A Mother of three and a widow, Subbamma arrived in bangalore in the late 1930s and leaned on her culinary expertise to raise her children. She began by going door-to-door to sell her homemade snacks, pickles, masala powders and chutneys. She soon became a household name and rented a hole-in-the-wall shop in Basavangudi’s gandhi Bazaar. There has been no turning back ever since. Nearly seven decades later, Bengalureans, especially old-timers crowd her shop to stock up on their favourites from over 200 snacks and condiments. Even today, though the shop run by her grandsons is officially known as Srinivasa Condiments, people still refer to it as Subbamma Angadi (Subbamma shop). In an era when women entrepreneurs were almost non-existent, Subbamma’s story stands tall.
Like Subbamma, the city is home to several women entrepreneurs, many of whom are micro or small-scale women entrepreneurs in the food and beverage sector. And, to recognise and reward these women entrepreneurs in the F&B sector who have braved the odds to get their business up and running, Global Alliance for mass Entrepreneurship (GAME) and facebook india launched the Futurepreneur Grand Challenge 2019-2020.
The challenge was open to women entrepreneurs running cafes, bakeries, those making home-cooked or pre-packaged meals, and selling jams, pickles and other homemade products. While these businesses could be run single-handedly, the only criteria was that the team size should not be bigger than 20 as the challenge was open to only microentrepreneurs. GAME is a platform for mission-aligned partners to learn, innovate and collaboratively build a self-sustaining mass entrepreneurship ecosystem. By identifying and scaling breakthroughs with partners, they want to build a movement for creating and sustaining 10 million job-creating ‘mass entrepreneurs’, half of whom will be women.
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