Mastercard: Access to capital - and childcare: How this program for Ukrainian women entrepreneurs helped them thrive in Poland

BY EVA LACINOVA

NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / April 2, 2024 / The Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth
Mastercard

When Russian missiles began raining down on Kyiv in 2022, Polina Khlibanovska hurriedly threw clothes into a suitcase and bundled her five-year-old son into the car. Barely stopping to eat or sleep, she drove for nearly two days to reach the safety of the Polish border.

Foto: Accesswire

Polina Khlibanovska, who fled Ukraine for Poland, hugs one of her charges at the kindergarten she opened in Warsaw.

Like more than a million Ukrainian women and children who fled to neighboring Poland, Khlibanovska had no idea how long she would be away from home, but she knew she urgently needed to find a way to support herself and her child.

After many years of working with children, she knew how to run a kindergarten, but little about how to finance the startup costs or navigate Polish business permits, let alone advertise for clients in a new language.

Spotting an advertisement for a small business program for Ukrainian women entrepreneurs run by Poland's Impact Foundation and supported by the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, Khlibanovska decided to apply and got a spot.

Now, thanks to the legal, business and financial support offered by the (Re)building Ukrainian Business program, she runs her Smart Kindergarten Warsaw venture and employs three other women.

Khlibanovska was one of 1,500 women to apply for 80 spots on the yearlong program, which opened a Warsaw co-working space to give entrepreneurs the space and support they needed to start a new company or rekindle businesses they ran in Ukraine.

"We wanted the project to have a snowball effect by giving them the tools and knowledge to survive and live in a different country," says Emilia Borkowska, project manager for the Impact Foundation. "They were full of energy and motivated to start a new life."

Yet many of these women needed more than business skills to launch their new lives.

All too often, women entrepreneurs are forced to juggle the lion's share of childcare with the challenges of starting and running a new business. According to a recent World Bank study, women spend 2.4 hours a day more on unpaid care than men, and much of that is spent looking after children.

For the women fleeing the war, the burden on them was even greater - they were in a new country where they didn't speak the language and knew no one, had no immediate job prospects, and had children who were dependent on them.

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