Digital skilling of rural women entrepreneurs with NASSCOM Foundation
Firstsource · 2024 · Education
Under its 'Support Rural Women Entrepreneurship' project, Firstsource trained 150 women artisans in Bagh, Madhya Pradesh and is skilling a further 176 women in Maheshwari, contributing INR 14,55,641 to build digital and business skills.
Digital skills for rural women artisans
Firstsource's 'Support Rural Women Entrepreneurship' project takes a specific bet: that rural women artisans already have a craft and a product, and what they lack is the digital and business know-how to turn that into a sustainable enterprise. Run in partnership with the NASSCOM Foundation, the project targets exactly that gap.
The programme's first cohort trained 150 women artisans in Bagh, a town in the Dhar district of Madhya Pradesh known for its traditional Bagh block-printing. With that group's training completed, Firstsource extended the effort to a further 176 rural women artisans in the Maheshwari region, another Madhya Pradesh weaving and textile tradition, with that cohort's training scheduled to run through the year.
What the training covers
Rather than teach a craft these women already possess, the project builds the surrounding capabilities an entrepreneur needs: digital skills and business skills. In Firstsource's framing, the aim is to create a favourable environment for women to start and grow their own businesses, bridging the gender gap in entrepreneurship, improving family incomes and positioning the participants as role models in their communities.
The numbers that matter
- 150 women artisans trained in the first cohort, in Bagh, Madhya Pradesh.
- 176 rural women artisans being skilled in the Maheshwari region.
- INR 14,55,641 contributed by Firstsource to the project, per the company's social-impact reporting.
The dollar figures here are modest by the standards of large corporate CSR, and honestly so: this is a focused, deep-touch programme reaching a few hundred women, not a mass-scale headline. Its value lies in depth rather than breadth.
The partner
The NASSCOM Foundation is the social-impact arm of NASSCOM, India's technology-industry body. It has a long track record in digital-literacy and skilling programmes and brings the delivery infrastructure that lets a company like Firstsource run training in places such as Bagh and Maheshwari without building that reach from scratch. Choosing an established skilling partner is a recurring pattern in credible corporate CSR: the funder supplies capital and intent, the specialist supplies on-the-ground execution.
How it fits Firstsource's wider CSR
Firstsource is part of the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group, and its CSR spending spans education, healthcare, community development and the environment. In FY2024-25 the company reported CSR spending of around INR 7 crore, the bulk of it going to education, alongside healthcare work such as cataract surgeries and rural ICU support, plus tree-plantation and urban-forest initiatives. The rural women's entrepreneurship project sits within the community-development and women's-empowerment part of that portfolio.
It also reflects a wider industry trend. Technology and BPO firms have increasingly framed their social programmes around digital enablement, on the logic that a company built on digital skills is well placed to transfer them. Extending that to rural women artisans pushes digital capability out to a group usually left on the far side of the divide.
Why it matters
The project touches several Sustainable Development Goals at once: gender equality (SDG 5), decent work and economic growth (SDG 8), and reduced inequalities (SDG 10). For each woman who converts a household craft into a functioning business, the effect compounds through family income and community example.
The honest caveat is scale. A few hundred artisans is a pilot-sized footprint, not a movement. But well-run pilots are how programmes earn the right to expand, and the move from a completed 150-woman cohort in Bagh to a larger 176-woman cohort in Maheshwari suggests exactly that trajectory.