Women's Economic Forum, Empowering billion women by 2020 and GAME....

Women's Economic Forum, Empowering billion women by 2020 and GAME....

The last two days I had the opportunity to represent Umed MSRLM on three platforms, the Women's Economic Forum 2019, India, Empowering billion women 2020 with Dr. Tina Ellton at a roundtable talk organised by FICCI, and GAME, Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship, a network for catalysing 10 million Mass Entrepreneurs by 2030 with support of Facebook.
While two of them emphasised on the need to empower women, the third emphasised on empowering youth along with women and entrepreneurs in general.
The common thread among all the three was providing support to entrepreneurs to facilitate their growth.
In a country teeming with millions, providing jobs to all is impossible as well as formidable. However enabling them to become entrepreneurs will synergise their own growth and lead to overall sustainable development.
MSRLM's approach in creating community organisations for collective growth and support is a standing example. There has been no dearth of programmes for creating individual entrepreneurs, however these are limited to persons with great drive. At times some individuals may not have the required sets of skills but coming together in a group and working for the objective gives them an exposure to hone their skills. This can be a great boost for the beginning of their enterprise where they become collectively responsible.
MSRLM/ NRLM is rife with examples of several women, specially the destitute and deserted who have have been able to transform their lives due to the social and financial inclusion and capacity building activities undertaken by the community organisation.
The support offered to women for enhancing agricultural productivity under the Mahila Kisan Shashaktikaran Pariyojana with emphasis on creating women farmers, enabling them with knowledge and skills to use better seeds and techniques for agricultural management and technology to reduce drudgery are wonderful examples.
It is also a lesson in learning wherein efforts have been made by the Ministry of Rural Development to empower women with the right attitude by making them self dependent and self sufficient.
This also reflects the fact that when strength is giving to developing community institutions society can be transformed. The fact that almost 4 million households have been enabled through SHGs and over a million livelihoods have been generated through MSRLM are enough proof.
As a corollary, youth between the age of 18 to 35 are also being skilled under the Deendayal Upadhyay Grameen Kaushalya Yojana for placement through jobs. Almost 40,000 youth have been trained and placed in Maharashtra and in the next 3 years more than 100.000 beneficiaries will be trained and placed.
Individual entrepreneurs are also being created through the Rural Self-employment training Institutes- RSETIs.
However much more needs to be done. Increasing awareness about the options and avenues available is important. It is also essential that the community platforms created by SRLMs , all over in rural India are used effectively by all stakeholders including government departments, NGOs, CSR partners, educational and financial institutions.
Another important aspect to be kept in mind is the varied capability and capacities of women and youth and plan accordingly. Needless to mention that whatever progress has taken place in the empowerment of women and youth, is certainly due to support and help received from family, friends and society. Yet  people have to undergo great struggle for achieving their goals in the face of opposition.
Secondly the aspirational levels of youth and women are increasing by leaps and bounds but they are unable to unravel the ways and means of access to finance, technology, legal requirements or keeping pace with the requirements of such growth.
Forums like WEF, EBW2020, FICCI, GAME-Facebook should unravel ways and means to simplify the processes in a manner that the interest of the entrepreneurs not only grows but is also sustained .
This is possible only when we stop working in silos. The future lies in collaborating, creating clusters and growing together. The government is the single largest force which works on scale for the common good and reinforcing their efforts and chanelising it to the community is possible as can be seen from the Community based organisations created by NRLM / MSRLM.
It is therefore important to bring together the policy makers, civil society leaders, community based organisations, youth leaders and champions on a common platform to discuss the issues and create an enabling atmosphere to facilitate and promote entrepreneurship.
GAME, Global alliance for mass entrepreneurship is one such example. The WEF and EBW2020 are others.
However even as we embark on this lofty mission, a thought needs to be given to check the true status of women and crime against them as also the existing inequalities and inequities.
The key still lies in change of the mindset of every individual in society lest it would tantamount to lip service or patronage and then all these efforts would sadly go in vain.
Entrepreneurship holds the key to the future and what better satisfaction could all of us get than nurturing this sapling.