Why women entrepreneurs grow as fast as their circle of trust

This article is authored by Meena Vaidyanathan, founder, NIITI Consulting and Vijeth Acharya, senior manager, IIMA Ventures.

For the past year we have been evaluating the impact of 11 fintechs on women customers.

Women empowerment (Voices of Youth)

By March 2026, with a combined reach of 1.02 crore women, one finding kept surfacing which rarely reaches a product roadmap: Mentorship (and its value). For women entrepreneurs, mentorship is frequently the missing infrastructure that decides whether capital and training convert into a sustained enterprise at all. Most companies still treat it as soft support. The field evidence puts it closer to the centre of the business.

Mentorship is generally assumed to be one thing, or to do one thing. In reality, it does four things together. Networks that open doors an entrepreneur could not have opened alone. Role models who make a particular kind of success feel achievable rather than exceptional. Peer learning that normalises struggle and accelerates real-time problem-solving through shared, lived experience. And sponsorship, where someone with standing actively advocates for a woman entrepreneur in rooms she is not yet in. These are particularly important for women entrepreneurs, who are often excluded from accessing these. Women continue to start fewer businesses than men, and they usually have a narrower starting base of financial buffers. They see fewer peers running the kind of enterprise they are attempting to build. Mentorship bridges these gaps alongside providing access to informal networks that men often access by default.

Our evaluation offers two perspectives on this, one from the grassroots and one from the platforms' own registered data. Starting with the grassroots, where two enterprises sit on either side of the gap.

In Karbi Anglong, in Assam, small tea growers have built an enterprise that runs almost entirely on community mentorship. Small groups of artisanal tea manufacturers work under mentors drawn from their own community. Quality inspection is the smallest part of what these mentors do. They give continuous guidance, stand as role models, and make peer learning possible for women who would otherwise be working alone in remote, resource-constrained settings. The relationship has cut production costs and made collaboration between growers a norm. It is a large part of why more than 340 women, once daily-wage tea pluckers, have become entrepreneurs since April 2025, manufacturing chemical-free, single-origin tea on their own. Among dairy entrepreneurs in Tamil Nadu, more than 80% already run multiple income-generating activities. Their dairy collectives take pride in a no-default status, with members chipping in for one another when a monthly instalment is missed. That is peer sponsorship in its most literal form: women underwriting each other's creditworthiness.

While women do the primary work of cattle rearing, milking, and dairy management, it is men who typically deal with the milk aggregators and conduct the financial transactions on digital platforms. The collective protects a woman's credit record. It does not yet extend her into the market-facing and digital roles that would let her run the enterprise end to end. That gap is the missing fourth function. It is the kind of gap a mentor-sponsor closes.

Someone willing to broker her direct introduction to an aggregator or a bank agent will do it faster than any redesign of the app she has been handed.

Of the 1.02 crore women reached as of March 2026, only a small, formally recorded set are logged as mentors, proposers, or referrers within the platforms' own systems: 211 mentors, 611 proposers, 511 referrers. The footprint is tiny. Even so, the effect is measurable. Women proposers drive faster product adoption among their peers, and uptake accelerates wherever a woman customer becomes another woman's referee. They also ask for more training and mentorship alongside credit rather than credit in isolation. Held together by group and peer accountability, women borrowers repay on time about 76% of the time, a few percentage points ahead of men.

The wider research runs in the same direction. Studies have found that small businesses receiving mentorship are nearly twice as likely to survive beyond the five-year mark as those that do not. Gender-matching enhances this: A randomised trial on Ugandan women entrepreneurs mentored by women saw firm sales rise by roughly a third and profits by close to a third, while mentorship from men produced no comparable Improvement.

For people building fintech products, this finding has direct bearing on unit economics.

One of the reasons financial institutions deprioritise women customers is that onboarding a woman entrepreneur takes longer than onboarding a man, given the socio-cultural barriers and lower baseline familiarity with formal financial decision-making. And this is precisely where mentorship pays for itself. Field evaluation is beginning to show that onboarding costs for women fall meaningfully wherever sales strategies are built around trusted, peer-led referrals rather than individual acquisition alone, which is why some fintechs are now moving to formalise them as shared, incentivised programmes.

A gender intentionality score built only on product features and outreach spend is only measuring one part. For the whole to be complete, a fintech deliberately needs to build mentor, proposer, and referrer networks among its women customers. This could be one of the scalability indicators.

Mentorship is the mechanism through which inclusion can lead to growth. Any fintech, funder, or programme design that treats it as ancillary is likely underestimating both its true cost of scale and the true size of the women-entrepreneur market it is trying to reach.

(The views expressed are personal)

This article is authored by Meena Vaidyanathan, founder, NIITI Consulting and Vijeth Acharya, senior manager, IIMA Ventures.