Project: Gender Enabling Ecosystem for Women-Owned Climate Ventures: Challenges and Opportunities Across States
Call for Research Associate: 1 post (On Contract)
Duration: 3 months (November 2025 – January 2026)
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 50 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 Research Associate
- Work on literature review, collect secondary data related to the topic of research, access the policy documents of governments and International organizations, with the guidance of Principal Researcher and Co Principal Investigator.
- Engage in qualitative and quantitative tools development to both online and physical interviews, and oversee the field work with the field investigators to get everyday report and join in some of the interviews online
- Transcribe the qualitative data of both online and in person interviews, and collate case studies, clean, enter and collate the date with the software packages, analyse with the support of Research Team and prepare the draft report.
- based on the analysis, prepare research paper for publication.
- Any other work which is connected with the study and completion of the Report.
Requirements: Candidate should be Ph.D or PDF Scholars in social sciences or science background with gender specialization. Those who worked on women entrepreneurship field specialization and familiar with digital data analysis of qualitative data will be preferred. They need to work full time for the entire period of appointment at CWDS, Delhi.
Good communication in English and Analytical ability are basic requirements
Applicants from the Marginalized communities and women are invited to apply.
Remuneration: Salary is Rs. 47,000/- per month as per ICSSR Rules with actual TDS.
Application Process: Interested individuals can send their updated CV to climate-ventures@cwds.ac.in latest by 15th October, 2025.
Shortlisted candidates will be invited to for the online interview and selected candidates will be expected to join in the first week of November
Principal Investigator: N.Manimekalai