‘Only 3% of women entrepreneurs in tier 2-3 cities have access to external funding’: RBIH white paper | Bangalore News

“The lack of gender disaggregated data presents a significant barrier. This white paper shows that only 3 percent of women entrepreneurs in tier 2 and tier 3 have access to external funding,” said Innovation Hub CEO Rajesh Bansal.

Speaking at the event, he added, “When a woman builds a product her thinking is wired to what a woman would want. When men manufacture a car, they only think of how they would use the car, not necessarily how a woman would. We are keen to promote women in entrepreneurship and women in fintech in a large way….. this study validates anecdotes as well as some scattered data: even if you are an accomplished woman and want to go into fintech men can be hesitant to give funding.”

The paper highlighted other data regarding the current state of access for women entrepreneurs in India. For instance, only around 20 percent of India’s MSMEs are women-led, of which the majority are sole proprietorships. Within these, 5.2 percent of small enterprises are women-led and 2.6 percent of medium enterprises are women-led.

The paper also highlighted that Indian women end up shouldering the majority of care responsibilities in the family, 86 percent of women relocated on account of marriage, with tier 2 and 3 cities lacking scalable employment opportunities compared to tier 1 and a few tier 2 cities.

The event also played host to two panel discussions – one entitled ‘Taking the Train to Middle India’ hosted by SALT cofounder Shinjini Kumar, and featuring First Spoon founder Deepa Muthukumaraswamy, CEO of Revolut India Paroma Chatterjee, and Shraddha Jindal, joint director of Jindal Saw Limited.

The second event, ‘Discussing the Capital and Data Gap’ hosted by Shilpa Rao of the Innovation Hub, featured Bindu Ananth, co-founder of Dvara Holdings, Anuradha Ramachandran, partner at TVS Capital Funds, and Geetha Manjunath, co-founder and CEO of NIRAMAI Health Analytix.