Blogs

Empowering Nano Entrepreneurs to Transform India’s Economy

Sharvi Dublish, Abhishek Gupta | April 17, 2023

In India, the ingenuity, vision, and limitless potential of nano entrepreneurs represent a tremendous and largely untapped opportunity. According to the baseline report of a longitudinal study on credit access for nano enterprises, conducted by LEAD at Krea University, nano entrepreneurs are … Read More

Does One Nation Really Have One Ration Card?

Sumiran Ardhapure, Komal Jain | February 6, 2023

The COVID-19 pandemic rendered millions of workers unemployed in India; during the first wave, the estimated unemployment rate in India peaked at 24% in April 2020. The pandemic also brought to the forefront the vulnerability of the migrant population in India who bore the maximum brunt. … Read More

Six Learnings from Swashakt Program’s Complexity-aware Monitoring

Morchan Karthick | November 11, 2022

Monitoring, Learning and Evaluation (MLE) approaches for development interventions have been constantly evolving over time. It started as a country-level focus in the 1960s and expanded to individual program-level MLE approaches, methods and standards in the 1990s and newer and … Read More

Connections: How Social Interactions Shape Growth Stories of Women-led Enterprises

Aishwarya Joshi | September 28, 2022

This blog presents insights from a research study that seeks to understand how social interactions between women entrepreneurs and their business ecosystem intersect with their social and economic backgrounds, and in turn shape their business decisions and outcomes.  “Women are … Read More

Postcards from the Village Square

LEAD at Krea University | July 30, 2022

Our research and field teams occasionally run into curious and amusing situations on their data-collection missions into the hinterland. These experiences also offer insights into people’s lived experiences and the various dimensions of the problems central to our research. Here … Read More

Delving Into the History of Pulicat, Its Inhabitants and Its Ecosystem

Vighnesh P, Kaavya Kumar, Sathiyan S, Siddarth M | June 16, 2022

This post on the history and socio-economic context of Pulicat was produced in collaboration with students from Ashoka University to observe World Environment Day. Pulicat or Pazhaverkadu is home to over 56 fishing communities which depend on this endangered ecosystem … Read More

Postcards from the Field

Keerthana Ramaswamy, Diksha Singh | June 13, 2022

In this new series, we bring forth anecdotes and lessons from our field interactions in Bhagalpur, Bihar and Tondiarpet, Tamil Nadu.

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Moving the Clean Cookstoves Sector Forward: Six Principles for Investors

Fabrizio Valenti, Mitzi Perez Padilla | February 23, 2022

Around 3 billion people across the world rely on solid fuels for their daily cooking needs. The adverse effects of traditional cooking methods on health, socio-economic and environmental conditions, especially among women, are well documented. Clean cookstoves promise a solution to these … Read More

Social Welfare Delivery in the Age of Platforms: Comparing Private Models

Bhaskar Pant, Deveshi Chawda | February 2, 2022

Globally, 1.3 billion people (22 per cent) live in multidimensional poverty – with millions of households in 107 countries living with undernourished members, out-of-school children, and lacking access to electricity and clean cooking fuel. The Covid-19 pandemic is estimated to … Read More

Re-imagining Entrepreneurship Models for Rural Women

Tanushree Bhan | January 17, 2022

Building on the evidence highlighted in the first part of this two-part blog, the discussion in this second piece is anchored in a normative framework that shapes individual and household-level decision-making processes governing “appropriate” jobs for rural women. These norms do … Read More