Empowerment through Entrepreneurship

Women entrepreneurship in rural area of India is necessity for the economic, social and industrial growth of the country Skills Development plays a major role in overcoming marginalisation and enhancing inclusion, while employment promotion contributes to improve the Economic conditions of people and poverty reduction. Quality skills development can be an important tool to improve an individual’s access to employment. For enterprises to survive in this competitive economy, quality skill training is indispensable part. To increase the prospect and opportunities of future job market, promotion of self-employment, soft skills and entrepreneurship skills will be made integral part of skill development. Skill building and Micro enterprises are complimentary to each other and are considered to be growth engines of economic development in a State like Assam where industries are not adequate enough to boost the overall development. In order to sustain and grow, the capacities of these enterprises are required to be built and skill to be infused to survive the competition.
Empowered women always have various opportunities in her life and can utilize it to its full potential. Her empowerment can be reflected in the indicators like female literacy rate, Participation rate etc. Grameen Sahara, with a view to focus more on the issue of empowerment has initiated the program of promoting women entrepreneur in various business activities such as handloom, Tailoring, Beauty Salone, Confectionary, stationary shops etc. with the support of SIDBI.. Communities in this region is rich in traditional art and craft activities, traditional fabrics weaving of different tribes, and have reasonable understanding of manufacturing and production activities. But the people were not much aware of the schemes available for getting a loan to upgrade an enterprise. And most of the people from rural areas fear to deal with the banks due to lack of knowledge and financial literacy. Keeping that in mind, through the project intervention we had identified potential entrepreneurs and trained them through conducting various skill development programs, EDP in groups and exposure visits from different areas of Kamrup and Goalpara districts of Assam where major stress was to give the marketing of the produces as well as soft skills required to manage customers. Till date we have promoted 519 numbers of women entrepreneurs, built their capacities and linked them to bank and other financial institutions towards credit linkage.