These #5 Women Entrepreneurs are doing Their Bit for the Society Aditi Gupta has launched Menstrupedia to spread awareness about menstruation
By Komal Nathani •
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Motivated either from their own life experiences or driven by their long-cherished dreams or out of a sheer sense of duty to do good for others, many men and women start their social ventures.
Unmitigated problems faced by women across India in the form of physical abuse, harassment and wrong social practices have prompted many "privileged' women to fight for the cause of their hapless mothers and sisters.
Entrepreneur India presents a few women social entrepreneurs who are working to make the world a better place.
Breaking Social Stigma
In a bid to put up a fight against the social stigma of considering a menstruating woman impure and untouchable, Aditi Gupta launched Menstrupedia to impart knowledge and spread awareness about menstruation.
The organization aims to break the taboo of orthodox ideologies about menstruation by delivering informative content through different media. To make the content more reader-friendly and interesting, the online portal conveys the information through comics and video journals. An electronics and instrumentation engineer, Gupta Co-founded Mentstrupedia with her husband Tuhin Paul.
Assisting Budding Entrepreneurs From the Slums
After working as an investment banker and venture capitalist for years, Sheetal Mehta Walsh launched her micro-financing platform Shanti Life. The company provides financial assistance to budding entrepreneurs from rural areas and slums of Gujarat for doing sustainable business.
The organization also helps them create networks and mentors and trains those who have the capability but lack the resources to sustain their business.
Helping One Another
The seeds for social entrepreneurship were sown in Priya Naik's mind when she started working as a researcher at the Poverty Action Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, US. Naik owns a platform where NGOs, companies, donor agencies, philanthropists and researchers come together to discuss their problems and "do good for each other".
Creating Employment Opportunities in Rural Areas
An engineer from the University of Pune, Saloni Malhotra is the Founder of DesiCrew. Malhotra started her career in an interactive media start-up and went on to turn her dreams into reality through DesiCrew. The organization is shaped to generate employment opportunities in the rural areas and small towns of India. It aims to bridge urban-rural gap through employment.
Spreading Quality Education
Shaheen Mistri started "Teach for India" to bring in quality education. Mistri was touched by the children who cannot afford high-quality higher education in India due to lack of efficient and dedicated teachers at the primary level. Teach for India runs under the Fellowship Program and Alumni Movement. Fellows from reputed universities, varsities and renowned companies come to teach children who belong to low-income families. Mistri has done her Master's and Bachelor's degrees from University of Manchester, England, and St. Xavier's College, Mumbai, India respectively. She has also been the Founder and CEO of Akanksha Foundation.
