NITI Aayog announces revised Women Entrepreneurship Portal to sign up 2.5 lakh Women Entrepreneurs

The Women Entrepreneurship Platform (WEP) 3.0 web platform has been launched by the government's think tank for public policy, NITI Aayog, to assist women entrepreneurs in India. The portal aims to sign up 2.5 lakh female entrepreneurs, interact with 500 partners, and hold more than 200 offline and online events to increase their capabilities. The nonprofit organisation for entrepreneurship in India, Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME), will be in charge of designing, running, and maintaining the site as well as serving as the platform's programme manager for the next three years.

The WEP was created in 2017 to improve the ecosystem for women entrepreneurs in India by bringing together important stakeholders and addressing information asymmetry.

In its capacity as an aggregator platform, WEP offers services in six crucial categories: community and networking, finance and financial support, incubation and acceleration, compliance and tax support, entrepreneur skilling and mentorship, and marketing support.

"Only 8.05 million out of the country's 58.5 million entrepreneurs are women, making up just 13.76% of all business owners. In a statement, Anna Roy, Senior Adviser, Niti Aayog & Mission Director of WEP, stated that the organization's goal is to address information asymmetry and assist in resolving resource fragmentation.

"To do this, we need input from our stakeholders on how to make the platform better. Together, we want to plan the platform's future, she stated. The United Nations, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, Human X, Microsave, Mastercard, SIDBI, TechMahindra, CISCO, Atal Innovation Mission, Flipkart, and other organisations are currently partners with WEP.

According to a previous release by NITI Aayog, as of March 20, 2022, over 900 women entrepreneurs had benefited from 77 programmes and events held on the WEP platform.

Women-centric challenges will be launched under phase II of the second iteration of the Atal New India Challenge, according to an announcement made by NITI Aayog's Atal Innovation Mission in November (ANIC). Through a grant of up to Rs 1 crore, the challenge sought to foster technological ideas that address societal and national-level sectoral problems.