventions in ways that address both visible and invisible barriers and opportunities.