Digital adoption for small businesses: Payments company Mastercard on Thursday announced the launch of the Mastercard Strive India programme which will join a portfolio of philanthropic programs supported by the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth to support 5 lakh small businesses with digital tools by 2025. Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth is the social impact and philanthropic hub of the company that invests in research and programs for advancing equitable economic growth and connecting academics, practitioners, governments and businesses to enable change.
Leveraging collaborations with trade associations, non-profits, and government agencies, the company said Strive India will focus its efforts on micro-enterprises, women-owned and led businesses and agri-entrepreneurs. The programme will reach out to small businesses to encourage the adoption of new digital tools and enable access to markets and digital financial services.
“Small businesses are poised to become India’s largest employer, and they can help make inclusion a cornerstone of the country’s journey to becoming a $5 trillion economy,” said Subhashini Chandran, Vice President, Social Impact, Asia Pacific at the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth. “Small businesses need broad support — from capacity building to wide-ranging access to tools, new markets and credit — to truly benefit from digital transformation and growth,” he said.
The Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth was launched in India in 2014 and in 2020 announced a five-year commitment to foster inclusive and sustainable economic growth for Indians and to succeed in the digital economy. So far, it has launched three digital inclusion programmes including Digital Saksham implemented by the Confederation of Indian Industry, Rural Women Chamber of Commerce implemented by Mann Deshi Foundation and Mainstreaming Agricultural Networks & Development Initiatives (MANDI) implemented by ACCESS Development Services.
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Mastercard also runs a $10 million credit facility for small businesses in India in partnership with HDFC Bank, DFC and USAID. Moreover in 2020, the company had announced a commitment of $33 million to help reboot Indian SMEs and enable business recovery post Covid.
In April this year, Mastercard had partnered with invoice discounting platform M1xchange to offer invoice discounting solution to farmers, farmer producer organizations (FPOs), and agri-MSMEs through its agritech platform Farm Pass. The digital platform allows credit and working capital access along with connecting farmers and farmer-producer organisations (FPOs) directly with buyers, negotiating the best price for their produce and getting paid.