Bengaluru: IIMB to train 12,000 women entrepreneurs

BENGALURU: Over 12,000 aspiring women entrepreneurs from across the country will be trained at the Women Start-up Programme (WSP) at Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB).

The first such initiative in the country, the programme will take the women through its five-week Do Your Venture Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), which has been customised to encourage women to systematically identify and test their business ideas.

The programme, to be funded by global investment bank Goldman Sachs and the Department of Science and Technology, aims to provide managerial and entrepreneurial skills through mentoring, incubation, and financial support. At the completion of the course, the top 300 will be shortlisted for a boot camp to be held at partner campuses in towns nearest to them. They will receive classroom instructions on communications and customer interaction. The partner institutions for the initiative include CIIE’s Innocity, Ahmedabad, IIM Indore, IIM Nagpur, IIM Udaipur and IIM Visakhapatnam.

Dr Anita Gupta, scientist at the National Science & Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board, DST, said the programme complements the national ‘Start-up India’ and ‘Stand up India’ initiatives. “We believe it will further foster an enabling ecosystem for women entrepreneurs while also serving to build a new pipeline of female talent throughout the country,” she said. 

WSP builds off a successful pilot programme launched in November 2016 by NSRCEL which drew more than 1,700 aspiring female entrepreneurs from across the country. 50 women entrepreneurs were selected to atttend a three-week boot camp at IIMB which enabled participants to develop customized methodology.