Empowering women in Rajathan through mobile phone earns a $ 25,000 award

01st September 2012
Empowering women in Rajathan through mobile phone earns a $ 25,000 award

Singapore, September 1 2012: The Singapore Committee for UN Women (UN Women Singapore) and MasterCard Worldwide have awarded a US$25,000 Women’s Empowerment grant to Women’sPrivate Personal Market Place from Rajasthan, India at the Project Inspire: 5 Minutes to Change the World 2012 Grand Finals. Rustam Sengupta, who represented his team for Women’sPrivate Personal Market Place, was among the nine finalists who pitched their project ideas to a live judging panel comprising some of the world’s top global development and social entrepreneurial experts, social advocates and business leaders.
The winning project aims to empower women in rural Rajasthan to become entrepreneurs by selling feminine hygiene products to other rural women via a mobile phone application. The application also acts as a platform to provide essential health and sanitary education to these largely illiterate women, as well as offer them a private interface to access feminine hygiene products. This project is a collaboration between Rajasthan-based Boond, and Decode Global, a Canadian incubator of mobile apps for social change. It was born after both CEOs (Rustam Sengupta and Angelique Mannella respectively) met in Singapore while enrolled at the MBA Program at the INSEAD Asia Campus. The scalable and sustainable micro-business model leverages the high penetration of mobile phones in India (225 million female mobile phone subscribers in India
Link For project details: http://www.5minutestochangetheworld.org/get_involved_2012finalists_WomensPrivateMarketPlace.php  
About 5 Minutes to Change the World: http://www.5minutestochangetheworld.org/about_grand_finals.php 
Do see our video on the Women’sPrivate Personal Market Place   in our video spot for a few days