Prime Highlights-
- Bangalore student Aditya Singh builds Unseen CEOs, a youth-led pipeline connecting India’s women entrepreneurs to formal credit and business planning support.
- His research exposes targeting gaps in the Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana scheme, affecting more than 20 million women nationwide.
Key Facts-
- Singh’s team built full business plans for 10 of 150 shortlisted women-run micro-businesses.
- His study spans 36 Indian states and appears in the Online Journal of Social Sciences.
Background-
A Bangalore high schooler is working to close a credit gap long overlooked by banks, nonprofits and policymakers, helping India’s smallest women-led businesses access formal lending. Figures from IFMR and SEWA, gathered in 2022, indicate fewer than 9 percent of India’s women entrepreneurs can access formal credit.
Aditya Singh, a Class 12 student at Greenwood High School, has spent two years building Unseen CEOs, a youth-led initiative with Jagriti Foundation that identifies women entrepreneurs, studies their pricing and borrowing habits, and turns that data into business plans lenders can use.
Singh’s team reviewed a database of 150 women-run micro-businesses, shortlisted 10 for full support, and built business plans covering revenue modeling, customer segmentation, financial literacy and credit readiness. He interviewed more than 30 women entrepreneurs across partner districts to identify where formal credit falls short.
Singh said the entrepreneurs he met are largely capable business operators whose main obstacles are paperwork, pricing decisions and lack of visibility to a financial system that was not built with them in mind. That observation led him to design a framework flagging businesses registered under women’s names but managed by male relatives, weakening women-focused lending.
His econometric study, published in the Online Journal of Social Sciences, examines microcredit access across 36 Indian states and flags targeting gaps in the Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana scheme affecting more than 20 million women.
Singh has also built an online platform connecting micro-entrepreneurs with lenders and is developing a funding pathway to attract venture capital and microfinance investment for his strongest ventures, alongside a toolkit to replicate the model in new districts.
