Women Entrepreneur Financial Empowerment Program - NRLM

One of the weakest links for MSME to grow is that of access to formal credit to fund its working capital and capital expenditure. The financing gap to MSME is estimated at INR.25 trillion and women entrepreneurs at INR.12 trillion.

Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME) is a multi-stakeholder alliance which aspires to catalyze the creation of 10 million young entrepreneurs in India, at the least half of whom will be women, who, in turn, will create 50 million new jobs by 2030. GAME focuses on the middle of the entrepreneurship spectrum, the Mass Entrepreneurs, who typically employ 5-20 people and have been the engines of job growth.

GAME-NRLM Partnership

In October 2022, GAME signed an MOU with National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM) to launch a Women Entrepreneur Financial Empowerment Program in 3 States of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan to support over 10,000 women entrepreneurs with access to credit across 16 districts in the 3 states.

The programme will be initially supported by strengthening National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM) and State Rural Livelihood Mission (SRLM) architecture through capacity

building and augmentation, training existing field cadres called Vitta Sakhis. The program also entails supplementing the existing NRLM training protocol and using it to train 1500 Vitta Sakhis, who will support potential entrepreneurs from among women SHG members to take up viable business enterprises.

THE GAME PLAN

GAME intends to achieve  this through credit enhancement mechanisms and strengthening NRLM and SRLM. The effort will also create and handhold a cadre of women support agents called Vitta Sakhi / CRP – EP (Community Resource Person Enterprise Promotion) and lead to higher levels of formalization and credit linkages of WEs.

GAME will work with the NRLM and its Alliance partners to pilot the program in the 3 States of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan and in specific districts in these States. The aim is to smoothen the flow of formal and sustainable credit to underserved and unserved  WEs by leveraging the NRLM structure and creation of a process for estimating WE eligibility and ability to effectively utilize the loan for enterprise development. This will be achieved with a specific focus on building the capacity of stakeholder involved and involving bankers from Public Sector Banks / RRBs, digitally led NBFCs and Small Finance Banks that are able and willing to lend to WE as a key lever in smoothening of capital flow into this segment.

The trained Vittal Sakhis will review compliance and eligibility of NRLM and SRLM identified women entrepreneurs. They will also mentor and help develop business plans to formalize their enterprise, as well as secure financial linkages. This program will also enlarge the narrative to establish a comprehensive onboarding process for financial institutions such as Public Sector Banks and Regional Rural Banks to unlock formal credit for the identified women entrepreneurs in rural area.

GAME's Role

Training programs

GAME will play an important role to establish:

  • A mechanism for capturing the learning of past and existing successful pilots and facilitating their scaling.
  • Create an alliance of implementing organizations to share their learnings.
  • Building a mechanism within NRLM to cohesively adopt practices from partners and replicate in various geographies while creating a standardized approach.

As a part of the program, GAME and its Alliance Partners will closely work with NRLM and other stakeholders to localize the training content and training programs for:

  1. The WEs willing to avail financing on financial management and access schemes / documents.
  2. The Vitta Sakhi’s on engaging with WEs and helping them access Government schemes and formalization documents.

GAME has collaborated with Haqdarshak to roll out this programme in the 3 States. The collaboration is for a year and aims to link 10,000 women entrepreneurs with format credit.

What We Do

Initiatives

Based on the curriculum, we curate custom programs and products for varied educational organizations, learning institutes and other student-oriented platforms.

Infrastructure

Engaging with content and implementation partners to ensure that EMC initiatives can reach millions of students.

Advisory

Our esteemed and respected taskforce comprises of people whose work spans across the grassroot to policy

Impact Evaluation

We help our partners in building standardized frameworks for assessing and analyzing the impact of the ongoing/completed programs to be used as benchmarks for scaling future programs.

Our Partners

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