Lactamo’s Founder, Etta, recently attended the G20 Summit (Startup20) in Gurugram, India.
Smart Company published an article drawing on the Taskforce, with a focus on support for women-owned businesses.
The article focused on the Inclusion Taskforce:
“The Task Force set out to expand the pool of startups and promote innovation by and for underserved communities in support of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Its five aims were to promote women-led startups and those working to make communities more inclusive, to enable funders to responsibly invest in startups focused on sustainability, to encourage mentoring across the ecosystem, and offer particular support for startups working on SDGs in areas of global interest.”
The article highlights the potential of accelerating women’s entrepreneurship:
“Gender and diversity initiatives are key priorities with direct support from Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself. Estimates suggest that accelerating women’s entrepreneurship in India could create more than 30 million women-owned enterprises, potentially creating up to 170 million jobs and driving up GDP. Globally women’s incomes are estimated to grow from $13 trillion to $18 trillion over the next five years. Indian women-owned firms are expected to be one of the major sources of that growth. So the social and economic returns are undeniable, as is the opportunity for investors. A big focus for the summit was ‘activation’, which I love because a lot of these events can be just pageantry. That in itself sets this forum apart. They kept saying, if we activate this many women, it translates to this in GDP, so they’re already putting a monetary value to it and framing it in terms of opportunity. That is a powerful perspective shift that we need to adopt in Australia.”
The article drew on the insights of Lactamo’s Founder, Etta:
"Australian lawyer and entrepreneur Etta Watts-Russell is co-chair of the Task Force. She shared this about their aims in drafting the white paper. “We’re really trying to show an alignment with GDP and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. So rather than just calling out the current situation, we’re really showing that positive opportunity with those two key alignments. We wanted to put some cold, hard figures out there in terms of what we were trying to achieve”.
Read the full article here.
Find the Taskforce Communique here.
