Empowering rural women entrepreneurs through business training is instrumental in imparting crucial skills, including sound financial management, marketing, and strategic planning. Specialised training programs become essential since many women entrepreneurs in rural areas may have limited familiarity with business and financial management concepts. Many BDSPs and entrepreneurs also do not have prior business experience and rely heavily on rote learning rather than experience.

LEAD piloted a phone-based interactive learning platform for women entrepreneurs to address this gap as part of its STREE initiative. STREE provides technical assistance to the DAY-NRLM in implementing capacity-building interventions for women entrepreneurs. The training was designed as a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for BDSPs and women entrepreneurs, covering different topics under record-keeping.

The pilot aimed to develop complementary training modules on business management that entrepreneurs and BDSPs can use to facilitate continuous learning while testing user acceptability, effectiveness and scalability. This report presents key insights from the evaluation.