A landscape study conducted by Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME), a partner-led platform that supports mass entrepreneurship, and Facebook provides a comprehensive overview of the entrepreneurship opportunities available to women, especially home-based entrepreneurs, across urban India. The research was conducted from May to August 2019 across Bengaluru and Mumbai.
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The study titled ‘Unlocking Entrepreneurship Opportunities for Women’ reveals that currently only three percent of businesses with more than four employees are women-owned. It calls out three sectors – food, education and beauty and wellness sector, as holding high potential for home-based entrepreneurship for women. Apart from outlining the opportunities, the study also analyses the demands, mega trends, and the challenges that potential women entrepreneurs in India face.
Women-owned businesses within the education sector are more prevalent than in the food sector, the study found. One in five urban enterprises in the education sector is owned by a woman. The employee base of these businesses is fairly gender balanced with on an average woman comprising 48 percent at these organisations. The report identifies three sectors as where-to-play areas – day care and pre-school, vocational skilling, and after-school education as high potential entrepreneurship opportunities.
The study found that the food sector comprises approximately 550K women-owned enterprises that employ more than two million women. The study explains that the sector appeals to women as it doesn’t require a high financial investment to start a business, and offers flexible work schedules. The emerging opportunities within the sector include homemade snacks, home cooked meals, and cloud kitchens.
Furthermore, the study identifies inhibitors for women entrepreneurs in the country. These include factors like lack of awareness of the possibilities related to their passion, inadequate skills or knowledge to be a successful entrepreneur, skepticism about taking unconventional routes, lack of accessibility to available resources and immediate support system. The study has also identified interventions that can boost women entrepreneurship.
A boost peer-to peer connections and learning among entrepreneurs, dissemination of success stories of entrepreneurs, access the best-of-breed entrepreneurship curriculum, and supporting entrepreneurs to avail government benefits and help like Mudra loans and more can help women entrepreneurs make full use of the opportunities, says the report.
GAME launched in August 2018 is India’s first national-level organization to pioneer the movement of Mass Entrepreneurship in the country. Through learning and advocacy, it’s vision is to create 10 million entrepreneurs in India by 2030, 50 percent of whom will be women.
Read more at: https://yourstory.com/herstory/2019/12/education-food-home-based-entrepreneurship-women-study
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