"EMPOWER Her Journey" initiative launched by Villgro & UNDP for Women-Led Businesses

By: WE Staff | Thursday, 17 August 2023

One of India's top social enterprise incubators Villgro and UNDP India launched a new initiative to promote women-owned businesses in India. The program named "EMPOWER Her Journey", will help female entrepreneurs by closing the funding gap and facilitating faster access to digital tools for expanded market reach.

A very crucial role is played by female entrepreneurs to foster development outcomes, fostering employment opportunities, enhancing human capital investments, promote innovation, and advancing equality. But they frequently encounter difficulties in their path of growing further including ignorance of their capabilities, cultural limitations, lack of awareness about the governmental schemes, lack of guidance, and more.

By providing proper learning and training sessions, networking opportunities, and mentor support, the "EMPOWER Her Journey" initiative will fill every gap and barrier for women. In addition to this, it will teach business owners how to use digital transformation tools to boost sales and services like go-to-market, fundraising, and impact measurement. There will be 100 women-led startups and female entrepreneurs in the first cohort and the last date of submission is 30 August 2023.

Amit Kumar, UNDP India's Head of Sustainable and Inclusive Growth stated that the sustainable development goals must be met in order to achieve economic gender parity. At UNDP, the aim is to build an ecosystem that is more supportive and equitable of women's economic empowerment. This new initiative will unleash the potential of women-led start-ups. Those females can apply whose startup is in the ideation, pre-revenue, or revenue-generating stages.