Celebrate Solutions: Micro-Entrepreneurship as a Tool for Women’s Empowerment

January 19th, 2015

By: Emily Mello, Women Deliver
When you invest in girls and women, everybody wins.

Here at Women Deliver, we can’t say that enough. Economically empowered women not only raise the labor productivity of their countries, but also spend more of their earned income on their families. Hindustan UniLever Limited (HUL), India’s largest Fast Moving Consumer Goods Company, is applying this principle through Project Shakti. This entrepreneurial program offers rural women microgrants to become distributors of the company’s health and hygiene products.

Project Shakti follows a ‘Doing Well by Doing Good’ model, aiming to meet both business and societal needs through the same initiative. The project selects and trains rural women from poor economic backgrounds to be Shakti Entrepreneurs (SEs). In addition to basic business management training, SEs receive tools to boost sales, including bicycles and mobile phones. Then, they receive product stocks from a local HUL distributor at a discounted rate and sell those products directly to households in surrounding villages.

The project’s social impact has been significant. Since its launch in 2000, Project Shakti has trained over 65,000 SEs. Each SE earns an average of 700 to 1,000 rupees a month. Given that the majority of SEs live below the poverty line, these earnings often double the entrepreneurs’ household income.

Take Shobha for example, a young woman living in Maharashtra - a village near Mumbai. Shobha was struggling to make ends meet after her husband’s death and could no longer afford to pay for her son’s schooling. But then, after Shobha completed Project Shakti’s business training and began selling HUL products, she saved enough money to send her son back to school.

The investment in rural women has benefited HUL’s business as well, allowing them to reach previously untapped rural consumers. SEs now sell HUL products in more than 165,000 villages, reaching over four million households. The micro-entrepreneurship model has been so successful that HUL is adapting it to their markets in South-East Asia, Africa and Latin America.

For more information on Project Shakti, please click here.   

Flickr photo via Find Your Feet

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