About Us

In 2011, Business, Enterprise and Employment Support for Women in South Asia Network (Guarantee) Limited, an informal platform of 15 civil society organizations representing 8 South Asian countries was born as a regional platform to collectively tackle the shared challenge of women’s economic participation. With the support of the World Bank, the BEES Network primary focus over the last decade was on delivering peer learning between women entrepreneurs and grassroots producers across borders. The platform leveraged its strengths of scale and scope, with the scale of the BEES Network being the combined strength of its individual members at about 23 million women, and the geographical reach including cross-learning through best practices on entrepreneurship, reaching remote areas covered by BEES Network members. The scope refers to the diversity of its member organizations in terms of their capabilities – deep knowledge of gender-based discrimination to e-commerce - and constituencies – from home-based workers to artisanal clusters, ensured that the platform was more than a sum of its parts. The BEES could tackle the challenge of economic participation with the complexity and nuance it demanded. 

BEES is registered in Sri Lanka as Business, Enterprise and Employment Support for Women in South Asia Network (Guarantee) Limited subject to the provisions of Section 35(1) of the Companies Act No.07 of 2007, Sri Lanka.