Signature projects

Empowering Rural Women Kirana Entrepreneurs (RWKEs) in Madhya Pradesh

  • calendarJul 29, 2025
  • time 2 min

Reliance Foundation, in partnership with MSC, launched a one-year initiative to strengthen the entrepreneurial capacity of 100–120 rural women kirana entrepreneurs (RWKEs) across three districts of Madhya Pradesh. These women, often operating in low-resource and tribal regions, face persistent barriers in accessing markets, finance, and digital tools. The project was designed to address these challenges by enhancing their business skills, resilience, and access to essential services.

MSC led the end-to-end execution of the initiative through a structured and participatory model. The engagement began with the mobilization and selection of RWKEs, with a focus on aspirational and tribal areas. We then conducted tailored needs assessments to understand the specific constraints faced by the entrepreneurs and designed a contextualized training curriculum to emphasize entrepreneurship, financial literacy, digital enablement, and leadership. The program further delivered capacity-building workshops reinforced through continuous mentoring. A key component of the initiative is the “pitch your business plan” event, in which selected RWKEs present their business proposals to a jury. Winners receive seed funding from Reliance Foundation to grow their businesses. MSC also provided post-training handholding, including exposure visits to successful enterprises and support for market linkages through local ecosystem actors.

This project is expected to significantly improve the RWKEs’ access to finance, markets, and technology, enabling them to transition into more sustainable and growth-oriented businesses. The intervention will result in a replicable training framework suitable for similar rural contexts and generate actionable insights to inform future programs targeting women-led microenterprises in low-income and tribal regions.

Reliance Foundation, in collaboration with the Women Entrepreneurship Platform (WEP), commissioned the project.

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