November marks a year since I joined GAME- a year of immense learning, hustling, emerging clarity, building a network, pushing just a little harder and working with a group of amazing people. When I look back, I feel two things most strongly- immense gratitude for the opportunity and there's "miles to go before I sleep"! As a small team driven by a common goal, the high energy and motivation is palpable - led from the front by Ravi, Madan and Mekin and yet, collectively we understand our mission requires us to push harder and build strong partnerships that will become a true global alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship. Over the next couple of months, our focus will be hugely on building the Alliance and moving ahead with our Task Forces. This month's newsletter is filled with exciting updates about a Grand Challenge for women entrepreneurs (with Facebook), building a Community of women entrepreneurs in the Food Sector in Bangalore, a wonderful report on the opportunity in Meghalaya, an insightful research report on Microenterprises in India and a few partner updates. Coming up is a Roundtable and Workshop (Designed around the Three Key Challenges Identified in the Microenterprises Study) on 12th November in New Delhi and the GAME Annual Mass Entrepreneurship Convening, Supported by Facebook on 12th December at The Park, New Delhi.

Let's Make Mass Entrepreneurship Aspirational, together!

Sandhya Thukaram
Director, GAME

GAME In Collaboration With  Facebook has launched the Futurepreneurs Grand Challenge 2019 - For Bengaluru Based Women Entrepreneurs In The Food & Beverages (F&B) Business. 

Read more - https://massentrepreneurship.org/future/

GAME has kick-started its projects working with Women Entrepreneurs in the city of Bangalore. Following its research in the potential opportunities for women 'homepreneurs', GAME identified that Food and Skilling sectors are two large entrepreneurial opportunities for women. It also identified that women entrepreneurs need support in 3 broad areas - Building i) Entrepreneurial Skills and Mindsets, ii) Developing Market Linkages and iii) Providing Financial Linkages and Business Model Support. One of the first interventions is to Boost Peer-to-peer connections & learning amongst entrepreneurs through channelized group discussions. These communities are crucial for imparting sensitive / trust-led learnings.

GAME has begun with TWO channelized group discussions in the food sector with existing and potential Women Home-chefs. In the first group, GAME met a group of middle-to-low income home-chefs, hosted by Mrs. Madhura Chatrapathy, Founder President of AWAKE and a food entrepreneur herself. The group comprised of 6 entrepreneurs and 2 partner organizations (Buzz Women & Swiggy). GAME moderated a session to understand entrepreneurs' personal and business issues, and learned a) language of communication was very important in building relatability and trust b) While these women were ambitious entrepreneurs, they were also constrained by societal factors and business skills. There was a great yearning to supplement their family household income.

In the second group, GAME met a group of high-family income home chefs in Koramangala, hosted by a Food Community moderator, Ms. Padmashree Balaram. The group of 10 women home chefs along with partners orgs (Swiggy, Catalysts of Women Entrepreneurs, and Something Cooking)  discussed the business opportunity for home-cooked food, with a potential profit earning capability of Rs 50000-60000 per month, just working from home. The insight from this group was that women of this community had agency and capability to build the business, and could be tapped by the corporate demand in home-cooked meals.

Both discussions provided a rich understanding of the potential opportunities and GAME is learning from these discussions to design its interventions holistically.

Priyadeep, Director GAME, visits Meghalaya

Team GAME, in its efforts to catalyze mass entrepreneurship in the hill state of Meghalaya, made a week-long trip to the state in order to meet entrepreneurs across multiple sectors and value chains such as eri silk, turmeric, and eco-tourism as well as Government of Meghalaya officials which is a key partner.

During this trip, GAME also extensively spent time on the ground understanding the eri-silk processing from raw cocoon to finished cloth in the beautiful and quaint village of Diwon in the Umden eri silk cluster in Ri-Bhoi district of the state.

Eri-silk, also known as Ryndia, has wonderful properties. It is firstly ahimsa (non-violence) silk since the worm leaves the cocoon after creating it and are not killed in the process. Ryndia also is not single filament silk and is a staple fibre having texture close to a combination of cotton and soft jute. The colors of the cloth (can be seen in the spun thread photo) are all natural using things like turmeric, onion peel, other vegetables, iron ore, and other metals, etc.

The weaving of Ryndia is done on many different types of looms such as the pit loom, the fly shuttle loom, the backstrap loom, vertical loom, etc. The best thing is that it is pretty much part of the culture of the people in Ri-bhoi district for the women to spin and weave, and do this work for a limited time each day. The cocoons are spread across villages and each home takes care of a certain number of worms and cocoons making it a collective effort. It takes anywhere between 3-4 weeks to produce a 2-metre ryndia cloth starting from the processing of the cocoon and different women participate in different parts of the process.

GAME is currently in the process of setting up the Meghalaya taskforce and partnering with different stakeholders for market linkage, financial linkage and skilling of entrepreneurs and weavers in the eri-silk value chain in Meghalaya in order to lift their profile and hopefully provide more sustainable economic opportunities for them.

Visit and Update - Priyadeep Sinha- Director, GAME

deAsra and G.A.M.E are coming together to launch a program for Homepreneurs

Women in India own and run far fewer businesses than in the other countries and according to World Bank data, the female labour force participation is lower in urban areas than rural.

Homepreneurs - entrepreneurs who run businesses from home have different set of challenges and motivations. Supporting the family income, managing the family and financial independence are the top motivators for homepreneurs.

The top challenges, according to our study, includes- access to funding, legal compliances, marketing, social media management and creating and managing digital presence.

Food, Fashion, Beauty and tutoring are the top choices for starting businesses from home.

We have created self help resources for homepreneurs and are launching a program for homepreneurs in partnership with G.A.M.E in November to further understand the challenges and motivations of homepreneurs and provide them the support they need. Checkout our offerings for Homepreneurs here.

deAsra Foundation is a not for profit social tech venture based on the vision of Dr Anand Deshpande (Founder, Chairman & MD of Persistent Systems) committed to supporting entrepreneurs to start, manage and grow their businesses, so they can be successful and create more jobs.

To do this, deAsra offers an online platform at www.deasra.in using which, setting up, managing and growing a business is made simple and entrepreneur friendly through 80+ knowledge resources, tools, templates and services, created based on studied benchmarks and best practices. In the last 4 years since launch in 2015, the platform has more than 48,000 beneficiaries with 5000 new ones getting added every month.

GAME is extremely excited to have a new work space at WeWork Prestige Central

We will over the next couple of Newsletters share interesting WeWork member updates. This month’s update is about Turbostart.
Turbostart is a sector agnostic, pan India startup program that identifies the top 10 most promising start-ups in the country in a competition format. It will be conducted twice a year (January and June). The top 10 startups will receive up to INR 2 Cr. funding each, along with a multitude of services - pro bono for 12 months or until their next round of funding, whichever is earlier.

The founders of the winning start-ups enjoy the flexibility of building on their ideas while Turbostart works with them closely. Turbostart, in fact, becomes an extension of the team with experts involved in scalability opportunities and overall growth. Turbostart is the brainchild of business veterans who understand the challenges of starting up and more importantly, scaling up. Here's the website for more information - www.turbostart.co

Designothon for NGO's by Creators

GAME in partnership with Centre For Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University, launched the: MICROENTERPRISES IN INDIA: A MULTIDIMENSIONAL ANALYSIS-STUDY

Micro-enterprises have been the engines of job growth in the majority of dynamic economies and they can perform the same role in India as well. Meeting their challenges requires significant policy changes and investments in local communities. MSME’s, and in particular very small enterprises, have been disadvantaged when it comes to availability of and access to data and analysis – vital in championing and creating a growth agenda around them. The study looks at micro-enterprises that employ 0-19 workers, and analyses various dimensions such as geographical distribution, demographics, gender (employment and enterprise ownership), industrial distribution, labour productivity, and wages. It is based on Economic Census and National Sample Survey data. Our aim in this report is to provide information and analysis that can assist policy-makers and the micro-entrepreneurial ecosystem at large to develop tools required to help this sector flourish.
Read the complete report here