Enabling Environment for Women’s Enterprises (EE4WE)

• Mar 5, 2024
• 2 min

Enabling Environment for Women’s Enterprises (EE4WE) works on crucial catalytic interventions to create policy pathways that lead to a more gender-sensitive entrepreneurship ecosystem in India. The program is doing so by unlocking the bottlenecks that impede women entrepreneurs from accessing and benefitting from existing support programs and services.

MSC is engaged as a technical assistance and knowledge partner to support in strengthening the Women Entrepreneurship Platform (WEP). The WEP is a Government of India-backed initiative launched by the NITI Aayog in 2017 to promote a conducive ecosystem for women’s entrepreneurship in India. WEP intended to do this by becoming a unified aggregator of all relevant information and services for women entrepreneurs in India. Our work focuses on the following aspects of WEP:

• Research and policy insights
• Access to finance
• Mentoring and Networking
• User data analytics and outreach to states and smaller cities
• Content management

Outcomes and impact

1. Research

• Research study on “Decoding government support to women entrepreneurs” filled a critical knowledge gap and generated insights for policymakers on key areas that need government support.
  (Framework: MSC’s SAFE framework, Applying the ecosystem lens to female entrepreneurship)
• Research study on “Mentorship for Women Entrepreneurs – A Highway to Growth” shows a glimpse of the current mentorship landscape in India and key recommendations to enhance the nationwide availability of effective mentorship for women entrepreneurs

2. Mentorship

• A Dedicated mentorship platform at G20 for WEs
• Launch of WEP-Unnati mentorship cohort

3. Access to finance

• A roundtable discussion with key stakeholders from the financial sector on “Access to credit for micro and small women entrepreneurs”
• Launch of “Financing Women Collaborative”

4. Content management

• Platform hosts information on schemes supporting entrepreneurship which includes 70 central, 433 state, and 52 SIDBI and NABARD schemes, and information on incubators and accelerators across India

5. Outreach

• Increased outreach of the WEP platform to new states
• Increased the number of women entrepreneurs regularly using the platform to ~30000