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Women with dreams bigger than challenges
Minu Pramanik from Kolkata lives with her husband and 2 children. They have never had much, except an aspiration for a better tomorrow. Despite all their struggles, it was a happy household inside their small thatched hut. Unfortunately, fate had other plans for Minu.
One fateful evening, early this year, when the family was outdoors, they got an emergency call. Their house and all their belongings had caught fire. Minu helplessly watched all her dreams and years of hard-work and sacrifices go up in flames. When they moved into a make-shift tent, they felt this was the end. It could be impossible to rebuild all four lives with the wages that barely helped ends meet.
This was when our field staff met Minu. Having no education or past experience, Minu was worried if she could be an entrepreneur at all, but she had a goal in mind, that was bigger than all her challenges. Our team member Tridib realized this, and spent more time motivating Minu, besides training and mentoring her. Fuelled by some support, Minu’s sales started picking up.
With her husband’s entire income going into rebuilding their home, Minu’s earnings are essential to run the household and support her children’s education. Motivated by nothing but the hunger and need to give her family and her community a better life, Minu has been distributing clean energy products to migrant-worker families with no access to the most basic necessities.
Unfortunately, the Covid-19 second wave has stalled all of her hopes and sales. The lockdowns have completely stopped her husband’s income too. Minu and her family are now stranded in a makeshift shelter with no way to even feed themselves.
Hundreds of women like Minu join Pollinate Group with the dream of having an independent income that can pull their entire family out of poverty, and give their children better opportunities.
We work with women in the most marginalized, hardest to reach communities living on less than $1.90 a day and support them to build and grow small businesses that help their communities out of poverty. Through our training and capacity-building programs, we equip our women leaders with the skills required to be economically independent in the future.
Many of our women entrepreneurs have already successfully increased their incomes and improved their household well-being. They have also raised their profiles in their communities by becoming visible and influential change agents. However, this month, our entrepreneurs have reported a 90% decrease in sales compared to last month
Keeping this in mind, we are running a fundraising campaign ‘Closing the Gender Gap: One Woman At A Time’ with the aim to raise $50,000 AUD to support our entrepreneurs and their small businesses. Your donation can not only help us support the health and well-being of these women leaders and their families through subsidized vaccines in the coming weeks, but can also help us train and empower more women as change agents to rebuild lives the most overlooked communities
You can donate at https://pollinategroup.org/give/