Project: Gender Enabling Ecosystem for Women-Owned Climate Ventures: Challenges and Opportunities Across States
Call for Field Investigators: 2 Posts (On Contract)
Duration: One Month (November 2025)
Indian women entrepreneurs face gender and social barriers that limit their skills and income. E-commerce and competition disproportionately impact their small businesses. Overcoming these challenges requires comprehensive support, gender sensitization, rights awareness, and a gender-enabling environment rooted in Sen’s capability approach. Addressing social capital, continuous learning, technology adoption, innovation, and gender role dismantling is crucial for their empowerment. Indian women-owned enterprises drive green growth via organic farming, waste management, and renewable energy, despite financing and bias challenges. These start- ups address environmental issues, empower women, and boost socio-economic innovation through climate ventures like organic farming and eco-friendly products, fostering waste reduction, climate action, and local jobs.
This study explores strategies to overcome gender and social barriers hindering women-owned climate ventures, aiming to cultivate a gender-enabling ecosystem. Building on TREC-STEP and the Women Entrepreneurs Association of Tamil Nadu’s three-year capacity-building work with over 200 CSOs across eight states, focusing on four states, this research will test the effectiveness of using CSOs to support the long-term success of women in climate ventures. Hence it is qualitative study and proposed analyse the women-led climate ventures supported by TREC-STEP in Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal, assess the aspirations, motivations, and challenges of women, identify gender-enabling conditions for start-up, sustenance, and growth and offer barrier mitigation.
In this Pan India study, a sample of 60 Women-owned climate ventures in Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal will be covered. The number of units varies across State, but the actual number available will be covered. It would the scaling factors, gender environment, and gaps in rural and urban climate ventures to improve sustainability ecosystems. Data will be collected to understand the narratives of women’s experiences in climate ventures, focusing on support systems, policies, and gaps in a regional and gender diverse perspective.
Roles and Responsibilities of the Field Investigator
- Participate in the online Training for collecting qualitative data through in-depth interviews
- Carry out the primary data collection from the designated field sights both in person (when located closer to the field) and over google meet, in Maharastra, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal with the tool developed and pre-tested
- Document every day observations of the interviews with every participant and provide a thematic categorization of the data collected from the respective fields
- Participate in the debriefing workshop upon completion of the field work.
- The applicant must commit to work full time for the mentioned duration.
Preferred Candidates:
- Master’s degree in relevant field (Preferred but not limited to Social Sciences), with some prior experience of conducting field work with digital interview schedule and transcribing the recordings if any. Experience in collecting qualitative data is highly desirable.
- Good Communication Skills in Tamil, Hindi and English are mandatory and writing the field observations in English is desirable.
Remuneration: Salary is Rs.20000/- per month. The actual field travel expenses will be borne by CWDS and the daily limit will be a maximum of Rs.250/- for the in person interviews alone.
Application Process: Interested individuals can send their updated CV to climate-ventures@cwds.ac.in latest by 15th October, 2025.
Only short-listed candidates will be invited for an online interview.
Principal Investigator: N. Manimekalai