Johannesburg and Nairobi are the only African countries in Dell’s 2017 list of top 50 cities in the world that attract and support High Potential Women Entrepreneurs.
While New York City, the San Francisco Bay area, London, Boston, and Stockholm were ranked the top-five cities for women in business, Johannesburg and Nairobi came 28th and 33rd respectively.
The 50 cities were chosen for their reputation as established or emerging hubs of innovation and entrepreneurship, and they were ranked based on the impact of local policies, programs and characteristics in addition to national laws and customs.
Cities were ranked on five important characteristics: capital, technology, talent, culture and markets. These pillars were organized into two groups — operating environment and enabling environment. The overall rating is based on 72 indicators; 45 of these, nearly two-thirds, have a gender-based component. Individual indicators were weighted based on four criteria: relevance, quality of underlying data, uniqueness in the index and gender component.
“It is in the world’s best interest that women entrepreneurs everywhere thrive. The WE Cities Index can be used as a diagnostic tool to help ensure that lawmakers are enabling women entrepreneurs to succeed,” said Elizabeth Gore, entrepreneur-in- residence at Dell. “Each of the cities on this list can learn from one another and encourage political change to attract and support women entrepreneurs. The resulting change will be felt at not just a city level, around the world as we develop an ecosystem where all entrepreneurs can thrive regardless of gender.”
The Dell Women Entrepreneur Cities Index (WE Cities) is a measure of a city’s ability to attract and support high potential women entrepreneurs (HPWE) i.e., women that want to grow and scale their business. The data provides a diagnostic tool to advise entrepreneurs and policy-makers on how to improve conditions to enable businesses founded by women to thrive.