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Business Formalization for LBQ+ Women: How Bogotá’s Ruta Works

Writer: Deborah Iroegbu
Deborah Iroegbu
Oct 27
3 min read

Meet the Partners, Part 1

You can have a good business and still be locked out of the places that help you grow. The reason is often a piece of paper.

In Bogotá, Corporación Femm is working on exactly that. Its project, “Ruta LBQTNB: a formalizarnos y sin miedo al éxito” (“a route to making ourselves official and without fear of success”), is business formalization for LBQ+ women and other LBQTNB people who have had to leave their homes. It is one of the 13 projects in the LesbianGlobal Economic Empowerment Fund.


Person fills out a checklist form at a wooden desk with laptop spreadsheet, calculator, coffee, and bags in a cozy room.
Illustrative image: Corporación Femm’s project helps 10 LBQ+ entrepreneurs in Bogotá register their businesses and access finance. [Photo credit: AI-generated illustration.]

What Business Formalization Means for LBQ+ Women

Formalizing a business means making it official: registering it, opening a bank account, and getting on the tax rolls. It sounds like admin. In practice it decides who can sign a contract, who gets a loan, and who has any legal protection when a client doesn’t pay, as we wrote in Economic Independence for Bisexual Women: The Work We’re Already Funding.

For the entrepreneurs in this project, the barriers stack up. They are lesbian, bisexual, or LBQTNB, and they are also migrants, refugees, or internally displaced people, starting over in a new city.


The Ruta: Business Formalization in Three Stages

Corporación Femm will support 10 businesses in the Bogotá metropolitan region at three stages: ideation, launch, and growth. Each business receives:

  • an individual assessment, so the support fits the business, not the other way around.

  • a grant to cover formal registration, so cost is no longer the reason a business stays informal

  • training on taxes and financial inclusion

  • three months of one-on-one accounting mentorship

  • networking and matchmaking to open doors to markets and institutions


Who Is Corporación Femm?

Corporación Femm is a Colombian feminist organization based in Bogotá, with a chapter in Soacha. It works with lesbian, bisexual, and trans women and has been running training programs since 2011. It is one of five organizations that co-founded and co-ordinated LESLAC, a network of lesbian and bisexual women’s organisations from Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Mexico and Colombia. In 2019 it hosted a regional conference in Colombia that brought together more than 300 activists and human rights defenders.

So this is not a first project. It is an organization that knows its community, extending its work into money.


Business Formalization With Evidence Behind It

The project will also use AI-supported research tools to gather evidence on what blocks LBQ+ entrepreneurs from formalizing and which routes work. The aim is a model other organizations can copy: business formalization for LBQ+ women that doesn’t have to be reinvented in each city.


Support Us in Funding the Next Ruta

Ten businesses in Bogotá is one project among 13. Seventy organizations from 39 countries applied to the Fund, and LesbianGlobal is working to open more funds with other trusted intermediaries. A gift helps us say yes to more.



Outright is a 501(c)(3), so gifts are tax-deductible in the US as the law allows.

Next in the series: Nadharia Kenya. Learning mechanics, carpentry, or design is only half the story. Part 2 looks at what happens after graduation and how one Kenyan organization is helping its graduates turn a skill into a living. Sign up for the newsletter on our Get Involved page so you don’t miss it.

 
 
 

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