The Study of consequences for Covid-19 to female entrepreneurship analyses and synthesizes the state of the art when it comes to economic and social consequences from pandemic to women entrepreneurship in nine countries of the Danube region: Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Moldova, Romania and Slovenia. In this manner, the Study enables project partners and relevant stakeholders to elaborate evidence-based strategies to deal with the impact of youth challenges, their unemployment and prospects that can be found in entrepreneurial endeavours.

Some of the KEY FINDINGS:

 

- The most negative economic consequences are decrease of revenues and decreased demand of products and services.

- There are some positive effects of Covid-19, such as introducing of new products/ services and expanded share of the online sales.

- The highest fears of women entrepreneurs during pandemic were related with health of close family, friends and own one, and impossibility to pay the bills, credits, fixed costs, reduced incomes, uncertainty about the future and insecurity.

- The biggest personal concerns related with  own business are ability to pay the salaries, to cope with the pressure, inability to keep employees in whom was previously invested a lot of time, effort, finding new clients and raw material suppliers, and last but not least ensuring the safety of personnel  families;

- Women entrepreneurs applied different personal strategies to overcome the negative consequences of the crisis, such as keeping social communication, positive attitude, practicing sport, yoga and meditation, walks in the nature, improvement of personal skills trough starting education or online training, reading of books. The most preferred business scenario for coping with economic consequences is keeping the current employees, including through put the employees on remote status, reducing the employees’ load and reducing the payment to executives. Partly closing of business is the least used option.

- Surprisingly, the rate of companies that used governmental or other assistance is quite low. Only 14% of all business women actually used some support measures. For Bosnia and Herzegovina and Moldova this rate is the lowest one (6%). The most accessible assistance is  subsidies for salaries of the employees, followed by tax relief and revenues compensation;

- The average rank for support received by policy makers and stakeholders during the pandemic is 2.68 out of 5 which means that in general respondents are neutral about the received support. The lowest rank is from Bulgaria (1.98), followed by Moldova (2.25) and Romania (2.53).