• Social Entrepreneur

Shahnaz Makbulbhai Vora runs a cutlery and provision store in Memdavad, a small village in Patan district of Gujarat. In 2002, Vora enrolled for a 40-day training program with the International Center for Entrepreneurship and Career Development (ICECD) and then bought cutlery worth Rs.1,000, which she sold in her village for Rs.1,400. That gave her a decent enough margin to start a full-fledged business. Today, she has an annual turnover of Rs.18 lakh (about 40 percent of that is revenue) and plans to diversify into the dairy business in this calendar year by investing in buffaloes. Vora is also investing in herself by engaging in activities like English language coaching.

As she walks down the steps of the ICECD campus in Bopal, Ahmedabad, in tandem with a group of empowered women running their own enterprises, Hina Shah, the founder of ICECD, says with a look of content and pride on her face, “Every woman has the potential to transform an entire family and eventually a nation. We train these women such that they see opportunities everywhere.”

Shah would know. In the late ‘70s, when she was helping her husband in his plastics business, she gathered from industry talk that polypropylene was going to be the next big thing. Her husband had a plant related to PVC manufacturing. He did not diversify at that point but Shah set up her own plant in Surendranagar district of Gujarat to capitalize on the opportunity that had arisen. Those were the days when it was rare for a woman to pursue industrial activity.

Financial institutions were apprehensive to lend any money to Shah and she had a tough time convincing everyone that she could pull off the venture. However, she was successful and steadily built a reputation for herself in the industrial circles of Gujarat. When the Ford Foundation came to India to conduct a special study on women entrepreneurs, a large segment of the women they met were engaged in conventional activities like selling sarees, jewelry and papads and pickles. They were looking for a non-conventional role model for women across India, who could motivate and inspire other women to turn entrepreneurs. Senior officials at the Gujarat Industry and Investment Corporation (GIIC) and the Gujarat State Finance Corporation (GSFC) strongly recommended Shah to the Foundation. They wanted her to come on board and become an official trainer for a select group of women from the state. ‘Preach what you have practised’ was the mandate given to Shah.

In 1983, she conducted the first training program for a group of 25 women under the aegis of the Ford Foundation. From those 25, 18 became entrepreneurs and are successfully running their ventures even today.

That was the first milestone in Shah’s journey. She continued with the training as a part-time activity. During this same period, the Ministry of Science and Technology in Delhi wanted to establish an Entrepreneurship Development Board. They sought help from Shah and introduced women entrepreneurship in Delhi. She played an important role in policy formulation and worked with various government organizations and NGOs.

Today, each state in India boasts of an Entrepreneurship Development Board. In 1985, considering the success of Shah’s training sessions in India for women entrepreneurs, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, then president of Pakistan, invited her over to train women there. That was Shah’s foray into the international domain. “The social context there was totally different. Each man had three wives and none of them could go out and work. Entrepreneurship would enable them to become financially independent from their own homes,” says Shah. Today, ICECD’s endeavors have reached more than 60 developed/developing countries of Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Pacific regions, with more than 1,150 organizations. More than 5,500 trainers have been trained in the international arena.

It is this kind of multiplier effect that Shah had visualized when she founded ICECD in 1986. The institute is an initiative by Shah to convert her own entrepreneurial experience into a development and training effort for women across all strata of society. “My first experience of working with rural poor women was in Philippines in the early years. Though their exposure and education is limited, such women do have the required potential to take up entrepreneurial activities if trained in the right manner. The entrepreneurial process of identifying a product, making a business plan, getting capital, establishing a unit, and earning profits from it doesn’t change across income strata or education levels. It is skill-based and behavior-oriented more than knowledge-oriented. We are trying to teach women to tap into the potential they already possess,” says Shah.

She feels this entrepreneurial behavior can be inculcated in children as well from an early age. It is this belief which led her to establish the Satyamevajayate International School (SJIS) in 2000 which uses a special entrepreneurship competency development model to mould children right from grade one.

“The younger kids here regularly have market activities where each child brings one item from home and goes to the other kids to sell the same. There is a fixed day when they all display their goods in the lawn for sale. They learn simple lessons like food sells more than pencils,” says Shah. Recently, a number of teachers, educationists and students from the Hathaway Brown School, Cleveland, U.S.A. visited the SJIS campus in Ahmedabad to interact with and study how entrepreneurship is taught here.

“The U.S. is finally waking up to the idea of entrepreneurship. So many of their people have been retrenched in the past two years that they now feel entrepreneurship is the way ahead for them. The mayor of Ohio has shown interest in adopting our training model for their Entrepreneurship Development Center,” says Shah.

Among other areas, ICECD implemented a pilot project for the economic rehabilitation of more than 3,500 rural widows in the state of Gujarat in 2006 along with the Women and Child Development Department and Social Security Department, Government of Gujarat. The project successfully enabled 90 percent of these widows to start small businesses/get linked with skilled employment and earn Rs.1,500-Rs.25,000 per month.

For increased outreach of this training module, ICECD identified and developed experts of 23 NGOs across the country, thus, enabling around 45,000 widows to benefit from the project between 2006-’07 and 2009-’10. Further, to ensure that these women can sustain their enterprises, they were given access to loans, insurance, and other financial schemes under the ‘Widows Federation’ that the ICECD project team formulated. The long-term goal of the Federation is to make this segment of widows bankable by mainstream institutions.

“We don’t believe in welfare-oriented developmental work. What works in the long run is capacity building. All our training modules are aimed at that. Once women become entrepreneurs, their confidence is amazing and they pull other women toward self-dependence too. Plus, they pull back their children from exploitative work conditions and put them into schools. With each activity that we do, we are trying to create a multiplier effect. Suppose we train 100 trainers from other countries, even if they go back to their lands and train 25 women each year, they would create 2,500 women entrepreneurs annually. And our success rate is not bad, it crosses 80 percent more often than not,” concludes Shah.

Widow Empowerment
Widows trained directly by ICECD: 13,000
Total NGOs trained by ICECD through capacity building: 23 (all India)
Widows trained through these NGOs: 45,000
Investment creation: Approx. Rs.45 crore

Success Saga
* Created 2 lakh women entrepreneurs
- Their investments range from Rs.2,500 to Rs.50 lakh
- Total investment creation by them: Approx. Rs.199.35 crore in India
* Development of four lakh deprived women
* Created >20 community-based microfinance institutions
* Created > 1,000 self-help groups
* Economically empowered > 10,000 poor youth in urban slums, tribal and rural areas
* Entrepreneurial hubs called ‘Village Service Centers’ created to cater to business requirements of 75 villages
* Economic and social rehabilitation in 36 earthquake-hit villages of Gujarat, and worked for tsunami-affected areas of Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Maldives

Next: Women empowered ->>>

Tags:
Entrepreneurship Development Board, Ford Foundation, GIIC, GSFC, Gujarat Industry and Investment Corporation, Gujarat State Finance Corporation, Hina Shah, ICECD, International Center for Entrepreneurship and Career Development, SJIS, Women Entrepreneur