Women Entrepreneurship: A Global Opportunity And Challenge
According to a report, approximately, there are 27,000 startups in India, which means about 18 per cent or around 5,000 startups are led by women. The report also found that between 2019 and 2022, about 17 per cent of investment deals in India were by startups with women leaders. Given the pace of the Indian growth story, how do you see entrepreneurship in the women's world? According to a report, less than one per cent of all institutional investments in 2021-22 went to women-led businesses. Also, less than one per cent of active angel investors in India are women.
We have been reading about the same stats for years now. The quantum of funding globally has increased but the percentages have remained the same. India is now the third-largest startup ecosystem with immense growth and innovation in the entrepreneurial ecosystem and with women being active catalysts in the same. We must stop and question ourselves why isn’t the needle really moving almost 180 degrees for women and funding for women.
For me personally, I wanted to bring about this change and founded the first and leading venture capital fund, Saha Fund and StrongHer Ventures for women entrepreneurship in tech to engage and open access to capital and opportunities to women-led and focused businesses. Working with thousands of women in India and globally, we also realised as an early stage investor we need to build strong networks, tools and frameworks to create many more entrepreneurs with a scale up accelerator programme. Investing in women and creating networks and communities with partnerships with companies, universities and governments has helped us amplify and scale our initiatives. Having invested in over 60 companies, our total market cap is more than $10 bn with more than 15,0000 jobs created. Our aim is to impact over 1 million women in the next five years.
Women participation in the workforce and women entrepreneurship is a global opportunity and challenge. The difference is though, that in countries like UK and US, diversity and inclusion is now a boardroom agenda and being mandated in various ways with reporting, policy making and institutional capital being allocated. Funding received by US startups with one or more female founders has gone up from $12 bn in 2013 to $45 bn in 2022, also funding for female-only founded startups increased from 3.6 per cent in 2008 to 6.9 per cent in 2022. We are lagging behind in allocating funding at scale from private and public institutional sources for women leaders and business owners to scale. Women need to be recognised as active contributors to the economic workforce and GDP.
We have a great education system in India with women making up nearly 43 per cent of the total graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics in India—one of the highest in the world but this is not being translated to women in the workforce and staying in jobs or pursuing entrepreneurial opportunities. We need the national banks, corporates and universities to come together to fund and provide capital to women-led and focused businesses.
Areas like women’s healthcare and finance have been overlooked for years even though women represent half the population. Twenty-three per cent of Indian women remain financially excluded, and a vast 42 per cent of the financially included are dormant account holders. Though India has been making strides in leading gender-responsive financial inclusion initiatives with schemes like Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana 2014, which managed to bring down the gender gap in financial services from 20 per cent in 2011 to 6 per cent in 2017, it still needs to deal with the gaping divide in digital access that limits women’s ease of access at a policy level, especially so during a pandemic when physical realities are highly altered.
My advice to any young entrepreneur would be to build to solve a real need in the market and come up with a solution that is deep and has scale and the potential to impact millions and billions. Entrepreneurs need to test out their differentiated business model and monetisation strategy with real clients before they plan to fund and scale. Entrepreneurship is a long and hard journey and one must be dedicated and motivated to build for a decade. No success is overnight and what we see on social media is a mere glimpse of the success that one achieves after going through the entrepreneurial ups and downs and pivots.
It is truly India’s year and decade and with the population, foreign capital inflow, domestic wealth and emerging middle class, there is no limit to what India can achieve. With the penetration of 5G in every village and with the hungry consumer, technology and access to commerce, finance, health and much more is unlimited. Women have and will continue to play pivotal roles in all these industries. They have always been powerful consumers, making 70 per cent of household decisions around consumption, health and education and much more. Now is their decade and century to lead and make decisions on the country’s progress. No country or company can be truly successful in the future unless they have equitable and inclusive leaders, workforce and culture. Women leadership and participation means business and is a must to create sustainable change and to really move the needle and change the narrative!
Ankita Vashisht, Founder and Managing Partner, StrongHer Ventures and Saha Fund
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