Fostering Inclusive Growth: How Digital Tools Benefit Entrepreneurs from Marginalized Groups

This paper studies marginalized groups, the challenges they face, particularly as they relate to entrepreneurship, and how low-cost digital tools can help marginalized entrepreneurs to address those challenges. Digital tools have a range of use cases—including marketing, ecommerce, interactive customer engagement, analytics, audience targeting—which can help small business, and particularly marginalized entrepreneurs. We aim to highlight opportunities for future research that will help inform policymakers, business leaders, and innovators on how to best support the entrepreneurial efforts of different marginalized communities. The paper was informed by a series of eight hour-long, semi-structured, qualitative interviews with entrepreneurs from around the world.