The N S Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (NSRCEL) at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore announced that it has launched the nationwide “Women Startup Programme”. The initiative aims to help women begin new ventures in a systematic manner.

The programme is primarily being funded by Goldman Sachs and is supported by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. The other partners of the initiative include institutions like CIIE’s Innocity, Ahmedabad, IIM Indore, IIM Nagpur, IIM Udaipur, IIM Vishakapatnam, and Presidency University, Kolkata.

“The initiative will empower female entrepreneurs, who will create jobs and in turn strengthen the foundation of our communities. In time, we hope to work with many of them on 10,000 Women, a global program which our firm has brought to India that provides a business education and access to capital,” Sonjoy Chatterjee, Chairman and Co-CEO Goldman Sachs India, said.

“For our last year’s programme, we had women across India participate in the online course but over 80% of the final 15 who are currently incubating at NSRCEL are from Bengaluru. Many women with innovative ideas refused participating in the boot camp as well as incubation because they could not relocate to Bengaluru were the incubation facilities were offered. Therefore, this year with the partner institutions, we would like to offer incubation in various cities,” said Suresh Bhagavatula, professor and Chairperson, Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Development, NSRCEL at IIM-B. “We hope that this would help women across the country to start and not just those living in Bengaluru,” he added.

The ideal target audience for the programme are women who would like to begin ventures that can be scalable. “We are also interested in helping women who would like to start ventures that remain small but remarkable,” added Suresh Bhagavatula.

The programme will commence with a five week ‘Do Your Venture’ Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for approximately 12,000 aspiring women entrepreneurs to help them systematically identify and test their business ideas. Thereafter, around 300 ventures will be shortlisted for a boot camp at partner institutions. Here they will attend classes on communication and customer interaction. From this , around a 100 entrepreneurs will be shortlisted for a second boot camp at the IIM-B campus where receive classroom instruction on developing a business plan and concepts like pricing, costing, sales and marketing as well as negotiation skills. Finally, these entrepreneurs will have their startups incubated at a partner institution of their choice for a period of one year and will get financial support.

The women will also be provided with a Rs 30,000 monthly honorarium as a safety net and support while they start their ventures. In addition to this they will also be given mentor support in all cities.

(Picture courtesy: nsrcel.org)