Access to capital is critical for entrepreneurs who wish to grow their businesses, but it isn’t always available. Last summer, Endeavor Insight interviewed and surveyed hundreds of policymakers and local entrepreneurship experts in more than 100 cities across the world. We asked them how available funding for entrepreneurs is in their local entrepreneurship ecosystem.
The responses for cities in the same geographic region were often very similar. The chart below illustrates how cities in each region tended to perform.
As you can see, local access to finance is rated poorly almost everywhere in the world. Even among cities in North America, where access was best, only 35% of respondents rated funding to be very or extremely available in their local ecosystems and almost one quarter rated it to be poorly or not at all available. (The remaining 41% chose “neutral.”)
It is likely that entrepreneurs in your city also have limited access to funding. We have evaluated over 100 programs that seek to increase financing for local entrepreneurs. We recently profiled one that has shown very impressive results. It is an innovative training course that has graduated more than 350 investment leaders around the world in the last two decades. You can read more about it here.
Contributed by Tala Bassil.
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