Empowering Her Journey: Enabling Women Entrepreneurs for Success

June 27, 2024

Meet Sayanika Deka, the CEO behind 'IndiMeat', a company revolutionizing the way we think about protein intake. Sayanika's journey into entrepreneurship was sparked by a personal experience - her father's struggle with dementia and the subsequent need for a protein-rich diet. Faced with the challenge of finding quality protein products in the market, Sayanika co-founded IndiMeat in 2022, offering a sustainable and easily digestible solution in the form of ready-to-eat meat protein bars.

Sayanika is one of the 700 trailblazing entrepreneurs being supported by the UNDP-Villgro ‘Empower Her Journey’ Programme, a four-week virtual programme that provides crucial business and digital transformation training to women entrepreneurs with 0-5 years of experience across sectors, across India.

Empowering women entrepreneurs is crucial for economic growth. However, socio-cultural barriers, inequality in accessing education, capital, and networks hinder women’s entrepreneurial endeavours. Nestled within this challenge lies the unrealised potential of putting women at the forefront of development. Indian women entrepreneurs have the capacity to create 150-170 million jobs by 2030, potentially boosting India's GDP growth to 8 percent. Women-led enterprises also excel in employing three times more women and generating 10 percent more revenue than those led by men, highlighting their vital role in economic prosperity.

However, while foundational literacy and numeracy training and capacity building support exists for women establishing nano/micro-enterprises, a gap persists in aiding growth-oriented women-led MSMEs, especially in digitalization. Digital skills are essential for enhancing business efficiency and scaling ventures. The 'Empower Her Journey' programme fills this void by offering modules on digital marketing, tools, and technologies, empowering women to develop digitally savvy and scalable businesses in the long run.

Indimeat’s products featuring their ready-to-eat meat protein bars.

Since October 2023, the programme has trained 445 women entrepreneurs across India, supporting ventures in proof of concept, early sales, and commercial pilot/growth stages. Approximately 25 percent of these entrepreneurs innovate in the climate and agriculture/food sector, while 20 percent focus on healthcare. The remaining cohort spans various sectors including gender, textiles, art, and handicrafts. The programme supplements training with fireside chats featuring experienced women entrepreneurs like Asha Scaria Vettoor and Nidhi Pant, alongside technical sessions with digital giants like Amazon Web Services and Zoho, providing valuable opportunities for integration of digital tools into businesses.

Going digital first

Sayanika’s background in agricultural research and her experience working with entrepreneurs in the North-East of India laid the foundation for her venture Indimeat, which rests at the intersection of agriculture and entrepreneurship. However, it was her participation in the Empower Her Journey Programme that truly catapulted her vision into reality. The programme provided Sayanika with invaluable training and a supportive network, equipping her with the building blocks of scaling her business.

IndiMeat's impact goes beyond providing nutritious products; through strategic partnerships with government slaughterhouses, Sayanika has created opportunities for 40 farmers of the Karbi tribe in Assam, half of whom are women, leading to an average 30 percent increase in their income. Moreover, IndiMeat provides training on sustainable farming practices, ensuring a holistic approach to community development and women’s economic empowerment.

For Sayanika, the Empower Her Journey Programme wasn't just about acquiring skills; it was about putting them into practice. From developing a robust business model to mastering digital marketing techniques, she diligently implemented every lesson learned. Now, as IndiMeat seeks to establish its independent research lab and expand its reach, Sayanika is eager to connect with potential supporters and collaborators.

“In the programme, I learned about mapping psychographics of customers and using digital tools for marketing. Using these concepts and taking inspiration from my peers, I created short informal educational videos for our farmers internally to bring forth the personal engagement angle while delivering bite-sized content.”

- Sayanika Deka, CEO, IndiMeat

Promoting inclusive entrepreneurship

Geetika Mehta, another alumni of the Empower Her Journey Programme, is on a mission to generate dignified livelihood opportunities for Persons with Disabilities (PwDs) through her venture, Atypical Advantage (AA). Having relocated from the United States to India to work with marginalized communities, Geetika joined as a co-founder of AA to advance India’s largest livelihood platform for PwDs. Her approach is simple yet powerful: focus on their strengths and skills, rather than their disabilities.

Driven by a desire for structured learning, Geetika joined the Empower Her Journey Programme to hone her entrepreneurial skills “The neatly structured programme enabled me to thread together my personal and academic experiences, validating everything I was already doing as an entrepreneur,”

Through AA, she has pioneered inclusive practices in the corporate sector, organizing workshops on inclusion and experiences or performances by PwDs on increasing awareness and acceptance of issues of disability in workplace settings, successfully generating livelihoods for 3,000+ PwDs. Atypical Academy further equips PwDs with essential skills, fostering a more inclusive workforce. Within a short span of three years, Atypical Advantage has over 15,000 PwDs registered on their platform and have worked with 250+ corporates.

Atypical Advantage supported artists with disability to sell their artworks through their platform.

“I greatly benefited from the Virtual Fireside Chat sessions that the Empower programme organised. Listening to the journeys and experiences of other women entrepreneurs brought practical first-hand information and helped me gather ideas to implement in my own workplace.”

- Geetika Mehta, Co-founder, Atypical Advantage

Building Peer Networks

With over a decade of experience in India's rural livelihoods sector, Debika Mukherjee, based in Bhubaneshwar, witnessed firsthand the numerous challenges faced by framers and women's self-help groups (SHGs) across the value chain, from the lack of adequate training in production, packaging and marketing, dependence & exploitation by middlemen for markets, to insufficient price yields for produce. In response, Debika founded Divavi Enterprises - Gaaon ka Bazar in 2019, incubated at IIT-BHU, to promote local production by connecting farmers, SHGs, artisans, weavers and rural entrepreneurs and provide a fair platform to sell their goods directly to consumers and institutions.

Collaborating with over 250 farmers, women-led SHGs, and up to 50 artisans and weavers nationwide, Debika recognized the need to expand her business knowledge. The Empower programme proved instrumental in filling this gap, equipping her with detailed knowledge on business, digital and impact tools, relevant across each stage and domain of her venture. Despite initial challenges in gaining farmers' trust due to past experiences with middlemen, Debika kept her ears close to the ground, personally meeting farmers, understanding their unique requirements (on topics such as certification, product development, technology assistance etc.) to ensure they are market ready, and only then onboarding them on her e-commerce platform. Debika's perseverance, outreach to farmers and community focused approach paid off, making Divavi unique to other e-commerce platforms.

Divavi Enterprises – Gaon ka Bazaar’s interaction with local artisans and members of women SHGs in Jajapur district, Odisha.

"The Empower for Her training programme provided me with an overview of everything that an entrepreneur should know while running their business. Through the Empower training, I was able to learn the nuances of finance, fundraising, digital marketing, and impact measurement."

- Debika Mukherjee, Founder, Divavi Enterprises

The peer network established through the programme continues to benefit Debika, reinforcing her belief in the importance of women supporting each other in entrepreneurship. Empower Her Journey equipped Debika with the fundamentals of expanding her business and she is on track to widen her collaboration with local women artisans and weavers.

For Sayanika, Geetika, Debika, and countless other women entrepreneurs, the Empower Her Journey Programme has been a catalyst for change. It's not just about business; it's about empowerment, community building, and creating a more inclusive economy.

Read more about Empower Her Journey here.

“Villgro’s objective with Empower Her Journey is two-fold. Firstly, it provides a platform for us to share our decades of learning in fostering entrepreneurship and technical assistance, customized to cater to many women entrepreneurs across India. Secondly, this initiative also helps Villgro drive our strategic goal of increasing the participation of women in the workforce by contributing towards upskilling women entrepreneurs in digital and business skills. We are grateful to have collaborated with a similarly aligned partner like UNDP, to support 1600 women entrepreneurs scale their enterprises”.

- Srinivas Ramanujam, CEO of Villgro

- Parnika Jhunjhunwala, Programme and Partnerships Associate