The World Bank estimates that 75% of working-age women currently do not have paid work. India’s women labour force participation rate, which is already abysmal, is on the decline.

At GAME, our vision is to catalyse the entrepreneurial ecosystem. We want to support 10 million entrepreneurs, 50% of whom are women. This will help create 50 million jobs – by 2030. We seek to achieve this goal by forming alliances with mission-aligned partners.

GAME believes that an alliance has greater potential to drive high-quality outcomes than organizations working on just a “piece of the puzzle”. An alliance approach amplifies existing wisdom of players in the ecosystem and builds their capacities.  Additionally, it helps direct resources (financial and technical) to work on priority problem statements. Thus, by building consensus, we can help scale solutions faster across India.

In order to increase women’s labour force participation rate, GAME held a workshop on February 27, 2020 to identify interventions that can be done in the food & beverage sector to encourage more women entrepreneurs to scale and resultantly, employ more women. As per a recent report, the global catering services industry is expected to see an incremental growth of $184.98 billion between 2019 - 2013, with 45% of the growth stemming from the Asia Pacific region.  Thus, we see enormous potential for women to capture a slice of this expanding pie, both figuratively and literally.

Some other highlights in this newsletter include a visit to the Buzz Women centre to see the impact on ground, the kickoff of the Finance Taskforce and the signing of an MOU with Deshpande Foundation

We hope you join us in our journey!

Deepthi B 
Manager

GAME conducted a Webinar on Agri Entrepreneurship as a high leverage opportunity for creation of Mass Entrepreneurs on the 29th of January. The webinar was conducted by S Baskar Reddy (Executive Director) at Syngenta Foundation India that drives the Agri Entrepreneurs Program.

The Syngenta Foundation helps to improve the agricultural productivity and last mile delivery/first mile access for non-commercial smallholders. The idea is to set up Agri entrepreneurs (AE) that can help farmers access markets . The Agri Entrepreneur provides different services like crop advisory, market linkages, agricultural inputs and earns revenue by providing these services to the farmers.

The entrepreneur can choose from a range of archetypes broadly clubbed within Agri Entrepreneurship and Livestock Entrepreneurship.

Successes of the Agri Entrepreneurship Program:

• Has trained 2543 Agri Entrepreneurs
  
• Is operational in 9 states across 57 districts
• Has helped 1.89 lakh famers in improving their productivity
• The transactions conducted through the 1700- 1800 Agri Entreprenerurs have generated about 70 crores in revenue

Madan Padaki (Co- Founder, GAME) and Ashwin Chandrasekhar (Vice President, Strategy GAME) delivered an engaging presentation on the ability of nano entrepreneurs to create jobs and thus act as an engine of economic and job growth. They discussed the concept of mass entrepreneurship and the ease of doing business which is important for these entrepreneurs to succeed.

The talk was delivered on the 23rd of February at the Bangalore International Centre.

On the 11th of February, GAME held its Finance Taskforce meeting with the objective to draft the overall goals of the taskforce over the short, medium, and long term. Going forward, taskforce members will help the Alliance develop a point of view on different ‘areas of inquiry’ and possible next steps (i.e. research, test, or replicate) for the next taskforce meeting.

These areas of inquiry include:

• Enabling entrepreneurship through information & the role of financial intermediaries
• Mitigate risk for financial institutions working with nano-entrepreneurs
• Social and credit security for entrepreneurs
• The need for formalisation of enterprises
• Necessary conditions/prerequisites to become a bankable entrepreneur  
• Matrix for Measurement of outcomes
• Scalable credit assessment models
• Leveraging MFIs to achieve Finance Taskforce goals

If you would have any queries or would like to partner with GAME on these areas of enquiry, please reach out to Ashwin Chandrasekhar ashwin@massentrepreneurship.org

The Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship- GAME’s mission to catalyse 10 million Mass Entrepreneurs by 2030 (50% of who will be women) relies a great deal on making

entrepreneurship aspirational in India (changing the narrative from job seeking to job

creation). We define a Mass Entrepreneur as someone who solves a local problem, mostly using local resources and employing five plus people. Today, young India largely aspires for either government or private sector jobs; bringing entrepreneurship to this choice set will create a pipeline of mass entrepreneurs for generations to come.

We hosted an envisioning workshop to get a diverse group of people to combine

experience, creativity and ideas to create a broad outline that will form the basis of a more definitive plan to Make Mass Entrepreneurship Aspirational. Our going in Hypothesis was our efforts should be based on work on the ground and the envisioning workshop focussed on on two broad objectives. Read more

At the recent Deshpande Foundation Development Dialogues 2020 ,GAME signed an MOU with Deshpande Foundation thus accelerating mass entrepreneurship especially in the rural hinterlands.

This collaboration with the Foundation is focused on legislative reforms to enable mass entrepreneurship in Karnataka especially rural Karnataka. Improving the ease of doing business can help to increase farmer livelihoods and strides are being made to move into the farmer micro entrepreneurial segment.

For further queries, please reach out to Santanu Chari at santanu@massentrepreneurship.org

By Venkatraman Anantha Nageswaran (“Van”), Gulzar Natarajan

Proven to be the best engines for job creation, this report discusses new and smaller enterprises that are India's answer to rising unemployment and a burgeoning youth population.

Read More

By Pritha Venkatachalam and Kashyap Shah

Read More

By Seema Jayachandran

This article reviews the recent literature in economics on small-scale entrepreneurship ("microentrepreneurship") in low-income countries. Major themes in the literature include the determinants and consequences of joining the formal sector; the impacts of access to credit and other financial services; the impacts of business training; barriers to hiring; and the distinction between self-employment by necessity and self-employment as a calling. The article devotes special attention to unique issues that arise with female entrepreneurship.

For more information please access the report

VOLUME THREE | 25 JANUARY 2020

SPECIAL FEATURE: SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS INDIA INDEX V

View report