Barriers to enterprise often begin with barriers to employment, education and training.
Entrepreneurs may encounter barriers to accessing finance or have difficulty accessing appropriate support and advice that considers relevant personal characteristics or challenges. There may also be difficulties accessing customers and contracts due to a lack of diversity in supply chains.
The Charter outlines the core principles for implementing and supporting an inclusive entrepreneurship ecosystem across five key areas:
- Promoting diverse role models across the enterprise ecosystem
- Delivering inclusive enterprise support
- Enabling lifelong learning of entrepreneurship education
- Ensuring equal access to enterprise finance
- Implementing measurable targets for Inclusive enterprise policy and procurement practices
What are we asking you to do?
Signatories to the Charter for inclusive entrepreneurship will:
- commit to implementing the principles of the charter
- visibly display their commitment to the charter on their websites and promotional material where relevant
- actively promote the charter within their own supply chain and encourage suppliers and/or clients to adopt the principles of the charter, where appropriate recruit diverse workforces to ensure diversity across gender, ethnicity, age
- accommodate disabilities and different abilities among their workforce and/or procured service provision, where appropriate
- ensure staff are aware of gender, race, disability, and other potential barriers to service uptake and that such considerations are factored into service delivery, design, promotion and practical arrangements
- ensure staff undertake appropriate equality, diversity and inclusion training in line with good practice