In low income settlements of Indian cities, a significant number of women, especially those who are married and have grown up children, have ventured into micro-level entrepreneurial activities, such as starting a home based tailoring shop, small-scale tutoring centres for children in the neighborhood or food stalls. However, there are innumerable challenges that restrict women from low income communities to sustain and scale their business enterprises. Social conditioning and traditional gender roles make it difficult for many women to imagine themselves in a new identity of an entrepreneur. This also hampers their ability to negotiate with their own selves and their families and balance their dual roles of homemakers/ caregivers and entrepreneurs.

With Vastu Housing Finance’s support, we have been working with women micropreneurs in Delhi since 2022-23. Our WMP project seeks to support these women micropreneurs to build their individual identities as entrepreneurs separate from their traditional gender roles and develop a business view towards their work while honing business skills and entrepreneurship competencies.

This year, we have initiated the second cohort of the WMP project, expanding to 25 women micropreneurs from Jaipur in addition to 50 from Delhi. We were also able to regroup and bring together the 50 participants from the first cohort of the project for further capacity building activities.