highland womenGrowth Summit

The economic context

The inaugural Highland Women Growth Summit took place at a moment of real economic change for the region, shaped by renewables, inward investment and major projects such as the Inverness and Cromarty Firth Green Freeport.

It was against that backdrop that 126 women, alongside a small number of men, gathered in Inverness on 27 February 2026. Founders, leaders and ecosystem partners travelled from across the region. We heard from the Deputy First Minister, Kate Forbes MSP, on confident and authentic leadership in a region in transition, and from Calum MacPherson, Chief Executive of the Inverness and Cromarty Firth Green Freeport, on the scale of the opportunity ahead.

As the day unfolded, a shared realisation emerged. The Highlands are entering a decade where scaling will matter as much as starting. As investment flows in, the places that benefit most will be those with strong ecosystems where people are connected, confident and able to step into opportunity.

That shifts the conversation about women in business. This is about more than representation. It is about participation, visibility and long-term regional prosperity.

• Participation: Ensuring founders can access the opportunities flowing into the region.
• Visibility: Recognising women-led businesses as a genuine growth lever.
• Long-term prosperity: Building growth that is inclusive, durable and felt across communities.

Women spoke openly about unequal access to investment, thinner networks, visibility barriers and the weight of caring responsibilities. These experiences are widely shared and extend far beyond the Highlands. Evidence across Scotland and the wider UK continues to show deep structural barriers for women in business, especially at the point of growth and scale.

The growth gap

Data shared on the day showed a clear, widely recognised pattern that appears consistently across research. There is a structural gap between starting and scaling for women-led businesses.

National studies, including the Scottish Government's Pathways review and research from Women's Enterprise Scotland, identify multiple contributors to this gap: unequal caring responsibilities, limited access to informal networks and persistent investment bias.

These are the numbers the Highland Women Growth Partnership is directly designed to move.

Naming this gap matters because once visible, it can be addressed collectively.

The Highlands context

In the Highlands, these realities sit within a distinctive regional landscape shaped by geography, population distribution and the practical implications of rural life. Distance between communities, limited public transport, and the time and cost of travel all shape how easily people access networks, opportunities and support.

These dynamics are often compounded by childcare and caring responsibilities, which can be more complex in rural areas where provision is thinner and informal support systems are more dispersed. Together, these factors create a layer of friction that is less visible in urban ecosystems but deeply felt by those building and growing businesses across the region.

Digital connectivity is improving, but still uneven. While progress continues, not-spots and infrastructure gaps still shape what is possible in some communities. This makes locally rooted, adaptable approaches to business building even more important.

At the same time, with the growth of the energy transition, the development of the Inverness and Cromarty Firth Green Freeport, and increasing inward investment, the region is entering a period in which questions of participation and value capture are becoming more prominent.

Confidence surfaced repeatedly throughout the day as a practical enabler of participation. In regions where visibility, networks and capital access are thinner, confidence acts as a form of economic infrastructure, shaping who steps forward, who scales and who remains on the margins of opportunity.

Nathalie Agnew spoke about building her business from a kitchen table into a 30-plus strong team and one of Scotland's leading PR agencies, as well as Scotland's first B Corp PR firm.

Naomi Russell from Russwood reflected on how her family business responded during COVID, using shifts in stock and the wider economic climate as a springboard for innovation and growth. Sarah Francis shared how moving to the Highlands without a job led her to build a business around her skills, which she has grown into a successful growing team at Yellow Cherry. Vicki Miller spoke about seeking more direction in her career, wanting work that fitted around her life, retraining in accountancy, and now serving as a director at Frame Kennedy.

Mentorship

Mentorship came up again and again throughout the Summit as one of the clearest areas for change. While research often talks about mentorship as a barrier, the conversations gave it a much more practical feel.

In the Highlands, distance and thinner networks mean people often have fewer informal ways to learn from others. Many spoke about how valuable it is to have someone ahead of you to sense-check decisions, share experience and help navigate key moments like hiring, raising investment or entering new markets.

There was strong interest in more intentional matching between experienced leaders and emerging founders, especially relationships that last longer than short programmes and allow real trust to build. Peer connections also mattered, with many highlighting the value of learning alongside others at a similar stage.

The need for mentorship went beyond early-stage founders. Several women spoke about the lack of support when navigating more complex growth decisions, where what is needed is perspective and experience rather than encouragement.

Taken together, mentorship felt less like a support offer and more like part of the infrastructure that helps people grow.

What was clear is that there is a need for an ongoing mentorship package that does not sit inside cyclical programmes but as an ongoing service.

Young people and entrepreneurship

Young people came up a lot in conversations across the day, both through the presence of younger voices in the room and a wider focus on how we connect schools and entrepreneurship more closely.

A strong theme was visibility. Many people spoke about how powerful it would be for young women in schools to see what running a business actually looks like and to spend time around women building successful companies in the Highlands.

There was real warmth around the idea of more intergenerational spaces. The suggestion of future events where people could bring their daughters came up repeatedly and clearly resonated. Others spoke about including young boys too, helping shape wider understanding of leadership, ambition and enterprise from an early age.

People also talked about founders spending more time in schools and creating clearer, more relatable pathways into entrepreneurship. In rural and island communities, where exposure can be more limited, that visibility really matters.

Seen through a regional lens, this is about shaping the future pipeline of founders, investors and leaders who will influence how opportunity is created and shared across the Highlands in the years ahead.

Investment and capital

Investment was one of the most energising parts of the day. Many attendees valued honest conversations about how funding and capital actually work, particularly beyond grants. Wider evidence shows that only a small share of equity investment flows to women-led businesses, a pattern widely understood as structural rather than individual.

Several speakers helped bring the investment landscape to life. Gillian Fleming from Mint Ventures spoke about the accessibility of angel investing, both in terms of becoming an investor and the value angels bring beyond capital through experience, networks and support.

Nicola Douglas from the Scottish National Investment Bank shared practical insight into what it takes to unlock investment and committed to making time in the coming weeks to meet Highland businesses and offer advice.

Stuart Black from Highlands and Islands Enterprise highlighted the new Highland Impact Women programme, designed to support women entrepreneurs with skills and mentorship. He also committed to working on more funding for the enterprise team that Rachel Hunter heads up.

Cath MacRae from Shepherd and Wedderburn LLP spoke about what makes businesses more attractive to private investors, including strong management accounts, clarity around intellectual property and a clear growth story. Bronwen Thomas from Women's Enterprise Scotland grounded the discussion in national research, including findings that 68% of women surveyed reported experiencing discrimination during their business journey.

One of the most energising threads was the idea of more women stepping into investment roles themselves. Over time, this creates a reinforcing loop, where women as founders, operators and investors reshape how capital flows through the regional economy. This as a piece of work has real potential to directly impact women-led businesses across the region, by getting women, female angel investors, to back women-led businesses. We will continue to work with Mint Ventures and others to strengthen our angel investor ecosystem in the Highlands.

Funding

Another theme that surfaced during the Summit was the perception among many women-led businesses that they are seen as uninvestable, often because they struggle to access public funding and begin to internalise that as a judgement on their ventures.

Rachel Hunter from Highlands and Islands Enterprise spoke directly to this point, noting that many of these businesses are genuinely investable. The challenge often sits in how funding systems are structured and communicated, rather than in the underlying strength of the businesses themselves.

Evelyn McDonald from Scottish Edge also spoke on the day, bringing to life the funding opportunities that the Scottish Edge competition offers. For early-stage and growing businesses, competition-based funding of this kind can open doors that more traditional routes do not, and her contribution helped broaden the room's understanding of what is actually available.

Public funding is often directed towards high-growth sectors and shaped by rules around displacement and market impact, which means many sectors where women are strongly represented sit outside those parameters.

What became clear on the day was that the landscape is broader than many founders realise. Alongside public funding, there are multiple other routes into capital, including equity, revenue-based finance, angel investment and blended models already used successfully elsewhere.

When this information is shared openly, the funding conversation begins to shift. The challenge becomes less about access to a single funding route and more about widening awareness, building confidence and helping founders navigate a more diverse capital landscape.

Procurement

Procurement is one of the most direct ways that intent becomes economic reality.

Too often, contract value flows out of the region, limiting the extent to which local businesses are able to build track record, reinvest and deepen their roots within the places where they already create value.

From our perspective, this reflects a systemic participation gap. When women-led businesses rooted in the Highlands are absent from procurement pathways or struggle to progress through them, the region loses both immediate economic value and the longer-term capability that comes from experience, confidence and sustained growth.

Understanding the barriers to women taking part in the public procurement process and strengthening participation in procurement ensures that regional investment builds regional strength and enables women-led businesses to move from the margins into the core economic activity shaping the Highlands' future.

Support beyond the early stages

Many conversations highlighted a clear gap in support beyond the earliest stages of building a business. Standard programmes often assume consistent availability and steady growth patterns, which rarely match the reality of building across Highland and island geographies.

Those most affected include women who have been trading for several years and founders balancing caring responsibilities alongside growth ambitions. Others include women ready to scale but sitting outside typical programme criteria.

There was a clear call for more flexible and life-aware support, alongside place-based approaches that reflect how businesses are built across rural and island contexts.

Many women spoke about the intensity of carrying businesses, families and community roles at the same time. The resilience across the ecosystem is real and often sits on top of invisible load.

Reframing women's enterprise

One of the most important outcomes of the Summit was a shift in how the conversation evolved across the day. The focus moved beyond identifying gaps and towards reframing how women's enterprise fits within the wider story of regional growth.

This includes recognising both the need for fuller participation and the significant role women already play in shaping the Highlands economy. It also means making that contribution more visible, more valued and more strongly supported as the region enters its next phase.

Women's experiences offer a powerful lens on how opportunity is distributed and where participation still feels uneven across the region. Through that lens, supporting women-led businesses to scale becomes a core economic question connected to resilience, capability and long-term prosperity across communities.

What also stood out was the cultural capital already present across the region. A spirit of collaboration, mutual support and place-rooted ambition creates a strong foundation for what comes next.

Everyone in the room

There were only a few men at the Summit, but their presence and their contribution mattered. What came through clearly in the feedback is that closing the structural gap around female entrepreneurship requires men to be active participants in the solution, with their voices in the conversation and, just as importantly, their ears.

This Partnership will fail if it becomes a side project handed to a woman in an organisation simply because of her gender. It needs the right people in the room: senior decision-makers, institutional leaders and men who are willing to listen, act and use their influence within the systems that shape how opportunity is distributed.

The work of building a stronger ecosystem for women-led businesses is a regional economic priority. It needs to be treated as one. This, in turn, will support our families, communities and region as a whole.

A market failure and an economic opportunity

In underserving the needs of women-led businesses and under investment in those businesses, the Highlands and Islands are leaving growth on the table. That is a market failure, and it has a measurable cost.

When capital does not flow to a significant portion of the available talent and business base, the system is not working efficiently. When networks are structured in ways that exclude capable founders from opportunity, the region loses the returns those businesses would have generated. When women-led businesses cannot access the conditions to scale, we are failing those businesses and, our regional economy.

This is the definition of a market failure. Capital is flowing past capable businesses, leaving potential unrealised. Women-led businesses in the Highlands are predominantly community-anchored, which means the cost runs deep. It shows up in childcare provision that falls short, in transport gaps, in local supply chains that remain underdeveloped, and in community wealth that stalls before it has the chance to compound.

This is why the Highland Women Growth Partnership cannot be treated as a women's initiative sitting at the edge of the economic development agenda. The investors, institutions and senior leaders who shape how capital and resource move through this region need to be engaged with this work, not as allies to a cause, but as participants in an economic opportunity that affects the region they are responsible for.

If that case still needs to be made in some rooms, we are prepared to make it.

The Highland Women Growth Partnership

From the outset, the Highland Women Growth Summit was designed as a catalyst for an ongoing Highland Women Growth Partnership, bringing people together around the shared belief that the Highlands can and should become the strongest-supported region in the UK for women-led businesses to start, grow, and scale.

The Highland Women Growth Partnership will create a shared layer that brings founders, the public sector, ecosystem partners and investors into closer connection around a common ambition, grounded in the understanding that strengthening outcomes for women strengthens the wider regional economy and creates more resilient communities.

The Highland Women Growth Partnership is built on four core principles, each set out below.

Built on clear foundations

The Highland Women Growth Digital Hub

The Summit was designed around a core belief: that bringing women together in person, with targeted sessions, honest conversation and real collaborative working, would create something that digital connection alone cannot replicate. That belief was confirmed on the day.

What also became clear, through the conversations in the room and in the feedback that followed, was a strong and consistent desire for something more. A digital infrastructure that keeps the network alive between gatherings. A shared space where people can connect, do business together, access mentorship and build on what was started in Inverness.

That came through too strongly to set aside.

There are off-the-shelf products that could serve some of those needs but we believe building something shaped specifically around this network, this region and the way people here actually work, is worth the effort.

The design and build of that infrastructure is our next step, and it will be shaped by what founders, mentors and partners across the Highlands say they need - and, of course, what we can fund.

2027 and beyond

The Highland Women Growth Summit was always planned as an annual event. The reception on the day, and everything that followed, has only strengthened that intention. Dates for the 2027 Summit are being confirmed now, and it will build directly on the momentum and commitments made this year.

Alongside the annual Summit, the Highland Women Growth Partnership will operate on a quarterly rhythm. Each quarter will focus on one of the core areas identified in this report, capital, mentorship, scaling and leadership, with targeted activity designed to move things forward rather than simply discuss them.

Those quarterly moments will be delivered in partnership. Identifying the right organisations and individuals to lead each area is part of the work ahead, and it reflects the same collaborative principle that runs through everything else. The Highland Women Growth Partnership does not need to own every piece of delivery. It needs to ensure the right people are doing the right things, and that progress stays visible across the whole network.

Our commitments

The Summit surfaced clear threads of work. Each one has momentum behind it. Each one needs the right people involved. These are not intentions for a future conversation. They are commitments we are making now, and we are being deliberate about who needs to be part of each one.

Acknowledgements

The Highland Women Growth Summit could not have happened without the generosity of everyone who gave their time, expertise and support on the day and in the months of work that preceded it.