The Women Entrepreneurship Platform (WEP), an initiative by NITI Aayog, and TransUnion CIBIL on Friday announced the launch of SEHER, a credit education program aimed at empowering women entrepreneurs across India.
This initiative, under the aegis of NITI Aayog, is designed to increase financial literacy and business skills among women, enabling them to access and manage credit more effectively.
State of play
In the last five years, the demand for business loans by women has increased 3.9 times. As of March 2024, women constituted 38% of the 1.5 crore borrowers with active business loans.
The portfolio balance for these loans grew at a 35% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from March 2019 to March 2024. SEHER’s launch, supported by NITI Aayog, is a move towards enhancing and expanding women-owned businesses and entrepreneurship in India.
SEHER’s Objectives
SEHER will provide women entrepreneurs with essential knowledge about finances, including understanding their CIBIL Rank and commercial credit reports, and offer resources and tools to help women entrepreneurs enhance their business acumen.
By educating women about the importance of maintaining a good credit history, SEHER aims to facilitate easier and faster access to finance.
Importance
India has 63 million MSMEs, with around 20% being women-owned, employing as many as 27 million people. This points to the fact that accelerating women’s entrepreneurship could potentially create more than 30 million new women-owned enterprises, generating 150 to 170 million jobs.
Anna Roy, Mission Director WEP and Principal Economic Adviser, NITI Aayog, stated, “WEP aims to empower women entrepreneurs by overcoming information asymmetry and providing support across various pillars, including entrepreneurship promotion, access to finance, market linkages, training and skills development, mentoring and networking, and business development services.”
Rajesh Kumar, MD and CEO, TransUnion CIBIL, added, “Our goal is to propagate financial knowledge and improve the skills of women entrepreneurs, enabling them to manage their businesses successfully and achieve sustained growth.”
