Only 3% of the 300 women entrepreneurs surveyed in tier 2 and 3 cities of Bengaluru, India, had access to external funding.

To start or expand your business, a white paper on women entrepreneurs driving change in Central India has been brought out by the Reserve Bank Innovation Hub (RBIH).

The white paper was released at an event organized by the Federation of India Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) here on Thursday.

“But we are keen to promote women in fintech. It is unfortunate that older investors are hesitant to commit US$50,000 or US$100,000 to women in fintech.Therefore, we are developing a fintech entrepreneur program in partnership with II Ahmedabad and Lucknow, BITS Pilani and the Indian School of Business,” said Rajes Bansal, chief executive officer of Reserve RBIH, who released the findings.

Bansal also pointed out that literature and primary surveys suggest that the status of women may be different, especially in rural areas.

financial goals than men, there is hardly any financial institution that looks at gender intent,

For example, a woman in Gorakhpur may prefer to save money for her child's education, while a man may be more inclined to save to buy a motorcycle. So, we are pushing financial institutions to think about Zende intentional projects,” Bansal said.

According to her, by providing a seamless savings experience, financial institutions can empower women to achieve their goals.

Following the launch of the white paper, two panel discussions took place on Capital GA and the data gap as well as the challenges faced by women

Met with entrepreneurs building and scaling businesses.When it comes to closing the gender gap, progress can only be made if women use the opportunities in front of them,

said Bindu Ananth, co-founder of Dwar Holdings, one of the panelists discussing the capital and data gap.

For example, if we say that land ownership should be made women friendly, then it becomes a political issue and it will take a lot of time to achieve this

All around for improvement. However, we can use land ownership digitization as an opportunity to pursue land reforms,” Ananth said.

The panel also included Anuradha Ramachandran, Managing Partner, TVS Capita Funds, and Geeta Manjunath, Founder and CEO, NIRAMAI Health Analytics. The session was moderated by Shilpa Rao, Head of Gender and Finance, RBIH.

Housewife-turned-entrepreneur Deepa Muthukumarasamy, founder of baby food brand First Spoon, speaks exclusively.

Coming from a small town near Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu, he faced challenges.“Getting your family to invest in you or even the bank to give you a loan is still a tough task. While banks require guarantors, families--where I come from--want their women to stay at home. So, you can say that every step was a struggle and for a long time the only push for me was my ambition to become a businesswoman,” said Muthukumarasamy.

Paroma Chatterjee, CEO of Revolut India, also talked about how as she developed various financial products as well as built a seller base in her previous jobs, gender equalization on the ground often forced them to rethink strategies.

For example, when I was building the seller base for Flipkart, I started with the intention of including a certain percentage of women.Entrepreneurs. But I learned that they were already there, except that they had left some of the money for their men. then we had to think

Educating them about the benefits of opening a bank account in their name or being a woman entrepreneur,” Chatterjee said.

The session was moderated by Shinjini Kumar, co-founder of MySaltApp, who also conducted research for the RBIH whitepaper.

Combines anecdotal evidence and some scattered data. She talked about how she traveled across India in search of invisible women and how it changed her perspective about women entrepreneurs.