Women’s Entrepreneurship Program

Urbanization can benefit women by providing greater economic, social, and political opportunities and access to better services. Simultaneously, research in cities has shown that women in cities very often face unequal access to work, housing, health, education, and representation in urban governance compared to men. As a result, women constitute 50 percent of the urban poor, with limited access to educational facilities and socio-economic constraints to attain any professional or skill enhancement training.

Women’s poverty is fuelled by discrimination in the workplace, limited access to resources and financial assets, deep-rooted stereotypes that limit women’s participation in education, decent employment, and decision-making, while burdening them with a larger share of unpaid care and domestic work. Violence Against Women (VAW) is also rampant in urban areas’ slum pockets. 

As a solution to this grave problem, CSR proposed to the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives (CFLI) to promote women’s entrepreneurship and provide women with a gateway to access capital, markets, technical assistance, and networks to ensure gender equality through economic participation. CFLI’s support in Delhi and Gurugram led to the initiation of the project “Building Women’s Resilience through Entrepreneurship: A pilot to enhance the income-generation capacity of women operating small-scale businesses” on 12th July 2024.

The beneficiaries of the project are women aged 18–40 from slum areas, resettlement colonies, and other low-income communities of Delhi and Haryana. The criteria for their participation in this project were: that they be self-employed, interested in starting their own business, have limited digital marketing and other skills, are interested in educating themselves, and are survivors of domestic violence. 

The project aimed to enhance the income-generation skills of women entrepreneurs who have small-scale businesses and are working in service industries, the platform economy, and small-scale cottage industries. They were provided with graded, structured, and qualitative training sessions on basic business management skills, leveraging digital technologies for outreach and marketing, and linkages with financial resources.