India as a nation is becoming the world’s fastest-growing startup ecosystem. In recent years, the Indian startup ecosystem has really taken off and come into focus on its own driven by factors such as massive funding, consolidation activities, evolving technology and a burgeoning domestic market. However, there still exists a huge gap, a gap also known as gender parity which is still yet to be solved. A mere 5.9 percent of the participating startups were founded by ‘only females’, as compared to 55.5 percent by their male counterparts, showing a long road ahead for women entrepreneurs to catch up. A pilot survey conducted by the banking regulator RBI on the Indian Startup Sector showed even among a majority of startups (57.5 percent) which have at least a minimum of two Co-Founders, the presence of at least one female founder is only 45 percent. These data simply shows that the startups led by women entrepreneurs aren’t in the majority in this country, rather the entrepreneurship space is largely dominated by men. The talk of parity and equality between women and men is mostly lip service, with very few willing to walk the walk.
However, things are about to change as the society is now focusing more on increasing the leadership role of women everywhere including all the business domain. All they need is support, not just mental but more as credit support. Here is where the role of startup incubators come into the light. A startup incubator is a collaborative program designed to help new startups succeed. The sole purpose of a startup incubator is to help entrepreneurs grow their business. The main focus of incubator stands on mentoring start-ups and providing businesses with the necessary support, guidance and equipment required to start a business. Though the rise of incubators is steady in India, the necessity of having more women entrepreneurs has today led to a number of incubators which are promoting and helping out women-led start-ups. In this article, we aim to help our readers to get acquainted with some of the renowned incubators that are contributing their best to promoting women entrepreneurship in India.
5ideas
5ideas is an organization that is dedicated to catalyzing women entrepreneurship by bringing access to knowledge, role models, mentors, connections and capital required to build high growth women-founded startups. 5ideas aims to fuel the tech start-up ecosystem in India. Its initiative, ‘Founder in Heels’ has been established to back women entrepreneurs primarily in tech-enabled industries. The initiative focuses on making available to women entrepreneurs across the country resources such as knowledge, advisors, mentors etc.
We-Hub
We-Hub is the first state-led incubator exclusively for women entrepreneurs in India. Established by the government of Telangana in 2018, the incubator has launched various projects for women entrepreneurs, both existing and budding. The organization aims to foster and promote women entrepreneurship to startup, scale-up, and accelerate with global market access in Telangana and across India. WE Hub works with the mission to ensure that all women entrepreneurs in the country have access to technical, financial, governmental and policy support required to start-up scale-up sustain and accelerate with global market access. The work of WE Hub is primarily in the fields of providing access to technical, financial, government and policy support required to start-up, scale-up and accelerate with global market access, to all women entrepreneurs in the country.
Project Her & Now
Project ‘Her&Now’ is an incubation and acceleration program for women entrepreneurs in Rajasthan, with an objective to support over 105 women entrepreneurs until March 2021. The sector-Stage-Scale agnostic program, funded by GIZ, Government of Germany; supported by Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE), Government of India, and implemented in Rajasthan by Startup Oasis. The two-fold intent of the program is to have a more gender-inclusive entrepreneurial space, while also discovering a loosely structured program model that could be scaled up in other parts of the country and become a part of the policy structure. The program is crafted strategically to offer mentoring, capacity building, formal registrations, growth hacking, funding, and portfolio management.
Nexus
Nexus is a collaboration between the U.S. Embassy, New Delhi and ACIR to showcase the best of American and Indian entrepreneurship, innovation and technology commercialization. Nexus and WE Connect International-India has strategically collaborated to cooperatively pursue activities that will build economic equivalence and build and improve business opportunities for women business owners. This partnership, formalized by a signed MOU, has been entered into to bring opportunities available through the WE Connect platform to Nexus’ start-ups and promote it to women entrepreneurs across India.
NSRCEL
N S Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (NSRCEL) is the leading startup Hub incubation centre across India. With programs specifically catering to entrepreneurs with profit ventures and social ventures, also student and women entrepreneurs, NSRCEL offers its support to various players of the startup ecosystem. NSRCEL brings together start-ups, industry mentors, eminent academicians from its parent institution Indian Institute of Management Bangalore and researchers who thrive on continuous interaction of theory and practice. NSRCEL is also the first incubator with a program tailored for social entrepreneurs and their unique challenges. One of its most notable endeavours is the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women Initiative. Goldman Sachs 10,000 provides women entrepreneurs with a business and management education, mentoring and networking and access to capital.
The above-mentioned incubators are offering their best in order to build a strong startup ecosystem for women entrepreneurs in India. India as a nation needs more such organizations to offer support to women entrepreneurs, which as a result can be instrumental in helping them set up stronger foundations and build robust networks.
