What is the NatWest Thrive entrepreneurship programme for girls?

NatWest Thrive is not a single course. It is a resource hub and delivery network built around bite-sized lessons, learning plans and face-to-face youth work sessions covering money management, career planning and entrepreneurship, and Sisterhood has described it as a platform dedicated to building money confidence and future skills for the next generation. The programme is available free to anyone, customer or not, across NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland and Ulster Bank Northern Ireland, which means a teacher in Bradford or a youth worker in Belfast can access identical NatWest Thrive entrepreneurship resources without a school budget getting in the way.

Sisterhood Summer sits alongside that core platform as a more intensive strand aimed squarely at closing the gender gap in entrepreneurship. The programme targets 16 to 20 year old girls and gender-expanding youth, running as an in-person launchpad where participants develop a business idea from scratch, work with professional designers and mentors, and finish with a live pitch night. It is entrepreneurship education solving real-world problems in the most literal sense: participants pick a social or environmental issue they care about and build a venture around it rather than inventing a product for its own sake.

Why does a female founders confidence gap start so early?

Girls are not born with less confidence than boys. Research shows the gap opens during adolescence, well before anyone applies for a business loan, and the newest tracking data confirms it has narrowed rather than closed. The original 2019 review found that only 39% of women were confident in their capabilities to start a business compared with 55% of men, and the most recent progress check on that review found 37% of women still cite fear of failure as a primary barrier to starting a business, against 28% of men. That review, led by NatWest’s Alison Rose and now known simply as the Rose Review, identified fear of failure, funding access and caring responsibilities as the three biggest barriers, and all three still show up in the latest figures.

Activity data tells a similar story of slow movement rather than a closed gap. The total early-stage entrepreneurial activity rate for women rose from 5.6% in 2018 to 8.4% in 2024, against 11.2% for men in the same year, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor UK report. Zoomed out globally, the newest worldwide GEM data found that one in ten women compared with one in eight men started new businesses in 2024, so the pattern holds well beyond the UK.

Youth-focused research backs up the idea that this starts young rather than being a mid-career phenomenon. Evidence submitted to Parliament on behalf of Young Enterprise found that 93% of young women who had taken part in entrepreneurship programmes agreed that female entrepreneurs face greater barriers than their male counterparts, and when asked what would make the biggest difference to future founders, “confidence” was the single most common answer, ahead of mentoring and self-belief.

That last point matters more than it might seem. It suggests girls in STEM entrepreneurship and business programmes are not lacking ambition. They are lacking early, low-stakes chances to practise failing safely, get feedback from someone who looks like them, and build the muscle memory of pitching an idea out loud.

The funding side of the picture has arguably moved in the wrong direction even as awareness has grown. A parliamentary report on female entrepreneurship found that in 2024, just 2% of equity investment went to back a female founder, down from 2.5% in 2023, while all-male teams received over 80% of the venture capital allocated despite female-led businesses outperforming them. The Investing in Women Code, created off the back of the Rose Review, has still grown its reach, with over 250 signatories from across the financial ecosystem by the end of 2024, up from 190 in 2023. More signatories tracking their own data is not the same thing as more money reaching female founders, and the gap between those two facts is exactly where confidence-building programmes for teenagers cannot do all the work alone.

Rose Review headline metrics, then and now

What real-world problems are these young innovators solving?

The businesses coming out of programmes like Sisterhood Summer are not toy projects built for a school fair. Past cohorts have pitched ventures tackling period poverty, mental wellbeing, sustainable fashion and food waste, using the kind of design-thinking process that professional social enterprises use. One participant from the 2023 cohort, Sofia, founder of a venture called Gut Feeling, described the programme’s effect on her plainly: “I feel after this program it has given me the confidence to actually go after what I want,” while fellow founder Ebunlowa, who launched a project called Dimensions, said the experience made her feel “capable of anything.”

The pattern has repeated across every cohort since. In the most recent round, one mentor paired with a 21 year old graduate building a venture at the intersection of sport and mental performance, and later wrote that “her confidence in laying out the idea, at 21, on the day after graduation, was properly impressive.” That participant was preparing for her first pitch in front of a room at Canva, the same design-software company whose office has hosted recent Sisterhood pitch nights, with a mentoring day built into the schedule specifically so founders get structured feedback before facing an audience.

Those are not generic feel-good quotes lifted from a press release. They reflect a specific mechanic built into the programme: pairing each participant with a personally matched mentor, a public speaking coach, and design professionals who treat a teenager’s business idea with the same seriousness as a client brief. Sisterhood’s cofounders, Rachita Saraogi and Rebecca Thomson, built the model around what they call social impact design, explaining that “Sisterhood exists to democratise design activity and also entrepreneurial skills for girls.” The idea is that skills used to solve a design brief, problem-solving, articulating a challenge, presenting to a room, transfer directly into entrepreneurial thinking, regardless of whether a participant ever launches a formal company.

The most recent cohort also had a notable guest: Team GB Olympian Emily Campbell, who joined as a NatWest Thrive Ambassador on the programme’s final day and spoke with participants about following a chosen path with commitment, according to a recap posted by one of Sisterhood’s cofounders. Having an elite athlete rather than a typical startup founder as the role model matters for a programme built around women in business role models, since it signals that the underlying skills of self-belief and disciplined practice apply well beyond a traditional business background.

How does NatWest Thrive compare with other NatWest entrepreneurship initiatives?

NatWest runs several distinct programmes under its wider entrepreneurship banner, and it is easy to confuse them. Here is how the main ones differ:

The distinction matters for anyone trying to plug a young person into the right level of support. Thrive’s core platform is the entry point for confidence and basic financial literacy. Sisterhood Summer is the intensive, pitch-ready layer for older teenagers who already have an idea worth developing, and it now credits both NatWest Thrive and the NatWest Accelerator among its supporting partners for the most recent cohort. The Accelerator sits well beyond school age, aimed at founders who are already trading.

Where can teachers and youth workers find these resources?

The honest answer is that most of the material sits in one place, but it takes some digging to find the right entry point for your group’s age range. NatWest Thrive’s resource hub organises everything into topics and ready-to-go learning plans that a youth worker with no entrepreneurship background can pick up and run in under an hour. For older teenagers ready for something more intensive, Sisterhood Summer opens applications separately each spring, and spots are limited by design because of the mentor-to-participant ratio the programme relies on.

Ahead of this year’s application window, the team also ran an informal open workshop at NatWest’s Moorgate office aimed at 17 to 21 year olds with a rough idea, hobby or side hustle they wanted help shaping before formally applying. That kind of low-pressure entry point matters for a female founders confidence gap that research consistently links to fear of failure rather than a lack of ideas, since it lets a teenager test whether an idea has legs before committing to a two-week programme.

One limitation worth naming honestly: neither programme is a substitute for sustained, curriculum-embedded enterprise education. A two-week summer intensive or a set of bite-sized online modules cannot fully replace the kind of year-round mentoring that changes a young woman’s default assumptions about who gets to start a business. Programmes like Thrive are a strong on-ramp, not a finished bridge.

Why grassroots confidence programmes are not the whole answer

Building confidence in a room full of mentors does not fix a funding system that still allocates the bulk of venture capital to men. A parliamentary report found that just 20% of UK businesses are female led, 75% of university spinouts are all-male teams, and 86% of angel investors and 85% of senior venture capital investors are male. Those are structural gatekeeping numbers, not confidence numbers, and no amount of pitch-night rehearsal changes who sits on the other side of the table.

Grant programmes built specifically to help are not immune to the same bias. Reporting on Innovate UK’s Women in Innovation programme found that assessors were 81% male, that the median application took 60 hours to complete, and that the scheme rejected 96% of applicants in a recent year despite more than half scoring above its own funding threshold, with the organisation later admitting it had “prioritised wrongly.” That is worth flagging plainly to anyone treating a school-age entrepreneurship programme as a complete fix: it is not one, and pretending otherwise sets young women up to blame themselves for a system that still filters against them further up the funnel.

The government-backed Invest in Women Taskforce, launched in 2024, has raised over £500 million to help close that gap, aiming to lift the share of angel investment reaching all-female and mixed-gender teams to 30% by 2027. That is real money, but it sits far below estimates that closing the entrepreneurship gender gap fully could add roughly £310 billion to the UK economy. Confidence-building programmes for teenagers and systemic funding reform for adult founders are not competing solutions. They are two different links in the same broken chain, and one without the other leaves plenty of talented young women stuck at the pitch-night stage indefinitely.

Where this leaves young female entrepreneurs today

The gap documented in the Rose Review has not closed on its own, and it will not close through good intentions alone. What programmes like NatWest Thrive and Sisterhood Summer offer is not a guarantee of business success, but a rehearsal space, somewhere to pitch, fail, get feedback and pitch again before the stakes involve real investors and real money. For every young female entrepreneur weighing up whether she is “the type of person” who starts a business, that rehearsal space appears to be doing exactly what the data suggests is missing: building confidence through repetition, not lectures, while the harder structural fixes around funding and grant assessment play out on a slower timeline.

If you work with young people, whether as a teacher, a parent or a youth club leader, the practical next step is straightforward. Check NatWest Thrive’s resource hub for age-appropriate entrepreneurship modules, and if the young women you support are aged 16 to 20 with a business idea they care about, flag the Sisterhood Summer application window when it opens each spring. Small, well-timed nudges like that are, according to every piece of research cited here, exactly what tips a “maybe someday” into an actual pitch, even while the wider funding system still has real catching up to do.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is the NatWest Thrive programme?

NatWest Thrive is a free entrepreneurship and financial education platform for young people aged 8 to 24, delivered online and through youth clubs in partnership with the National Youth Agency, covering money management, career planning and entrepreneurial skills.

Who can access NatWest Thrive resources?

Anyone can access NatWest Thrive, including non-customers, across NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland and Ulster Bank Northern Ireland. It is designed for teachers, parents, community partners and young people themselves to use at home, in school or in youth clubs.

What is the Rose Review of female entrepreneurship?

The Rose Review is an independent report led by Alison Rose, first published in 2019, examining barriers women face when starting and scaling businesses. Its 2024 progress check found the confidence and funding gaps have narrowed only slightly since publication.

Why is there a confidence gap between young men and young women in entrepreneurship?

Research shows the gap starts in adolescence, driven by fewer relatable role models, less exposure to entrepreneurship as a career path, and fear of failure, which the latest data puts at 37% for women against 28% for men.

What support does NatWest offer female entrepreneurs?

NatWest offers layered support including NatWest Thrive for young people, Sisterhood Summer for teenage girls building social-impact businesses, Dream Bigger for school-age students, and the NatWest Accelerator for adult founders scaling existing businesses.

What age group is NatWest Thrive designed for?

NatWest Thrive is designed for young people aged 8 to 24, with content ranging from short bite-sized activities for younger children to more in-depth learning plans and pitch-focused programmes for older teenagers.

How does entrepreneurship education help close the gender gap in business?

Entrepreneurship education gives young women structured, low-stakes chances to pitch ideas, receive mentorship and practise handling setbacks, which research links to higher self-reported confidence, though funding-side barriers still require separate systemic fixes.

What other organisations partner with NatWest to support young female founders?

NatWest partners with organisations including the National Youth Agency for Thrive’s delivery network and Sisterhood, a social enterprise founded by Rachita Saraogi and Rebecca Thomson, for the Sisterhood Summer entrepreneurship programme.