From Ger to Market: Empowering Women Entrepreneurs in Isolated Desert Communities of Southern Mongolia
Keywords:
women entrepreneurship, empowerment, Gobi Desert, Mongolia, community service, rural developmentAbstract
Women in the remote desert communities of Southern Mongolia's Gobi region face compounding disadvantages: extreme geographic isolation, persistent gender norms that constrain economic agency, minimal access to financial services, and accelerating climate stress that erodes traditional pastoral livelihoods. This community service study reports the design, implementation, and outcomes of a six-month participatory entrepreneurship empowerment program—titled Gobi Women Rise—conducted across three soum-level communities in Ömnögovi Province, engaging 76 women aged 18 to 58. The program delivered six integrated training modules addressing financial literacy, handicraft value-chain development, digital commerce, cooperative governance, climate-adaptive livelihood planning, and negotiation skills, alongside the establishment of a peer-supported women's cooperative network. Using a pre-test/post-test design with qualitative triangulation, findings demonstrate significant improvements across economic, psychological, and social dimensions of empowerment, including a 67.7% increase in mean monthly household income, an 83.2% improvement in Women's Empowerment Index scores, and the registration of 63.2% of participants on digital marketplaces. These results advance evidence-based frameworks for gender-sensitive entrepreneurship development in extreme geographic and climatic contexts.
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