Google partners Sheroes to support 500 rural women entrepreneurs

Google India on Monday said it has partnered with Sheroes to support 500 rural women entrepreneurs by connecting them with experts and enabling access to resources, guidance and mentorship.

Last year, the tech major had started a small pilot for an accelerator programme for 10 women entrepreneurs in rural India across its Internet Saathi network.

The programme centred around solving for basic business issues like customer acquisition, selling and marketing, digital presence, management, and self-confidence.

"Within three months, we saw a rise in confidence among the participants and the women went back and applied the learning to their businesses. 80 percent of them started working on their digital presence and one of the participants had a working website within months," Google India said in a statement.

Google has now joined hands with Sheroes to scale this to 500 rural women entrepreneurs by connecting them with experts, urban women entrepreneurs in the same or adjacent industries and enabling access to the right resources, guidance and mentorship over a six-month period, it added.

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In 2015, the Internet Saathi programme was initiated in collaboration with Tata Trusts to bring basic digital literacy skills to women in Indian villages and have them become informal teachers for other women in their communities. Since then, the programme has touched over 30 million women across the country.

In a separate statement, Google said it has launched new insight tools for the travel industry.

'Travel Insights with Google' is a website that provides demand trends to sector participants, whether they are a chain of hotels, a small travel startup, or a booking agent.

This will help better understand pent-up travel demand and leverage insights from these tools for businesses to position themselves for recovery, the statement said.

Based on user search data, the Travel Insights with Google tool can point to two kinds of time-specific trends (Destination Insights and Hotel Insights), increasing confidence in decision making in this dynamic period, it added.

In addition, the website also hosts the Travel Analytics Centre.

Available to Google's commercial partners in the travel sector, this will enable these organisations to combine their own Google account data with broader Google demand data and insights to give a clearer picture of how to manage their operations and find opportunities to reach potential visitors, the statement said.

"The pandemic has had a direct, immediate and continuing impact on the travel industry...Our Travel Insights with Google tool recognises that, and amidst this volatility, provides players real-time, actionable analysis of travel intention and sentiment, domestically and from overseas, for better and more agile decision making," Roma Datta Chobey, Director - Travel at Google India, said.

She added that this tool will accelerate the digitisation of those in the industry that has been operating offline as going online is now an essential requirement for recovery.

In August this year, Google had partnered with FICCI towards upskilling Travel MSMEs (Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises) on digital, sharing insights on changing consumer trends, and providing a roadmap to help the travel and tourism sector digitise their business.

In addition to the Travel Insights tools, the website will also be a one-stop destination for other Google resources, including skills training courses through Grow with Google, Digital Garage and Google for Small Business, and our tourism Acceleration Programme with the UN World Tourism Organisation.