Mobile payments and wallet player FreeCharge has partnered with International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank group, to help women entrepreneurs sell their products on Snapdeal, a business-to-consumer online marketplace. This partnership will support start-ups and early-stage women entrepreneurs to join the e-commerce platform for the first time.
FreeCharge and IFC will work together to promote women’s entrepreneurship and improve their financial access through technology and digital payments. The programme will also address their non-financial needs through skill and capacity building, the company said in a statement.
Govind Rajan, CEO, FreeCharge said, “We want to make FreeCharge wallets ubiquitous in both the online and offline space by creating an ecosystem of partnerships. By enabling women entrepreneurs online, FreeCharge wants to promote the digital payments landscape. Offering financial products on the basis of seller digital transaction histories and digital footprints reduces manual intervention in providing access to finance to these sellers. This partnership with IFC, with its global experience, will help us achieve our aim of becoming India’s leading digital payment operating system, while creating value and a market for women entrepreneurs.”
The ultimate goal of the programme is to develop data-driven insights and viable demonstration models to understand the journey of women entrepreneurs on e-commerce platforms. This will help develop a pilot programme to address the factors hindering women entrepreneurs from selling online and accepting digital payments.
“With the current demonetisation move, digital payment platforms such as FreeCharge offer massive convenience to entrepreneurs as well as consumers. Women — as entrepreneurs, employees, and suppliers — could lead by demonstrating that change to cashless transactions is only a matter of access, skills, and thinking differently,” said Andrew McCartney, Principal Operations Officer, IFC.
“In fact, cashless transactions could pave the way for higher participation of women as entrepreneurs who typically shoulder multiple responsibilities and for whom time is always scarce. Digital payments could be the defining tool for their empowerment as contributors to India’s growing online retail industry,” he added.