Technology for MSMEs: The government’s public policy think tank NITI Aayog on Tuesday announced the launch of its Women Entrepreneurship Platform (WEP) 3.0 web portal to support women entrepreneurs in India. The platform will target to onboard 2.5 lakh women entrepreneurs, engage with 500 partners and host over 200 capacity-building online and offline events. Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME) – the nonprofit for entrepreneurship in India will be the platform’s programme manager for the next three years to manage the platform end-to-end and will also be in charge of developing, operating and maintaining the portal.
WEP was conceived in 2017 to boost the ecosystem for women entrepreneurship in India by aggregating key stakeholders and resolving information asymmetry existing in the ecosystem. As an aggregator platform, WEP provides services in six key areas viz., community and networking, funding and financial assistance, incubation and acceleration, compliance and tax assistance, entrepreneur skilling and mentorship, and marketing assistance.
“Women entrepreneurs account for just 13.76 per cent of the total entrepreneurs in India – a mere 8.05 million out of the total 58.5 million entrepreneurs. Women Entrepreneurship Platform intends to address the existence of information asymmetry and help resolve the fragmentation of the resources,” said Anna Roy, Sr. Adviser, Niti Aayog & Mission Director of WEP in a statement.
“To achieve this, we need to hear from our stakeholders on what can be done to improve the platform. We want to chart the way forward for the platform together,” she said. Currently, WEP has several partner entities such as the United Nations, Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, Human X, Microsave, Mastercard, SIDBI, TechMahindra, CISCO, Atal Innovation Mission, Flipkart, etc.
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As of March 20, 2022, over 900 women entrepreneurs benefitted through 77 programmes and events hosted on the WEP platform, according to an earlier statement by NITI Aayog.
In November, NITI Aayog’s Atal Innovation Mission, which aims to promote innovation and entrepreneurship in the country, had announced the launch of women-centric challenges under phase II of the second edition of the Atal New India Challenge (ANIC). The challenge aimed to support technology-based innovations that solve sectoral challenges of national importance and societal relevance through a grant of up to Rs 1 crore.
