NEW DELHI (India CSR): As India moves towards the vision of Viksit Bharat 2047, the meaning of economic empowerment is evolving. Development is no longer only about creating access to education, skills and employment; it is increasingly about enabling people to participate meaningfully in economic growth, build sustainable livelihoods and create opportunities for others.
For women, this shift carries particular significance. Across India’s villages, towns and cities, women possess skills and ideas with immense economic potential. They stitch, cook, create handicrafts, provide beauty services, manage dairy activities and undertake a range of livelihood activities, often without access to the business knowledge, markets, digital tools and mentorship required to turn these capabilities into sustainable enterprises.
This raises an important question: How do we enable a skill to become a business, and a business to become a source of opportunity for others?
It is a question that lies at the heart of M3M Foundation‘s approach to sustainable development.
Through its interventions in education, livelihoods, skilling and entrepreneurship, M3M Foundation has consistently focused on building capabilities that enable individuals and communities to become increasingly self-reliant. Under Kaushal Sambal, the Foundation has created pathways for young people to acquire market-relevant skills and move towards sustainable livelihoods, including through the iMpower Academy for Skills.
The scale of this journey is reflected in its outcomes: more than 12,000 youth have been trained in skill development, while over 3,000 youth have progressed through enterprise development initiatives across 14 programmes. The wider programme ecosystem has recorded 76% placement among youth trained in skills and 72% progress towards entrepreneurship and livelihood creation among those engaged in enterprise development.
But skill development also opens another possibility.
A person trained for employment can also become capable of creating employment.
This is where M3M Foundation’s journey from skill development to enterprise development takes a significant step forward with VyaPower.
From Vyaapaar to VyaPower
The name itself carries the philosophy. Rooted in Vyaapaar, meaning business, and combined with the idea of power, VyaPower represents the belief that when people are equipped with the knowledge, confidence and ecosystem required to build a business, their skills can become a source of economic agency.
VyaPower, M3M Foundation’s Entrepreneurship Development Programme, has been designed as more than a conventional training initiative. It seeks to help aspiring entrepreneurs move from ideas and skills towards viable enterprises and sustainable livelihoods. Funded by M3M Foundation and implemented by InShakti Foundation, the programme combines entrepreneurial mindset development, business fundamentals, technical trade skills and digital marketing with mentorship, exposure visits and post-training handholding.
The distinction is important. Knowing how to stitch is a skill; understanding customers, pricing, branding and finances can turn that skill into a tailoring enterprise. Preparing food is a capability; understanding costing, packaging and markets can turn it into a business. VyaPower seeks to bridge precisely this gap between having a skill and understanding the enterprise that can grow from it.
Its first phase demonstrates what this approach can achieve.
Against a target of 300 women, 371 women enrolled and 326 were successfully trained, taking the programme to 109% of its training target across nine centres in Delhi NCR and Samalkha. More significantly, 145 women developed viable business ideas and 87 successfully launched their own micro-enterprises, exceeding the programme target of 75 businesses by 116%. These enterprises span beauty and salon services, dairy, stitching and embroidery, food businesses and handicrafts. More than 80 customised business starter kits were also provided to graduating entrepreneurs to support the transition from training to enterprise.
Yet the most important aspect of VyaPower is not simply the number of businesses started. It is the ecosystem created around the entrepreneur.
The programme combines a 20-session curriculum with trade-specific training, one-on-one mentoring, business-plan preparation, branding support, market-linkage facilitation and exposure to real markets. This reflects M3M Foundation’s understanding that entrepreneurship does not begin and end in a classroom. The real test begins when an aspiring entrepreneur encounters customers, competition, pricing decisions, financial challenges and the need to reach new markets.
This is also why continued post-training mentoring, stronger market linkages and deeper digital adoption have emerged as priorities for VyaPower’s next phase.
At the centre of this larger vision is Dr. Payal Kanodia, Chairperson & Trustee, M3M Foundation, whose leadership has consistently emphasised the importance of building capabilities that can translate into sustainable livelihoods and greater self-reliance.
Her vision for VyaPower is rooted in India’s enormous entrepreneurial potential, particularly among women and youth. As she has articulated, what is often missing is not aspiration, but access to structured knowledge, confidence, mentoring and the right ecosystem. VyaPower seeks to bridge this gap by helping individuals translate their skills and ideas into sustainable enterprises.
This vision takes VyaPower beyond the conventional idea of empowerment. The objective is not simply to help a woman earn; it is to enable her to build something that can sustain her, strengthen her household and, eventually, create opportunities for others.
The next phase of VyaPower is designed to take this vision further.
On World Entrepreneurship Day, M3M Foundation announced the digital expansion of VyaPower through a dedicated Learning Management System (LMS), opening structured entrepreneurship education to aspiring entrepreneurs, rural women, youth, micro-enterprise owners and grassroots organisations across India. The platform will enable self-paced learning, structured progression, standardised content and learner progress tracking, helping overcome the barriers of geography, time and access that often limit participation in conventional programmes.
Importantly, M3M Foundation is also opening the VyaPower ecosystem to NGOs, educational institutions, Self-Help Groups, community organisations and livelihood organisations through its learning framework, capacity-building support and Train-the-Trainer model.
This creates the possibility of a multiplier effect: trained facilitators can support aspiring entrepreneurs, successful entrepreneurs can create livelihoods for others, and communities can gradually develop their own networks of enterprise and opportunity.
This is ultimately where VyaPower connects with the larger vision of Viksit Bharat 2047.
A developed India will not be built only through large industries and established businesses. It will also emerge from thousands of enterprises created in villages, towns and communities—businesses rooted in local skills, local knowledge and local aspirations.
For M3M Foundation, the journey from iMpower Academy for Skills to VyaPower represents a continuum: building capabilities, connecting them to livelihoods and then enabling people to create enterprises of their own.
The numbers offer an encouraging beginning, more than 12,000 youth trained in skill development, over 3,000 youth engaged in enterprise development, and within VyaPoweritself, 371 women enrolled, 326 trained, 145 business ideas developed and 87 enterprises launched.
But the larger measure of success will be what these enterprises become over time: how many sustain themselves, how many grow, how many reach new markets and, most importantly, how many create opportunities for others.
Because the real power of entrepreneurship lies not merely in creating a business, but in creating the confidence and capacity to shape one’s own economic future.
That is the journey from Vyaapaar to VyaPower, and the larger vision M3M Foundation is building towards: enabling women not merely to participate in India’s growth, but to become creators of it.
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