Women-led Enterprises Can Create 17 crore Jobs: Report

A joint report by Bain & Company and Google emphasizes that fostering women entrepreneurship can help generate employment for up to 170 million or 17 crore people by 2030

Women entrepreneurship can help solve the pressing challenge of unemployment that India is grappling with, shows a report released by Bain & Company in collaboration with Google.

Titled ‘Women Entrepreneurship in India—Powering The Economy With Her’, the report emphasizes that fostering women entrepreneurship can help generate employment for up to 170 million or 17 crore people by 2030, which is more than 25 per cent of the new jobs required for the entire working age population, from now until 2030.

“Enabling women entrepreneurs to start up and scale could, by 2030, increase direct employment by around 50 million to 60 million people and increase indirect and induced employment of another 100 million to 110 million people,” said Megha Chawla, Bain & Company partner and a lead author of the report.

Currently, women own an estimated 15.7 million businesses—20 per cent of the total businesses in the country—,which employ about 22 million to 27 million people in India. In comparison, developing countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam and Russia have over 30 per cent women-owned enterprises, whereas developed countries such as the US and Canada have ~40 per cent women-owned businesses.

How to Foster Women Entrepreneurship

“Women entrepreneurship directly affects income, employment and capital formation while indirectly benefitting household-level resource allocation. Supporting women entrepreneurs not only improves their livelihood but also creates jobs,” said Chawla in the report.

But what should be done to foster women entrepreneurship?

The report outlines four key opportunity areas that can unlock the potential of women entrepreneurship.

• Level the playing field for high impact entrepreneurs—who generate annual revenue or employment growth of more than 20%

• Enable ambitious solopreneurs and small business owners to become high-impact entrepreneurs

• Expand the funnel to encourage more women to start businesses

• Build and scale productive rural agripreneurs

Source: Women Entrepreneurship in India