Renu is an alum of Harvard University and after her stint with Corporate World in marketing & sales for more than 10 years one particular incident triggered her entrepreneurial path. At the start of her career, she had also begun sponsoring a few street children to school. It was the Class X result of the oldest child that made her realise she loved this work more than anything else. It was then, that she pivoted to the development sector and started a school for slum kids in Nepal and later co-founded with her friend Project PEHAL, an education program for government school children in rural UP.
She belongs to a middle-class business family in a small town of western U.P. and studied in boarding school in the early years. She has done her schooling from Scindia Kanya Vidyalaya, Gwalior and graduation from Delhi University and PG from ITM, Chennai. Later she went to Harvard Kennedy School for her master’s in public administration.
“Empathy, passion and commitment to change are the three things that drive an individual towards the social sector,” says social entrepreneur Renu Shah. She is the founder of Shakti - The Empathy Project or STEP which is a beautiful acronym of the name. STEP is an incubation programme for early-stage women entrepreneurs working towards finding solutions to social problems.
“The first three years of my journey were very difficult. Funding of course is a big issue but there are other challenges which one needs to tackle. As a woman who is trying to multitask, these challenges increase many- fold”, she says.
As a woman social entrepreneur, she felt her journey was lonely and craved for a like-minded community where she could be heard and understood. Her wins too looked different from the regular wins. In the development sector, it is the number of lives one can impact. In the early years, this impact is not big and yet very important. She often felt that the space to celebrate these early wins was missing.
“Women play multiple roles depending on the stage of life they are in; it becomes difficult for them to strike a balance. On the other hand, most men in our society do not need to strike this balance and neither are expected to and pursued it for ten years while sponsoring some kids’ education.
This situation has led to a very abysmal picture of women in the entrepreneurship space in the country. Only 14% of 58.5 million entrepreneurs in the country are women. In 2017, only 2% of equity funding went to women-led startups,” she says.
Unfortunately, a little more than a decade later, she realised much had not changed since the beginning of her own journey in the sector. She then started working on giving her idea a concrete shape. The idea was simple, to build a supportive network of women who were challenging the socio-cultural barriers to bring about change in society.
Shakti - The Empathy Project (STEP) offers a six-month incubation programme for women-led startups. The highlights of the programme are 1) a safe community for the entrepreneurs for open exchange 2) workshops to build hard skills 3) mentorship for handholding 4) networking and funding opportunities.
Startups are selected based on the following criteria: entrepreneurs must be 18 years and above, and the startup must be registered in India, should have a social impact, and be in the early stage. STEP is agnostic to the type of startup. It can be for-profit, non-profit, or have a hybrid model.
The first cohort of 2019 had 16 women entrepreneurs working in varied sectors. Among others, it included an initiative that was reinventing organic clothing, an educational programme with prison inmates, a health tech startup trying to identify and reduce the time of diagnosis and antibiotic resistance in tuberculosis, a startup addressing food security, a menstrual hygiene programme, and a social enterprise that uses music to create gender awareness.
Few highlights of three Startup from the first cohort that she did
1. Founder: Reshma
Startup: Webhor
Sector: Education/Gender health
Webhor is a program for adolescent schoolgirls and young women. The programme covers Gender sensitization, Reproductive Health, Menstrual Hygiene, Career Orientation and Equality at Workplace and Home. They use music as a creative tool to engage the participants and convey powerful messages.
2. Founder: Raadhika Gupta
Startup: Foodshala
Sector: Food Security
Foodshaala has set up community kitchens, trains teams of local women to cook meals planned in consultation with nutritionists. They supply these meals to children of affordable private schools and communities at a subsidised rate. During the lockdown, they partnered with Delhi Government to distribute food in the state.
3. Founder: Praapti Jayaswal
Startup: AarogyaAI Innovations Pvt. Ltd
Sector: Healthcare
AarogyaAI aims to diagnose drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) using Artificial Intelligence in a few hours. They enable quick and accurate diagnosis of DR-TB so that the patient can be rightly prescribed effective drug combinations for treatment, instantly.
Applications for the second cohort will close on 15th September. The programme will kick off on October 29 with a four-day induction workshop and will be followed by regular workshops and mentorship. The six-month journey will end with a pitching and networking event in March. Top three social startups from the cohort, will be awarded up to Rs 5 lakh.
“Life in Delhi is mostly about work. She likes to read and travel but these days there is hardly any time to pursue anything else. “And now with the pandemic, all activities are homebound and it is even more about work and spending time with the family,” she says. Five years from now, Shakti will become a force to inspire, encourage and support women entrepreneurs through its direct and indirect services.
To apply for the incubation program click on the link: https://www.shaktipreneurs.org/
