For Women, By Women
Two leaders create entrepreneurship solutions for sustainable energy
Sometimes you meet someone who you realise could finish your sentences, whose spark and energy rivals your own. That is how Barefoot’s CEO Meagan Fallone felt when she first met Ajaita Shah, founder and CEO of Frontier Markets.
“I saw a younger woman, starting where I had already been in many ways and yet ahead of me in just as many,” Meagan says. “Ajaita is a person whose commitment, authenticity and energy would mean a whole lot of sh*t was going to get done!”
This dynamic relationship helped forge the Women Prosper Initiative, a partnership that revolutionizes last mile energy access. Together we empower rural women to become solar entrepreneurs and bring clean light to their communities. Our unique partnership and innovative education and enterprise model simultaneously addresses multiple UN Sustainable Development Goals.
The Women Proposer Initiative is also breaking new ground of what’s possible for partnerships. This is the first ever women led, strategic partnership between a for-profit social enterprise and a not-for-profit social innovation organisation in India, a country were 360 million families lack access to grid energy.
#FlipTheSwitch
It is a partnership that puts women at the center of the value chain, starting with women entrepreneurs rising of generational poverty through economic opportunity. Over the next five years this partnership will:
- create 10,000 jobs for female entrepreneurs in the clean energy sector.
- serve 500,000 households with access to clean, affordable light
- be the single largest deployment of renewable energy hardware to the poor, in India’s history.
- develop a market driven, gender revolution touching 1,000,000 of the poorest women in India.
- realize the potential to create +$21.4 Million in GDP within 3 years.
- meet six Sustainable Development Goals, at scale.
As a social innovation organization based on the lifestyle and workstyle of Mahatma Gandhi. We’ve been committed to the work with the “last man.” Gandhi believed the work wasn’t done until you’ve touched the last human being mired in the most remote rural villages.
We won’t make the world “work for all” until it’s a world in which women, universally have access to the critical knowledge they need to play an equal role in their families, communities and countries. A world where women feel and believe that they can learn whatever they need to assure their own wellbeing and create positive economic results for themselves and their families.
