Guidebook for integrating women into small and micro enterprise projects

programmers integrate women into small- and microenterprise (SME) development programs is presented. An initial section summarizes the reasons for integrating women into SME or other income-generating programs; these include the loose structure of the SME sector (which allows women to divide their time between economically productive and domestic activities) and the fact that the usual constraints to women"s participation in economic activities (e.g., lack of education and training, low literacy levels) do not prevent women from entering the SME sector, as they can use skills they already possess to expand household activities (e.g., food processing) into economic activities. The central second section: (1) examines the standard components of SME projects (credit, technical assistance, and training); (2) discusses SME project design issues (funding, cost-effectivness, the capacity of implementing institutions, and the role of outside technical assistance); and (3) presents four steps to be taken in integrating women into SME project design (identify the type of assistance to be provided, conduct feasibility studies and disaggregate the data by gender, identify an appropriate implementing institution, and identify constraints to female small and micro entrepreneurs). The third section looks at gender concerns in SME project implementation, monitoring, and evaluation.