Illiterate gatherers of forest produce transformed into businesswomen

The evolutionary outcome of a 1992 World Bank Institute project to design microenterprise management curriculums and delivery methodology for poor, illiterate and semi-literate women producers in backward states of India, the Intel-Udyogini School of Entrepreneurship (I-USE) was established as a block-level training institution with a 2009 grant of $13,000 from the IT major Intel.

The objective of I-USE is to build the capacity of poor women to become entrepreneurs, with the capability to own and operate Village Level Service Centres (VLSC) and connect women producers to modern markets. Earlier, its promoters had developed two flagship programmes viz, Training of Enterprise Support Teams (TEST) for training NGO personnel as teachers and trainers, and the Grassroots Management Training (GMT) programme for bottom-of-pyramid women producers. All these programmes have been strategically integrated into the operations of I-USE during the past decade.

“During the past two decades since this women’s empowerment enterprise began its operations, we have trained over 3,000 NGO and government staff under TEST, and more than 200,000 women producers directly and indirectly through affiliated NGOs. Moreover, nearly 100 VLSCs are operational with each centre serving 80-100 families. The socio-economic impact of improving the productivity and business transaction skills of women producers is huge. For instance, in three districts of Jharkhand, we have trained 14,000 women traditionally engaged in selling lac resin — extensively used in the pharma, food, paints and varnishing industries — to improve their productivity through the use of new technologies,” says Vanita Viswanath, an alumna of Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru universities with a Ph D from the University of Texas, Austin. A former World Bank consultant on microenterprise, in 1990 Viswanath returned to India and promoted and served as chief executive of I-USE until early this year.

With these initiatives, women have dramatically increased their yields by 400-1,000 percent, with all of them earning at least Rs.20,000 and some earning above Rs.1 lakh for 15 days work. “Consequently many of them have signed up for our entrepreneurship programmes and have started wholesale and retail units to market urban goods in rural areas and vice versa,” adds Viswanath.

Encouraged by the Jharkhand experiment which has transformed illiterate gatherers of forest produce into women entrepreneurs engaged in backward (reafforestation and revival of lost livelihoods) and forward (distribution, retail) market integration, the I-USE team of 30 is set to roll out schemes to train 30,000 women in Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and Chhattisgarh. “Instead of traditional primary education, if we provide livelihood and enterprise education, it’s possible to arouse interest in knowledge and learning on a massive scale. Our women entrepreneurs have impacted remote rural societies in very positive ways by demonstrating that through accelerated learning programmes, women can transform rural communities for the better,” says Viswanath.