SIDBI access support from Japan to boost women entrepreneurship

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SME Times News Bureau | 20 May, 2013
SIDBI gets financial support from government of Japan under the Japan Fund for Poverty Reduction (JFPR) which is administered by Asian Development Bank (ADB) in order to boost women entrepreneurship.

"The project's aim is to help low income women entrepreneurs in accessing financial resources, services and market opportunities. It aims to assess existing gender practices of banks, NBFCs, MFIs, etc. and organize specific training. A monitoring and evaluation mechanism is planned to assess the results of activities under the project," according to a company release issued on Monday.

All the programmes are under a project for 'Supporting Micro Entrepreneurship for Women's Empowerment', which covers covers five States of Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and Rajasthan, it added.

SIDBI has also been training poor women in financial literacy and imparting skills to run their micro enterprises in the last three months.

The company has, so far, supported 40 such trainings in many cities of Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and Rajasthan. Overall, about 1,200 women have been trained under these programmes, the company statement said.

In fact, SIDBI has launched a series of residential training programmes to train officials of Regional Rural Banks (RRBs), Non Banking Financial Companies (NBFCs) and Micro Finance Institutions (MFIs), apart from its own select officials.

"The purpose of the training programmes is to make officials of these institutions understand about the enterprise lending to women as also impart them skills in gender sensitization. The training would cover 170 officials in 4 batches from senior, middle and junior level officials. A large number of the officials being trained are themselves women," it stated.

"The participants learnt about issues like KYC, fixed deposits, critical factors for enterprise success, business cycle, etc. From the feedback obtained, these women have understood many concepts not known to them earlier and which would help them in managing the day to day affairs of their businesses," it added.