Pollinate Group

I am applying for The Elevate Prize, as I view this as a huge opportunity to help my organization Pollinate Group address some of the world’s most pressing challenges.  Pollinate Group works with women from marginalized settlement communities to empower them by providing them with entrepreneurship skills to distribute clean energy products. Due to the escalating COVID-19 crises in India and Nepal, people in these communities are out of work and are falling back into extreme poverty.

At this crucial time, Pollinate Group provides women from these communities with the skills, opportunities, and support to step up and become the main income earners in their families, enabling them to help their families and communities survive throughout the pandemic and move out of poverty in the long-term.

Winning The Elevate Prize would help scale Pollinate Group’s crucial work with women in settlement communities at the global level by enabling me to develop strong networks within the Elevate Prize community, and learn from others to create innovative and impactful partnerships with like-minded organizations. This would help us to mobilize further funding to achieve our ambitious plans of empowering 10,000 women to reach 10 million people with clean energy products by 2025.

Growing up in India in a middle-income family, I was exposed to lower-income families and people living in settlement communities without access to basic necessities. I especially noticed women being denied basic rights for a respectful living and opportunities for employment and education. Children from these households also were trapped in cycles of poverty. These realities have made me committed and passionate about promoting opportunities for women, working with marginalized communities, and ending poverty.

After a long stint in corporate MNCs and 5 years of being an entrepreneur, my passions led me to take on the role of CEO at Pollinate Group. Pollinate Group works to address the challenges at the intersection of poverty alleviation, gender inequality and energy access by empowering marginalized women to be leaders of change in their communities. I felt well-poised to bring the necessary business rigor, resources and innovation to help Pollinate Group tackle these issues at scale. In 2020, under my leadership, we successfully pivoted our operations to online during the COVID pandemic, enabling our entrepreneurs to continue their small businesses.  Our ambitious mission is to bring clean energy access to millions of people living in poverty by 2025 through our women entrepreneur network.

Globally, 689 million people live in extreme poverty (<$1.90/day) with 256 million of these people living in India and Nepal (World Bank, 2017). In the communities in which we work, people live in basic tent shelters, without electricity, clean water, or access to basic products to improve their lives. Over 73.5% of households are reliant on hazardous and expensive kerosene for fuel and lighting (World Bank, 2019). 

The situation of living in poverty is compounded for women in all developing economies. Community members’ views that women's role is primarily in the household have denied women opportunities to pursue their dreams. 

Pollinate Group directly addresses these intertwined challenges. We provide women from marginalized communities with access to innovative digital technology as well as the skills, capital, and mentoring they need to become change agents who bring affordable clean energy and household products to their communities. In doing so, our entrepreneurs have been able to earn a stable income for the first time and help their communities save time, money and improve their health. Our proven model not only empowers women but equips communities to move out of poverty in the long term, simultaneously bridging economic and digital divides.

Pollinate Group is the only organization committed to giving entrepreneurship skills,  zero cost inventory of clean energy products, providing livelihood opportunities to women from marginalized urban settlement communities. These women have been overlooked by other organizations. 

We are deeply committed to inclusion and diversity and work to empower all women in our communities who want to be entrepreneurs, regardless of their literacy levels, ability, or background. Through our unique model, we do not stop with entrepreneurship training. We also provide zero-cost capital for our entrepreneurs to earn a dignified income for the first time and bring clean energy access to their communities, enabling these communities to save time, money and improve their health.

We constantly innovate and adapt our products, processes, and training to the needs of our communities. During the COVID lockdowns in 2020 we:

• Quickly developed a Learning Management System for our entrepreneurs to continue to train online;

• Partnered with Accenture to develop an innovative custom-made mobile application to enable our entrepreneurs to make cashless transactions for the first time; 

• Outsourced product distribution to a third party to enable our entrepreneurs to continue to receive life-changing products on their doorstep, without compromising the safety of our staff.

When women are put in the centre of the solution to address the issues of extreme poverty, gender inequality and clean energy, the results are assured. 95% of women use the income they earn to educate their children. Education is transformational in ending poverty. Thus our impact is intergenerational. 

Our locally recruited field staff invest in the development of our entrepreneurs over 2-3 years. They work in close collaboration with our entrepreneurs to provide them with support, product capital, and training tailored to their unique needs to enable them to set up and expand their own businesses. 

Our results speak for themselves. Since 2012, we have empowered 900 women to reach more than 700,000 people with life-changing clean energy and household products. We have enabled these individuals to save over $23 million USD and over 90,000 tonnes of Co2 emissions from the replacement of kerosene with clean energy products and move one step closer out of poverty. Over 90% of our entrepreneurs have reported increased incomes, investing their savings into their children’s education or their businesses. With their newfound skills and confidence, our entrepreneurs have gone on to take leading roles in their communities, such as in local government.