TiE, US embassy to train women entrepreneurs

As many as 30 women from Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh will get mentoring and skill development training at a workshop being conducted by The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) and the US Embassy, New Delhi along with consulate partners.

The aim of the workshop, which began on Monday, is to empower women entrepreneurs.

It is for the first time that the city is hosting such a workshop under the project AIRSWEEE 2.0 which stands for All India Roadshow on Women’s Economic Empowerment through Entrepreneurship 2.0 for scaling women’s entrepreneurship in India. This year, similar workshops have already been held in Lucknow, Bhubaneshwar and Patna while the two workshops at Vadodara and Hubli were inaugurated on Monday.

Sneha Shah, who is running a chain of bakeries and confectionaries, is one of the early-stage women entrepreneur attending the workshop as she getting into baked FMCG business.

“I want to scale up my consultancy business,” said another entrepreneur Meghavi Vyas, who operates a consultancy firm.

Each of this mentee participants have been chosen from over 800 applications that the organizers received.

“AIRSWEEE is seeking to create a significant multiplier effect by creating a pay-it-forward culture by requiring each of these 150 mentees to mentor at least 2 mentees each. This will create a ripple effect of at least 450 empowered women entrepreneurs in tier 2 and tier 3 cities in India,” said AIRSWEEE’s chairperson Seema Chaturvedi.

For the Vadodara workshop, which will continue till March 22, two mentors – Caroline Lewis and Komal Goyal have travelled from the US while Geeta Goradia, past president of Federation of Gujarat Industries and Rita Agarwal from Nagpur are working along-side to share best practices, experience and knowledge with the 30 women mentees.