As the Secretariat for the APPG for Entrepreneurship, The Entrepreneurs Network are hosting a series of webinars to bring Parliamentarians and leading business owners together to explore what the future holds for start-ups and scale-ups post-COVID-19. In the first webinar of the series we focused on the public health challenges facing disabled entrepreneurs and how the Government will be able best support entrepreneurs with disabilities.
We were joined by some inspirational speakers in our APPG for Entrepreneurship session on Disability & Entrepreneurship in the Time of Coronavirus last week. We heard from Dr Lisa Cameron MP, Chair for the APPG for Disability and Shadow Spokesperson on Mental Health. She was joined by social entrepreneur Kush Kanodia, and Liz Johnson, gold-medal winning Paralympian and co-founder of The Ability People and (recently launched) Podium.
Giving a parliamentarian's perspective, Dr Lisa Cameron MP stressed the importance of creating a momentum around the key issues facing disabled entrepreneurs and looking to policy areas that could be developed, to maximise everyone’s skills.
I've picked out a few of the most thought-provoking insights from the session. If you are interested in reading the full transcript, you can view it here. We will be uploading the webinar onto our YouTube channel.
Highlights & Insights from our Speakers
Liz Johnson spoke about accessibility and how we should address it as an underlying factor in everything we do to ensure that disabled persons are able to reach their full potential:
“Authentic inclusion and normalizing people's differences is what's going to make the world move forward and what's going to support people with disabilities to use their entrepreneurial skills and opportunities”
She drew on the education process in the sporting industry, with regards to disabled athletes and suggested that we can transfer this into every aspect of our society:
“We have to push and work with people to constantly make sure that accessibility is the underlying factor to everything and people are included in consultation at every level because you can't be expected to fix things for people. If you don't know what's wrong with them”
Kush Kanodia stressed the importance of re-focusing and changing our systems to combat the increasing inequality, which will result from the COVID-19 pandemic:
“Having accessible health-care and transport systems are only going to be ever more critical for disabled people in our post-COVID world”
He also spoke about how ‘fear’ of losing benefits is the single biggest barrier to disabled entrepreneurship:
“We need to focus and enable an environment where disabled entrepreneurs feel confident and not afraid to take the additional risks that are associated with starting a new business”
Dr Lisa Cameron MP drew attention to Liz and Kush’s insights and suggested that their ideas could be used to positively impact disabled entrepreneurs across the UK. She suggested that reducing barriers to accessing finance and mentoring are vital to address the challenges faced by many disabled entrepreneurs.
Questions & Recommendations
During the Q&A session, we touched on a range of key issues facing disabled entrepreneurs. Here is a quick summary of some of the issues we explored and the recommendations that came out of our Q&A.
One person suggested that APPG Disability meetings should be available on different platforms, to ensure that disabled persons are able to engage with parliament on the issues they face.
In response Dr Lisa Cameron MP spoke about how she is having meetings with the Speaker in order to make the meetings more technologically savvy going forward and to ensure that committee meetings are accessible to all.
Philip Salter, Secretariat for the APPG for Entrepreneurship, asked Liz and Kush about how optimistic they were about there being a positive change to come out of coronavirus for disabled people.
In response, Liz Johnson suggested that while working from home has opened doors for some disabled entrepreneurs, it has also made it more difficult and challenging for other people. Talking about the transition back to the office after lockdown, Liz suggested that there should not be a blanket approach for all.
“I think the key to the transition back out of this is how we frame it and how we educate everybody around the choices and the differences that are born out of necessity… there are people who actually, if they implement these strategies, their productivity will be so much more and the opportunities become endless”
Kush Kanodia suggested that COVID-19 has been a leveling experience for many, who might not have understood the fear that many disabled entrepreneurs feel leaving their homes. Kush also suggested that it has shown that virtual environments are just as important as physical ones.
“One of the key transitions that I want to see in a post COVID world is that disability no longer sits within diversity and inclusion, within organisations, but is actually a part of sustainability, is actually a part of corporate strategy, values and ethics of all organisations”
One person asked about what could be done to get more disabled persons involved at the policymaking level.
Dr Lisa Cameron MP spoke about the Disability Internship Programme developed by the APPG for Entrepreneurship which seeks to involve disabled persons as key stakeholders in policy making.
One of the audience members spoke about her struggle to access the finance she needed, as a disabled entrepreneur, and asked how the Government might support disabled entrepreneurs and ensure that they are heard?
Kush Kanodia spoke about how disabled entrepreneurship seems to be missing in the current Government support. He also recommended that the turnover requirements for disabled entrepreneurs in their first year of business should be scrapped, both during and in a post-COVID world, in order to reduce levels of unemployment:
“Entrepreneurship is going to be a much more conducive conduit to employment for a lot of disabled people”
One person whether there would be any additional initial funding schemes available to disabled entrepreneurs. Another person then asked about the economic recovery plan.
Liz Johnson stressed the importance of cross-communication between departments to ensure that disabled entrepreneurs have equal access to initial funding and are considered in the COVID-19 recovery plan:
“People want to be able to access what they are capable of and what they have potential for. So we need to create a world where you normalise differences”
Kush Kanodia brought the funding issue home with some interesting stats on the global purchasing power of disabled entrepreneurs and their potential to contribute to the UK economy.
“We have 15 to 20 percent of the population, equating to 14 million people being disabled globally. That's 1.3 billion people and that globally equates to a purchasing power of 8 trillion dollars”
Dr Lisa Cameron MP wrapped up the webinar with some updates on how she is raising the funding issue with the banks and also the letter she has written to the Prime Minister, regarding the importance of a disability inclusive economic recovery plan.
So where do we go from here? Dr Lisa Cameron MP has expressed her interest in looking into an inquiry report about entrepreneurship for people with disabilities. We see this webinar as only the beginning of a wider conversation about how we can help to support disabled entrepreneurs. As made clear in this session, entrepreneurship is going to be so important in our post-COVID-19 world.
Some of our greatest entrepreneurs live or lived with disabilities. Richard Branson, founder of Virgin has spoken about how Dyslexia made him a better businessman. Ralph Braun had muscular dystrophy and built Braun Corporation, the world’s leading manufacturer of wheelchair accessible vehicles. The concept for IKEA came from its founder’s, Ingvar Kamprad’s dyslexia.
We have a few more APPG for Entrepreneurship webinars coming up in the next few weeks. If you are interested, you can sign up here.