Entrepreneurship and Rural Women: Capacity-building for Market Reach and Poverty Alleviation in a Remote Region of Western India
This paper describes the framework of Udyogini, an NGO, for capacity building of women in Rajasthan, India, aimed at helping them move towards secure livelihoods and sustainable enterprise growth.
Globalization has imposed severe constraints to sustainable livelihoods for poor women, and there is a need to build women's access, knowledge and capacity in different ways. Udyogini is a business development service (BDS) agency working at the grassroots level with women, NGOs, and the government in India. The five-element trajectory of growth that Udyogini used to enhance livelihood security and enterprise growth in Rajasthan include:
- Enterprise motivation and management awareness for poor women;
- Selection and training of grassroots BDS providers;
- Enterprise promotion and incentives for producers and market players;
- Ownership and scale-up through systems and institutions;
- Expansion and outreach.
The flexibility in the enterprise framework of Udyogini has enabled incremental building on initiatives to facilitate learning and innovation in entrepreneurship.
