Home-renting
site Airbnb is providing women with a new way to earn money and build
businesses with more women than men on the site and women in Kenya gaining the
most, the company said on Tuesday.
Airbnb said
women have outnumbered men using the site since its 2008 launch and there are
currently more than one million women hosts — amounting to 55 percent of users
— who have earned over $10 billion in the past nine years.
A report
released to coincide with International Women's Day on March 8 showed Kenyan
women were gaining the most, earning about one-third of their annual household
expenditure from Airbnb and often using this to launch their own businesses.
Women in
India came second in the list, earning 31 percent of their annual household
expenditure through Airbnb.
This
contrasted with Germany and France, where Airbnb income was lowest among 14
countries surveyed, amounting to about three and four percent of average
household expenditure, with many using this money to supplement part-time jobs.
"Through
platforms like Airbnb, women around the world are finding a new source of
supplemental income and a new opportunity for economic security and
independence," Airbnb said in a statement.
The positive
message from Airbnb comes as the San-Francisco based start-up runs into
disputes in cities like Barcelona, Berlin and Paris that claim it deprives
locals of accommodation for permanent rent and hikes rental prices.
Studies show
that one of the biggest obstacles for women entrepreneurs around the world is
lack of access to capital to start businesses.
But the
sharing economy business is billed for explosive growth, estimated by
PricewaterhouseCoopers to reach $335 billion by 2025, from around $15 billion
in 2016.
"The
money I've made has helped pay part of my sister's doctorate degree,"
Airbnb cited one of its Kenyan hosts, Pamellah Gakenia, as saying.
Globally,
women's annual earnings, estimated at $10,778, are roughly half those of men,
the World Economic Forum says, partly because fewer women have formal jobs.
Women hosts
interviewed by Airbnb said they often employ others to help them with the
rental business.
"My
cleaner Lulu, a recent migrant from the Eastern Cape who doesn't speak much
English, now earns enough to pay her kids' school fees," it quoted South
African host, Belinda, as saying.
The top five
countries for women Airbnb hosts among the 14 surveyed were Kenya where women
earned 34 percent of average household expenditure, India at 31 percent,
Morocco 20 percent, China 19 percent and Japan 15 percent.
The data was
based on an email survey of 112,000 Airbnb hosts with more than 44,000
responses from Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Kenya,
Mexico, Morocco, South Africa, Spain, Britain and the United States.
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