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Highlights Women’s empowerment interventions are not as effective as hoped or intended. Could be an issue with intervention design and implementation. Research reveals that there are several limitations to existing women’s empowerment approaches. These include disregard of context, a non-holistic approach, difficulty measuring variables, etc. Vulnerability mapping may be able to address these limitations; we present an adapted framework.

Purpose The study aims to co-create a “priority action roadmap for women's economic empowerment” based on women's top priorities to charting recovery directions. Doing so contributes to the growing body of knowledge on COVID-19 literature in at least four areas: assessing COVID-19 impacts on women entrepreneurs; mapping these impacts with four interdependent women's entrepreneurial ecosystem components; innovating a co-creation methodology based on remote participatory research; and providing a replicable model to perform action-oriented research in the context of COVID-19 impacts. Design/methodology/approach A co-creation methodology is proposed, combining systems-thinking and remote participatory research to engage women entrepreneurs and institutional stakeholders to prioritize impact, response actions and recovery needs in the wake of COVID-19. A ranking exercise using the analytic hierarchy process was used to derive ranking and assess user inputs' consistency. Findings The study exemplifies the integration of participatory methods and mathematical tool to engage stakeholders in prioritizing recovery work. PARWEE action items ranked by entrepreneurs and vetted by institutional stakeholders cover: access to finances, capacity building, health care, public and private partnership, marketing opportunities and formation of active advocacy groups to voice out women entrepreneurs' needs to institutional stakeholders. Results show a slight difference in the ranking of priority actions between experience owners and fresh starters. Originality/value This study innovated a new co-creation methodology for remotely engaging stakeholders of the women's entrepreneurial ecosystem, which is grounded in evidence and provides a replicable model for performing action-oriented research.