How might we identify entrepreneurial opportunities

for women of rural and semi-rural areas of Amaravati,

Jhunjhnu, Surat, Dhubri and Sonbhadra districts in the
domain of digital media and technology?
Overview:
This case study comes from the Women led Virtual Field Support (WLVFS) program of PFEL (Piramal
Foundation of Education Leadership).

• Women in India:

There is a huge potential in India for increasing women’s economic participation and their contribution
to equitable, inclusive and sustainable development. India has much lower share of women’s
contribution to the GDP, than the global average of 37 percent.

o Only 14% workforce is women in urban areas. Most of it is informal, unprotected and in
unorganised. Nearly 50% women do not have bank or saving accounts
o Surprisingly 26% workforce is women in rural areas. 40% of the work is agricultural where only
9% of land in the country is owned by women
o Only 8% women have their own micro, small and medium enterprises. 60% do not have any
valuable assets to their name
o The male-female wage gap has been stagnant at 50%. More than half the work done is unpaid
and which has huge cost
o Crime rate against women stands at 53.9%, including domestic violence and dowry cases
o Gender parity ratio at birth is below 91%, one of the lowest in 113 countries of World
Economic Forum

• Potential

Increasing women’s work force participation by 10 percentage points would add $700 billion to India’s
GDP by 2025 (a 1.4% increase). However, achieving such a state of affairs for women has its own set
of challenges and root causes.

o Main challenges for Women

- Low Mobility
- Unsafe situations
- Low Self Esteem
- Low Confidence
- Lack of resilience- immediate flight or fight response
- Passive role in decision making
- Less power in exercising right choices

o Possible root causes of these challenges

- Patriarchy
- Male Power dynamic leading to marginalization
- Deep cultural conditioning about gender
- Unstructured/unexplored entrepreneurial/ livelihood space in remote districts
- Digital divide

• Current Landscape of women empowerment – International, Indian Government & NGOs

o At a policy level:
- National Policy for Women Empowerment is overarching framework for creating an
environment through positive economic and social policies for full development of
women to enable them to realize their full potential.
 - Vishakha Judgment transformed the jurisprudence on sexual harassment at workplace
and the NCW went on to formulate a Code of Conduct for preventing Sexual Harassment
at the Workplace (1997).
- Gender Budget allocation for gender- sensitive formulation of legislation, policies, plans,
programmes and schemes; allocation and collection of resources. Year 19-20 is focussing
on SHG promotion and women entrepreneurship strengthening
- Women and Child Department of India to govern the implementation of women rights
within the Indian constitution as well as the international frameworks for the same.

o At NGO level:
There are various small and big attempts being made to improve the status of women and
their contribution to the self and nation. A few in the area of livelihood preparedness and
skilling are Manndeshi, Barefoot, Dasra, SEWA, Mairada, CORO etc. which are working on:
- developing rural women’s skills in forming and managing their own SHGs (Self Help
Groups),
- entrepreneurship,
- networking,
- rescue support and
- legal aid.

Context:
Piramal Foundation’s initiative to strengthen women’s financial independence and contribute to
nation building has a rich history. The Foundation started a woman led rural BPO in Baggar, Jhunjhnu
in 2008 to provide employment to women and build their skills that are required in a commercial BPO.
It became one of India’s first rural women led BPO to become ISO certified (February 4, 2016).

After a drastic demand drop, women in the BPO revamped their skillsets. In 2017 they hired advanced
technology for tele and digital communications and got their own helpline number. They honed their
empathy providing skills and trained themselves to be education service providers. Eventually, they
became women led ‘Virtual field support’ (WLVFS) for development sector serving teachers and
government officials. By 2018, this newer, more empowered version of women was able to garner
projects from the government across 10 districts and also from Piramal Foundation’s other initiative-
Education.

VFS follows a standardized process of reaching out to and hiring women from underprivileged sections
of remote areas. Such a rigorous recruitment and selection process involves a written test, mock call
practice, panel interview and one month of on job training. This ensures that VFS gets women who
are ready to learn. Post recruitment, the Induction program ensures sufficient competency building
for the job role to be performed.

Learning & Development is an essential part of VFS’ success. Therefore, adequate resources and
importance is given to develop the team. The L&D inputs are provided in three categories:
 1. Functional Skills:
Building perspective on quality of education, subject pedagogy, TIPPS tool: For Classroom
Observation Metrics

2. Technical Skills:
Product Knowledge, MS Office, Basic Data Analytics and related software

3. Meta Cognitive and Behavioural Skills:

Self-Awareness & Self-Empathy, Communication: Empathy on call & Active Listening,
Debriefing as a tool of reflection and learning, Understanding Gender Equality and NVC – Non-
Violent Communication

Quality and quantity are both important for VFS’ operational outcomes. As a result, they have
identified key performance metrics that track parameters like efficiency with the help of customised
software and an exclusive quality control team. Among other things, the key performance indicators
also measure effectiveness of handling calls that in turn translates to service delivery excellence.

The VFS program has had a huge impact and has yielded some exciting outcomes:

- VFS centre is a powerful platform to build women’s skills, digital literacy, self-esteem and
resilience. It can strengthen the agency to change their lives.
- Over a period of 18 months, VFS women have been able to engage more than 50,000
stakeholders through 3,00,000 outbound calls
- The reading skill of children in Surat and Jhunjhunu has improved
- The pendency issues in state department initiatives of Odisha, Jharkhand and MP have
reduced.
- From a dependent member in the family with no or low voice in decision making to owning
assets in their name and negotiating their rights for life with dignity— women engaged in
VFS have changed completely.

Challenge:
There is this huge opportunity for scaled up engagement with women from the underprivileged parts
across the country. Women led virtual field support program has been able to tackle the problem of
targeting and on-boarding of these women at scale. But it is yet to solve the critical matter of
sustaining financial empowerment of women after the VFS program is over.

The WLVFS program has already identified the following opportunities:

- Women, even in the remotest areas, are getting educated and can come out with little
coaxing and support through parents’ counselling
- They can be easily skilled in diverse sectors and can learn the use of technology and digital
media to become a powerful change agent
- Women’s financial independence accompanied with compassionate attitude is the
prerequisite for building women’s agency to negotiate a dignified existence, beating
patriarchy peacefully

The constraints that WLVFS are facing before scale-up are:

- Women’s financial independence is solely dependent on the VFS program

 - Employing 10000 women for financial and social independence is not a scalable solution

For scaling up engagement of women, PFEL is already exploring Women Fellowship as a possible
solution to empower local young women for financial independence and bringing about social change.
PFEL understands that if more and more women need to be gainfully employed for financial
independence, the WLVFS program needs to start women fellowship for building self, technology,
functional and entrepreneurial skills of young women on a scale.

The outcome of the fellowship should be that young women are able to earn minimum of ₹
8000/month after completing their fellowship. Each VFS centre needs to think of ways to identify right
employability or entrepreneurial opportunities for young women in their own communities and areas.

Case Questions:
How do we identify and grow entrepreneurial opportunities for women in districts like –Amaravati
(Maharashtra), Surat (Gujrat), Jhunjhnu (Rajasthan), Dhubri (Assam), Sonbhadra (UP)?

A few other questions that PFEL needs answers for are as follows:

1. Which are the key sectors with maximum entrepreneurial/gainful employment opportunities for
women fellows in the targeted geographies?

2. How do we grow the relevant entrepreneurial skills for 80% placement of women fellows in gainful
employment/enterprise?

3. How can, reducing digital divide and technology enablement, support rural women in sustaining the
financial independence/gainful employment to provide a minimum of ₹ 8000/month in these
geographies?

Geographies to choose for understanding and working out the solution are as follows:

1. Jhunjhnu - Rajasthan
2. Amaravati - Maharashtra
3. Surat - Gujrat
4. Sonbhadra – Uttar Pradesh
5. Baksa - Assam
6. Dhubri - Assam
7. Ranchi - Jharkhand
8. Pakur - Jharkhand
9. Bhopal – Madhya Pradesh
10. Seetamadhi - Bihar
11. Jammu - J&K

About WLVFS:
Women Led Virtual Field Support Program (WLVFS) is an initiative to create meaningful financial
independence and empowerment opportunities for women using technology and their natural
learnability and empathy skills. The women are trained to provide project and scheme implementation
support through virtual means of connect (an alternate to the direct field support). It is aimed at
creating large-scale connections with stakeholders, reaching out to remote locations with the help of
technology to strengthen learning and services.

• Mission of WLVFS
Building a cadre of 10,000 financially independent social change maker women from the local
under-privileged sections of 100 districts by 2025

• Present Reach of the WLVFS program

During 2019, Women led VFS has been implemented in 11 districts. There is a high demand of
a VFS-like program (offering the kind of support that it does) from the government. At present,
the program has 250 women from underprivileged sections of 11 districts. These women are
being skilled and strengthened for supporting 4 state government initiatives and a NITI Aayog
program connecting more than 3,00,000 stakeholders regularly.

• WLVFS’ Program Impact on Women’s self- empowerment

o 72% women got their first job,
o 55% of these women are young adults,
o 43% are supporting their families with this income
o 21% women are able to solve disputes and take financial decisions with renewed
confidence due to self-awareness activities in the centre
o 25% women come from families with a monthly family income of less than ₹ 5000
o Financial Mainstreaming:
- 94% women have bank accounts (6% in process) and have access to ATM
- 22% have become members of SHGs (Self Help Groups) after joining the program
o Aspiration:
- 96% + women think that men and women can contribute equally to economy and
policy
- 20% want to engage actively for changing gender dialogues in society

• Geographies where we are working

o Jhunjhnu - Rajasthan
o Amaravati - Maharashtra
o Surat - Gujrat
o Sonbhadra – Uttar Pradesh
o Baksa - Assam
o Dhubri - Assam
o Ranchi - Jharkhand
o Pakur - Jharkhand
o Bhopal – Madhya Pradesh
o Seetamadhi - Bihar
o Jammu - J&K

Here are a few images showing how VFS works:

Image: How VFS works?

Image: Activities at a VFS centre

VFS has four technology channels:

1. Calls (Outbound & helpline for inbound):

To understand the needs of the officials and provide support over the phone.

2.

Image: Inbound/ Outbound Helpline

2. Awaaz De Broadcast service:

Communicating voice messages to officials/teachers through “Awaaz De” platform.
 3. Virtual Learning Labs:
This is an interactive forum to engage officials by asking them children’s learning outcome
related questions and creates an opportunity for group discussions. Creating Digital
Professional Learning Communities through WhatsApp and in-house developed
Knowledge Portal also helps in motivating clients to share their best practices.

4. Knowledge Portal:
Internal portal to universally access content for day to day solutions. This content is being
developed by a team of skilled, qualified people along with experts, on the basis of the
needs identified.

About PFEL:
Piramal Foundation for Education Leadership (PFEL) is a change management organization working in
the field of education. PFEL started its intervention in 2008 with a focus to improve learning outcomes
in public schools in India by supporting Public Education System Leaders to cause self and systemic
behaviour change through:

• Developing Leadership Skills:

PFEL works closely with the District Education officials, Principals and Teachers across 5 states
to develop their leadership skills by conducting workshops on leadership development,
implementing Need-based Assessment Tools and providing on field support with our Gandhi
fellows.

• Improving Processes:
PFEL works closely with the Principals, Teachers and officials of Public Education system to
improve processes in schools and the school administration system such as Library, Assembly,
Mid-Day Meal, BAL Sabha, distribution of free items for schools, delivery of teaching-learning
material, officials’ recruitment and induction process etc.

• Deploying Technology:
PFEL supports Education officials, Principals and Teachers by implementing unified scalable
technology solutions which provide an assessment based digital learning, remote support, and
encourages group learning for Education officials.

Piramal School of Leadership is a training facility located in Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan, India. Established in
2013 by PFEL, as a unique training centre to spearhead education leadership in India, Piramal School
of Leadership offers services to develop leadership skills and relevant knowledge by training
government teachers, headmasters, resource persons, block/district administrators and youth in
order to positively impact the quality of education in schools.

PFEL runs Gandhi Fellowship program, a professional program in transformational leadership for
young social entrepreneurs. PFEL provides youth with the opportunity for personal transformation
through self-discovery and thereby, leads social transformation.
About Piramal Foundation:
Piramal Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Piramal Group, is a Section 8 company that develops
innovative solutions to resolve issues that are critical roadblocks towards unlocking India's economic
potential.

The Foundation believes that bringing impact at scale across diverse geographies and communities
can be achieved through partnerships with governments and like-minded organisations. Therefore, all
of its projects are in conjunction with state and central governments, like-minded philanthropists,
corporates, donors, NGOs and social delivery organisations.

In line with the Millennium Development Goals, Piramal Foundation is committed towards improving
primary healthcare & nutrition, primary education and enabling access to safe drinking water.

Each social initiative nurtured by Piramal Foundation, addresses one of the three focus areas that
include -

• Primary Healthcare & Nutrition: Piramal Swasthya

• Education: Piramal Foundation for Education Leadership
• Safe Drinking Water: Piramal Sarvajal

The Foundation's initiatives are a reflection of the Group's core values and corporate philosophy of
'Doing Well and Doing Good'. To know more visit our official website.