Summary
How can women drive economic empowerment in societies where cultural and institutional barriers remain deeply entrenched? This blog explores how a catalytic partnership between the UNDP and female intrapreneurs in Kuwait transformed the country’s welfare ministry from a passive distributor of benefits into an active incubator for women’s entrepreneurship. Their collective, layered efforts reveal how empowerment takes root when catalysts and change agents meet to rebuild systems from within.
Why This Study Matters
Across the world, policies and programs promising to “empower women” often focus on individual capacity-building, offering skills training, mentorship or microloans. But such programs rarely dismantle the institutional and cultural barriers that prevent women from translating these opportunities into sustainable change.
In our Journal of Management Studies article “Breaking Barriers: Scaffolding Social-Symbolic Work for Women’s Economic Empowerment”, we investigate how women’s economic empowerment can be achieved in contexts where formal rights exist, but deep-rooted norms still limit women’s participation in entrepreneurship. We focus on Kuwait – a wealthy but socially conservative society where women’s entrepreneurship remains constrained by cultural traditions and institutional inertia.
Our study shows that empowerment must go beyond strengthening individual women’s capacity and requires also reshaping the institutions that shape women’s possibilities.
What We Found: Scaffolding Change Across Levels
To explore how empowerment unfolds in practice, we traced the creation of Kuwait’s first women’s business incubator, the Al Salam Business Incubator.
We show how empowerment unfolds as a collective, multi-level process, driven by women entrepreneurs and reform-minded female public servants who worked strategically within the government, and catalyzed by the UNDP, which created the enabling conditions for empowerment. It shows the power of catalytic partnerships in dismantling systemic barriers to female entrepreneurship.
The incubator’s creation was anything but straightforward. It began with one determined woman in Kuwait’s Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor who wanted to help widowed and divorced women on welfare start their own businesses. Her early efforts flattered: welfare recipients were legally barred from holding business licenses, and senior officials dismissed the idea of entrepreneurship as “unsuitable” for women.
Change began when she and other female intrapreneurs at the Ministry partnered with the UNDP. This catalytic partnership provided legitimacy, funding, and access to new networks, allowing the women to turn aspiration into action. Together, the women engaged in what we call scaffolding social-symbolic work – a structured, phased process that combines purposeful efforts across three forms of actions (work); self, organization, and institution.
Each form lays the foundation for the next, creating a chain of small, interdependent changes that collectively reshape empowerment.
- Self-work: the female intrapreneurs cultivated entrepreneurial identities among women on welfare, helping them move from dependency to self-sufficiency. Women trainees were reluctant to embrace an entrepreneurial identity out of concern that doing so might put at risk the social benefits that provided their only source of income.
- Organizational work: they transformed the ministry’s role from welfare distributor to empowerment enabler, reframing its mandate around sustainable development. Female intrapreneurs encountered resistance inside the Social Ministry, as senior officials brushed aside their proposals, which slowed their efforts to steer the Social Ministry toward an empowerment-focused mandate.
- Institutional work: they reformed regulations that excluded welfare recipients from entrepreneurial activity, effectively removing one of the most restrictive barriers to women’s economic participation. Such reforms were contentious, as granting a two-year license directly challenged long-standing system that had long kept entrepreneurship and welfare support strictly apart.
These intertwined, scaffolded efforts culminated in the launch of the Al Salam Business Incubator in 2013. Beyond its material function, the incubator provided training, mentorship and workspace for aspiring female entrepreneurs. It became a symbolic space – a visible sign that women’s entrepreneurship could be both legitimate and aspirational in Kuwaiti society.
Why It Matters Beyond Academia
This study offers important lessons for development practitioners, policymakers, and advocates working to advance women’s economic empowerment.
- Reshape institutions, not just train individuals. Empowerment requires reconfiguring the institutional and organizational environments that shape women’s agency. In Kuwait, progress began only when welfare rules and social norms were renegotiated, when “benefit recipients” could also be recognized as entrepreneurs.
- Position external actors as catalysts, not directors. The UNDP’s impact laid in transferring legitimacy to local actors – in this case, female bureaucrats – to lead transformation from within, rather than imposing imported solutions.
- Work within systems to reimagine them. In some contexts, particularly conservative ones, progress often depends on reframing existing norms, relationship-building and strategic negotiation from within rather than through overt resistance.
Looking Ahead
The Al Salam Business Incubator stands as an example of institutional transformation driven by women inside government. It has supported women across Kuwait in launching businesses, from crafts to technology ventures, and inspired similar initiatives in the Gulf.
Such transformation is best illustrated through individual stories. As the first Incubator Manager, Fayza, explained:
“Zahra was a trainee who started with us. Now she’s an international perfumer. She was divorced and on social benefits. She learnt about perfume design. We brought in trainers across several entrepreneurial areas and provided materials. She received several courses on perfume design. Now she’s a trainer. She won the Princess Sabeeka Bint Ibrahim Al Khalifa Award on women’s empowerment in Bahrain”.
Still, challenges remain. The incubator primarily serves Kuwaiti citizens, leaving migrant women outside its reach. Extending empowerment across lines of citizenship represents an important next step toward inclusivity.
Ultimately, “When Catalysts and Change Agents Meet” reminds us that empowerment is not an individual journey but a collective, scaffolded process. It unfolds when courageous actors connect their personal passion to organizational reform and institutional change. In contexts where confrontation can backfire, building new spaces, symbols, and shared understanding may be the most powerful route to lasting transformation.
From Kuwait to the globe, this case shows that empowerment is not delivered; it is built, layer by layer, through collaboration, courage and institutional imagination.
