Dec.18, 2023 – Villgro, a leading social enterprise incubator, has collaborated with Accenture, to launch EcoSakhi, an incubation program aimed at supporting Indian women entrepreneurs in the waste-to-value sector. The EcoSakhi initiative will provide five women-led growth stage start-ups financial support of up to INR 40 lakhs each and help increase the adoption of their products and services by offering market access and an enabling ecosystem. The incubation programme spread over 12 months will equip the start-ups with strategic mentoring, opportunities to implement gender pilots, and access to gender impact investors, partners, urban local bodies (ULBs), in addition to markets – for business expansion.
The EcoSakhi program invites applications from women founders or co-founders who meet the following criteria: minimum ownership stake of 50% in their businesses in the waste-to-value sector, registered as a private limited company in India with a formal business structure, and whose identified product or solution is currently present in the market or ready for commercialization. Applications can be submitted on or before December 23, 2023 at https://www.villgro.org/
Post-application screening, a shortlist of 10 women-led businesses will present their ideas to a jury panel. Of these, the jury will select five start-ups who will earn a spot in the year-long EcoSakhi program. The acceleration phase from April 2024 to March 2025 will provide the winning entrepreneurs with dedicated support and resources to grow their businesses.
“The collaboration between Villgro and Accenture reflects our commitment to fostering impactful women-led innovations in the climate action sector – with a focus on waste-to-value. Through this program we aim to enable market access to women-led businesses, and help women entrepreneurs employ more women. We aim to leverage our expertise in the domain to help more women-led businesses get that foot in the door, and take more women along with them,” said Kalyani Krishna, Manager, Villgro.
Kshitija Krishnaswamy, Managing Director, Corporate Citizenship, Accenture in India said, “Women’s participation in the economy not only improves lives and livelihoods, but also helps bring differentiated perspectives to solve for today’s challenges. By extending our support to the EcoSakhi initiative, we hope to fuel development of innovative sustainability solutions that are the need of the hour while fostering an inclusive future for all.”
The waste-to-value sector helps develop commercial products from agriculture, household and construction waste, creates zero-waste packaging solutions, and tracking solutions for waste management.
About Villgro:
Villgro is India’s foremost impact-first incubator with expertise in four sectors – Healthcare, Agriculture, Climate Action, and Gender Inclusion. Our mission is to make innovative, impactful businesses succeed. Since 2001, Villgro has supported 387 social enterprises that have raised over INR 4.7 billion in investments, created 8175 jobs and impacted over 20.8 million lives. Villgro was recognized as the “Top Incubator” in India by Invest India (DPIIT, GoI) in 2020 and won the DivHERsity awards in 2022 and ‘23.
