Turkish Trailblazer: Boosting Rural Areas through Business Investment

This is a study about a female entrepreneur in Turkey who achieved business success by breaking from the conventional practices preferred by others in her industry and investing in poorer parts of Turkey. Clothing, the industry in which the entrepreneur is operating, is one of the Turkish economy’s locomotive sectors in terms of industrial production, employment and export earnings.

Increasing competition, along with the elimination of trade barriers around the world, forced her to look for opportunities to reduce her business’s costs in order to survive. Her solution was shifting her production units to Turkey’s poorer regions where labor costs are lower and the government provides incentives. As a result, she opened four new production units around the country in six years. These investments and jobs created in Turkey’s poorer districts have changed economic and social life there for the better, especially for women. All of the entrepreneur’s investments have become successful business entities. The cost of production, especially for certain products, has been reduced drastically, which has helped the company respond quickly to the recent global economic turmoil.

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Categorisations

Partnership types

Doing business with the poor

Regions / countries / territories

Asia: Turkey

Global issues

Job creation and enterprise development; Gender issues

Business sectors

Manufacturing