Rural women in Madurai can now turn for help to L&T Finance’s Digital Sakhis
Following the success of its flagship CSR initiative – Digital Sakhi – in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, West Bengal, Karnataka, Kerala and in Villupuram district of Tamil Nadu, L&T Finance has now extended it to yet another location.
On June 27, Ms Apurva Rathod (Group Head - Secretarial, CSR & Sustainability at L&T Finance) launched the Digital Sakhi project in Tamil Nadu’s Madurai district.
As part of the move, L&T Finance has plans to develop over 100 Digital Sakhis from among the rural women in the district. They, in turn, will impart Digital Financial Literacy (DFL) training to over five lakh women.
The training will encompass a wide range of topics – digital modes of payment, access to government entitlements, goal-based saving and more. Each Sakhi will be equipped with a mobile tablet with preloaded DFL modules. Nurturing women entrepreneurs from rural communities, the project will upskill them and impart enterprise development training to help them build businesses and enhance livelihood.
In addition, the project aims to support over 600 women entrepreneurs in establishing and scaling up their micro-enterprises. This will involve end-to-end solutions like enterprise development trainings, business plan development, linking them to financial institutions for credit, and backward and forward linkages for marketing.
Kickstarted by L&T Finance in 2017, the Digital Sakhi project involves training rural women in every aspect of DFL. Once trained, the Digital Sakhis, in turn, impart training to other women in their communities. ‘Sakhi’ is Sanskrit for ‘female friend’.
The initiative has so far created 1,370 Digital Sakhis, who have helped upskill over 11,000 women entrepreneurs. In FY23 alone, Digital Sakhis trained and empowered more than 11 lakh people across four states.
This initiative is helping realise the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 – Gender Equality, which calls for the identification and training of rural women in DFL, leadership and technology.
