Small, Growing Businesses and Employment

Measuring What Matters: An Indian Index for Women Entrepreneurship

Partners: Global Alliance For Mass Entrepreneurship (G.A.M.E), India Morchan Karthick, Data Scientist from LEAD was a panelist in a webinar on creating an index for women entrepreneurship suited to the local context, organised by Global Alliance For Mass Entrepreneurship (G.A.M.E … Read More

Understanding Barriers & Enablers to Women Entrepreneurship and Opportunity for Collaborative Philanthropy

Sharon Buteau from LEAD participates in AVPN’s South Asia Social Investment Summit 2022 as a part of a closed-door roundtable discussion on catalyzing women entrepreneurship in India. … Read More

Roadmap for Digital Technology to Foster India’s MSME Ecosystem—Opportunities and Challenges

Sharon Buteau

Digital technology can significantly enable India’s MSME segment, provided the emerging infrastructure has joint buy-in from the government, solution providers and importantly users. The digital landscape catering to micro and small entrepreneurs has drastically changed in recent years. The challenges … Read More

Assessing the Multidimensional Impact of Finance Provided to Microenterprises: Insights from a Workshop Series

LEAD at Krea University

This discussion note summarises insights from a series of workshops across three sessions that were conducted with key experts to better understand aspects of micro-entrepreneurs and business functions. Themes explored centred around measures of entrepreneurial orientation, job creation, and proxy indicators to identify low-income households in urban settings, relevant for the study. These inputs will help the research team refine and finetune the survey design and questionnaire. … Read More

Building Back Better for MSMEs in India: Insights from the Field

Diksha Singh, Preethi Rao, Mridulya Narasimhan, Nilanjana Bargotra, Ananya Bhammidimarri, Madhu Sivaraman and Aishwarya Joshi

Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) play a crucial role in supporting and sustaining livelihoods, contributing to vibrant economies worldwide. This infographic provides a… … Read More

Assessing the Impact of Credit on Micro and Small Enterprises

This evaluation assesses the impact of Dell Foundation’s investments in financial service providers that are servicing the Micro, Small and Medium enterprise sector in India. Background Micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) have garnered an increased amount of attention lately … Read More

Plugging the MSME Finance Gap in India: Assessment of investment in Vistaar Finance

This study examines the effects of Dutch Entrepreneurial Bank FMO’s investment in NBFC Vistaar Financial Services. … Read More

Recovery Roadmap for Micro and Small Enterprises in Telangana

Aishwarya Joshi

In the past year, India has been weathering unprecedented health, social and economic adversities caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Disrupted supply chains, poor access to finance and markets, and consumers’ limited propensity to spend have revealed the fault lines in … Read More

Small Size, Big Impact: Employment Dynamics in Microenterprises during Covid-19

Sharon Buteau

The COVID-19 outbreak has had severe repercussions across the economy, particularly on micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and their workforce. There is a dearth of literature on the impact of acute crises on microenterprises, and this lack of information … Read More

Women’s Entrepreneurship in India: Harnessing the Gender Dividend

Mridulya Narasimhan, Sanjana Vijay

This brief highlights the key challenges in promoting women entrepreneurship in India, including social norms and biases, lack of education, unequal opportunities for affordable financing, and limited networking opportunities. It also outlines recommendations to address these social, economic and technological … Read More