Mastercard Strive India launches to help small businesses go digital
Payments giant Mastercard has launched the Mastercard Strive India programme, which aims to help 500,000 small businesses in India go digital by 2025.
Mastercard launches its Strive India programme
Strive India will focus on micro-enterprises, women-led businesses and agri-entrepreneurs in the country by leveraging partnerships with trade associations, non-profits and government bodies to help boost the uptake of digital tools and enable access to digital financial services.
The launch of Strive India, which is supported by the Mastercard Centre for Inclusive Growth, follows other Strive programmes in the US, UK, Mexico, Czechia, Indonesia and Malaysia.
Present in India since 2014, the Mastercard Centre for Inclusive Growth has so far launched three digital inclusion programmes in the country.
“Small businesses are poised to become India’s largest employer and can help make inclusion a cornerstone of the country’s journey to becoming a $5 trillion economy,” comments Subhashini Chandran, vice president, social impact, Asia Pacific at the Mastercard Centre for Inclusive Growth.
“Small businesses need broad support — from capacity building to wide-ranging access to tools, new markets and credit — to truly benefit from digital transformation and growth. We are committed to helping people around the world achieve long-term prosperity and will continue to work to meaningfully connect India’s small businesses to the digital economy.”
Strive India aims to complement Mastercard’s other initiatives to help small businesses in India go digital and gain access to capital and information.
These initiatives include a $100 million credit facility in partnership with HDFC Bank, DFC and USAID in 2021 to facilitate working capital loans to small businesses looking to digitise, and a five-year commitment in 2020 of $33 million to support small businesses in India.
