As India’s working-age population grows by leaps and bounds, an often ignored demographic has surfaced: women micropreneurs. Often self-employed, these women await the right launchpad to realise their dreams. While historically overlooked, women’s entrepreneurship can boost the economy and deliver transformational social and personal outcomes with proper support. Women-led businesses, comprising 14% of total enterprises in India, employ 30% of the country’s female workforce. These ventures foster product innovation and span various sectors, from local boutiques and beauty parlours to laundry services and handmade jewellery. However, their growth has been slow, hindered by informality, and a pervasive digital gender gap. Although there are many ecosystem players individually solving one or the other part of the overarching problem, they need to be brought together to devise a gender-intentional framework that can fully tap into all growth aspects of the digital economy.
The challenges are aplenty – limited digital literacy, compliance complexities, inherent social, cultural and gender biases, inaccessibility to affordable internet, smartphones, and finance. Some companies cite higher onboarding costs for female workers on digital platforms, contributing to low participation rates. Notably, the urban mobility infrastructure is not gender sensitive. In 2021, only 0.5% of partners of a leading food aggregator platform were women. Despite similar unpaid task hours to men, women engage in fewer paid digital work hours. Evidence from India’s domestic worker sector shows the significant impact of on-demand digital work, which excludes women who lack digital skills, digital devices, or access to formal banking channels. About 18% of women (315 million), are less likely to own a smartphone than men. Likewise, the gender gap in mobile internet access is at 16%. Clearly, we need reform.
Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME) is at the forefront of changing this narrative, through amplifying mass entrepreneurship via digital enablement. Following a thorough needs assessment, GAME connects its diverse stakeholders, each solving a part of the challenge. For instance, an organisation might need more women workers and be ready to provide training to enhance their business proficiency. Meanwhile, another might have a hard-working cohort eager for an opportunity to cultivate their digital prowess to attain a competitive edge in the market. GAME enables these entities to join forces for the greater good.
Case in point, GAME’s Women Economic Empowerment (WEE) programme where private players such as Amazon propel community mobilisers to assist women start, scale, and sustain their businesses. GAME’s focus as an alliance backbone organisation is to build connections with opportunities in the private platform space and enable them to think in a gender-intentional way, thereby cascading down the benefits to reach community organisations. This collective endeavour is well on its way to achieving transformative goals by aggregating at a much more expansive level.
To bring value to every woman entrepreneur, WEE and Saath Charitable Trust are working towards enabling various women artisan clusters. As an aggregator, SAATH is selling their products as well as enhancing their design skills, business acumen, and digital marketing capabilities to help them compete in the market. Additionally, these artisans will be onboarded to Amazon’s Saheli and Karigar initiatives, with the e-commerce giant providing end-to-end support related to performance marketing, product listing optimisation, and advertising techniques.
Another commendable venture by SAATH is their ‘Business Gym’ programme. Business Gym has been established to amplify the pride and resilience of micro-entrepreneurs from the urban areas of the country by upskilling their entrepreneurial abilities, providing hand holding & mentoring for business processes and increasing their revenues. Under the WEE programme, we are leveraging this model to mobilise and onboard 1,200 women garment retailers on BizUp (an online B2B wholesale platform for clothing retailers), enabling them to access better sourcing options without mobility restrictions. Once enrolled and equipped with the right knowledge, these entrepreneurs earn extra income by stocking and selling trendy garments within their social networks, ultimately building an identity for themselves. The benefits of this collaboration will also percolate down to the Business Gym members, along with enhancing the existing number of micro-entrepreneurs currently enrolled; thereby bringing a deeper large-scale impact.
With collective efforts, the sky’s the limit for these women entrepreneurs. The benefits are far-reaching. They are more confident due to better access to credit, exchange of best business practices, access to support networks, enhanced visibility and a wider customer reach. Armed with knowledge, they can easily register and follow online business compliances, access relevant government schemes, sell online (barring geographic limitations), produce in bulk, practise quality control, adopt digital payment solutions and get better at financial and tax management.
It is evident that this digital enablement is happening via GAME at the macro level through joint efforts by community-based organisations (SAATH) and private sector partners (Amazon and Biz-Up) with the benefits being reaped by ambitious women producers in tier 2 and 3 cities. As these efforts continue, women entrepreneurs are dismantling systemic barriers, finding their footing in the competitive market, and participating meaningfully in the digital economy.
The collective approach is not only empowering individual entrepreneurs; it’s reshaping India’s economic future, one woman at a time.
Poulomi Pal is the VP of Programs at GAME and Kruti Javeri is the Associate Director of Saath Charitable Trust.