How to Inspire Women from Low-Income Backgrounds to Become Entrepreneurs
How to Inspire Women from Low-Income Backgrounds to Become Entrepreneurs
Featuring Leena Kinger Hans
In rural India, women are more likely to sign up for business training when they see practical examples that involve family and community support.
April 08, 2026
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Leena Kinger Hans
Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour. Her research focuses on how individuals make career-related decisions in a variety of settings, including entrepreneurship, family businesses, and low-wage occupations. In a secondary stream of work, she studies the antecedents of corporate philanthropy and its implications for non-profit organisations.
Key Takeways
- Entrepreneurship programmes across rural India achieve limited success not because women lack capital or skills, but because they cannot yet imagine themselves in the role at all.
- For decades, development policy has celebrated the self-made entrepreneur, yet in communities where women carry the full weight of domestic life, that figure inspires admiration from a distance rather than action up close.
- A field experiment in rural Tamil Nadu found that when women were shown stories of entrepreneurs who relied on family and community support rather than individual determination alone, enrolment rates rose by a third.