This Harvard alum has started an incubation programme for women social entrepreneurs
Renu Shah saw the numerous challenges women entrepreneurs in the social sector were facing and started an incubation programme, Shakti - The Empathy Project, for them.
“There is no money in the social sector. It is just passion that drives you to do certain work in the development sector,” says Renu Shah, social entrepreneur and founder of Shakti - The Empathy Project, an incubation programme for women social entrepreneurs.
Renu’s latest social entrepreneurial venture is an incubation project that helps women entrepreneurs who are in the early stage of their projects and working to find solutions to social problems.
Renu Shah, Founder of Shakti - The Empathy Project
She began Shakti in 2019 after realising that social entrepreneurs, particularly women, faced challenges just like she did when she began her first social venture. She hopes to build a community of women entrepreneurs and provide them with necessary skills and resources for social good.
The need for an incubation programme
Renu started her career in marketing and sales. She worked for about a decade in the sector and alongside started to sponsor some kids’ education. After 10 years in the field, she realised that her passion lay in the development sector. She hung up her boots and started a school for slum kids in Kathmandu, Nepal.
"It was one of the most interesting parts of my journey as an entrepreneur and as I saw the situation, I actually ended up with a lot more questions: why these kids are not going to school, what is it that we are missing, what is it that we are not doing right, and more. To find answers to all those questions, I took a sabbatical and went to Harvard,” Renu tells HerStory.
Renu got her master’s in public administration from Harvard Kennedy School. She came back to India and worked with Ashoka - Innovators for Public, an organisation that helps social entrepreneurs and young changemakers. During the course of her work, she realised that women social entrepreneurs were facing problems similar to the challenges she faced as a social entrepreneur.
“I felt really alone in my journey as a social entrepreneur. I guess it was partly because I was a woman and the first three years are difficult for any entrepreneur; add to that social entrepreneurship, and there’s one more layer,” Renu says.
She felt the lack of a community and support structure where she could share her ideas, challenges, and wins. All these factors galvanised her to start Shakti - The Empathy Project to create a support system for women entrepreneurs in the social sector.
The Empathy Project
Renu says that she wanted to create an incubator that was different from the ones that already existed. The desire to be different also reflects in the name of the incubator. Explaining the philosophy behind the name, she says, “Shakti is a combination of power and feminine values, both.”
“That is what we stand for. We are not just talking about building hard skills; we spend a lot of time on building a community and just listening to them. Listening and empathy are integral to our work,” she adds.
The incubation programme
Shakti offers a six-month incubation programme that helps women entrepreneurs acquire hard skills like marketing, legal aspects of the development sector, business finance, and more. It provides women with mentors that help them throughout the programme as well. It also features a mental health workshop for participants.
Social enterprises are selected based on the following criteria: entrepreneurs must be 18 years and above, and the startup must be registered in India, should have social impact, and be in the early stage. The startups can be for-profit, non-profit, or have a hybrid revenue model.
Social entrepreneurs from the first cohort attending a workshop as part of the incubation project.
The first cohort that was inducted in 2019 had 18 women entrepreneurs working in varied spheres. It included an initiative that ran an educational programme with prison inmates, a healthtech startup trying to identify and reduce the time of diagnosis and antibiotic resistance in tuberculosis, a mental health initiative, a menstrual hygiene programme, and a social enterprise that uses music to create gender awareness.
The second cohort, applications for which are closing on September 15, will have 20 entrepreneurs. It will begin on October 29 with a four-day induction workshop and will be followed by weekly online workshops.
The programme ends with a pitching and networking event with investors. Shakti selects the top three social startups in each cohort, which will be awarded Rs 5 lakh each.
In the future, Renu hopes to reach more women social entrepreneurs and create a space where they can reach out to Shakti for any mentorship or support. “We hope to extend it beyond participants in the incubation programme,” Renu says.
(Edited by Teja Lele Desai)