Empowering women entrepreneurs to lead economic transformation
We often discuss India's economic trajectory through numbers and milestones—Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, infrastructure investments, workforce projections. But a recent conversation brought home a truth I have long believed--spreadsheets track progress, but people define it. Women entrepreneurs (representational image)(Pixabay)
I was reminded of this when I recently read about Gauri from UP's Shravasti district. Her story captures the quiet revolution powering India toward the Viksit Bharat vision. Like millions of women in rural India, Gauri's life was a cycle of survival. With a family to support and her husband's daily wage stretched thin, her sewing talent remained untapped. In 2022, she enrolled in Empowering Women Entrepreneurs (EWE) programme, a three-year partnership between Visa and United Way Mumbai, that equipped her with a sewing machine and offered her training in the basics of business and overall financial literacy. Today, she runs a sewing collective, mentoring village girls to stitch garments and steward them to better futures.
Gauri's journey is one of 11,000 such underserved women entrepreneurs that EWE has connected with across over 360 villages in UP, Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Assam. Last month, when I visited a program centre in Mumbai's suburbs, I met one of them, Smita, who has turned ₹ 50 beauty tutorials into a thriving parlour. Her monthly income of ₹ 25,000 is not just a number—it is her children's education, her parents' health care, and her community's roadmap to financial independence. India's economic narrative is shifting - women now drive 41.7% of the workforce and lead 20% of MSMEs, employing over 25 million. Beneath these milestones lies a reality often overlooked: struggle and progress coexist. Take the story of Revati from Assam's Muduki village. When her husband's health failed, financial survival fell on her shoulders. Her answer came through goat rearing—a skill she honed with training in livestock management and financial literacy from EWE. Today, her herd has grown, inching her closer to becoming a Lakhpati Kisan, with an annual income of ₹ 1 lakh. Her journey underscores a larger truth - when women prosper, communities thrive. Bain & Company estimates India needs 400 million working women to realise its economic potential but faces a 145-million shortfall. The hurdles? Limited credit access, fractured market linkages, lack of financial know-how, and entrenched stigma. The EWE programme addresses this through peer-led financial literacy training, seed funding for Self-Help Groups (SHGs), and startup (Saksham) kits that turn skills into sustainable businesses. This creates self-sustaining ecosystems where skills translate into sustainable livelihoods.
The stories of Gauri, Smita, and Revati highlight that financial literacy alone is not enough. It requires dismantling systemic barriers and democratising access to digital tools for budgeting and formal banking, bridging the $158 billion credit gap with financing models attuned to informal incomes, and linking grassroots entrepreneurs to markets through e-commerce and government schemes. The success of such social-impact programmes lies in their multiplier effects. Smita's parlour now employs three women from her neighbourhood, while Gauri's sewing collective has doubled school enrolment for girls in her village. These micro-impacts, when scaled, become macro-solutions fostering growth and sustained progress.
Empowerment cannot be a checkbox--it demands consistent commitment to nurturing skills, expanding credit access, and amplifying market opportunities. Time and again, public-private partnerships demonstrate how collaborative approaches create sustainable models for women's empowerment.
The data is clear--investing in women entrepreneurs could create 150-170 million jobs by 2030, adding $700 billion to global GDP. Beyond numbers, it is the human stories that resonate and transform societies. When Revati speaks of her goats as family, or Smita shares how her income restored her father's pride, we are reminded that economic empowerment is deeply personal.
Gauri's training centre, Smita's parlour, and Revati's livestock—each adding another thread in India's ongoing progress. As we stride onward to 2047, the question is not whether we can afford to invest in women, it is whether we can afford not to.
This article is authored by Sandeep Ghosh, group country Manage, Visa India & South.
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