Internet giant Google Inc. said it will support one million rural women entrepreneurs in India to help them pursue their ambitions and improve their livelihoods.
Google will implement this through the ‘Women Will’ web platform launched at the virtual Google for India event on 8 March, International Women’s Day.
Google also announced a $500,000 Google.org grant to Nasscom Foundation to train 100,000 women agri workers in Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh on digital and financial literacy. The Foundation will set up a helpline where the women can get counselling on their entrepreneurship-related queries.
Available in English and Hindi, the Women Will platform is designed for women aspiring to explore entrepreneurship. To begin with, Google will work with 2,000 ‘Internet Saathis’ to help other women with this resource to start their entrepreneurial journey.
“When women have equal access to opportunity, we all benefit from their perspectives, creativity and their expertise, and this is true all over the world. Yet, when it comes to accessing opportunity, deep inequalities persist. Building on the Internet Saathi programme success, we’re making a new commitment to help 1 million women in rural villages in India to become entrepreneurs through business tutorials, tools, and mentorship,” said Sundar Pichai, Google and Alphabet CEO.
Launched in 2015, the programme in collaboration with Tata Trusts was designed to impart digital literacy training to women across 300,000 villages in India. In six years, this effort has benefitted over 30 million women through training provided by over 80,000 Internet Saathis, Google said.
“We look upon the success of the Internet Saathis partnership we have had with Google with great satisfaction. Together, we embarked on training women trainers to familiarize other women on how to utilize the internet, all in the rural environment, that would otherwise never take place. In bringing today’s technology, and perhaps tomorrow’s technology, to bear for the benefit of rural women is a great move forward,” said Ratan Tata, chairman, Tata Trusts.