How Meta has been empowering local businesses in India

Meta yesterday (December 15, 2021) held the second edition of Fuel for India, which highlighted transformations taking place in India, with a particular focus on digital communities, creators, entrepreneurs, and small enterprises. Different aspects of Fuel for India 2021 showcased how people, businesses, and communities are collaborating on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to drive change, liberate expression, create inclusion, and explore future possibilities.

A panel discussion on ‘Enabling Local Businesses’ saw Sheryl Sandberg, COO, Meta, in conversation with three Indian entrepreneurs, who shared their stories and experiences of how Meta helped their local businesses grow exponentially.

Sheryl Sandberg noted, “We all know COVID has been so hard – it’s a health and economic crisis and it’s a crisis for small business. Small businesses have been forced to adapt their business models, they've looked for new ways to reach customers. And they've shown incredible resilience over the past 18 months. For our part, Meta has doubled down on efforts to support more than 200 million businesses who use our apps every single month, we care that people can make that shift to digital so that they can keep their businesses going. We've created new free educational resources and trainings. So, small businesses can easily use our tools. And we feel new tools to help businesses reach customers in a new way.”

Sai Gole, Co-Founder and COO, Bharat Agri. shared a unique problem that her family farm in Maharashtra has not seen profits for more than a decade. And when they realised this problem, they thought, why not figure out how this can be made easy for farmers as a user for their business farming. That’s when the idea of Bharat Agri originated. “Bharat Agri is providing them personalized information. What they essentially do is to collect lots of information from the farm. And based on that information, they give them a season long personalized consultancy. With a very, very detailed scientific aspect,” said Siddharth Dialani, Co founder & CEO, Bharat Agri.

Bharat Agri guides them about what they should grow, and how they should grow it. It covers every decision that they need to take on the farm. “One of the crux of our platform is communication. You know, we have to make sure we are communicating in vernacular in the most personalized form to farmers, not just advisory but the future piece which is ecommerce,” Gole added.

Muskan Malhotra, Creative Director, Pashtush India, introduced her approach to the small scale designers who make Pashmina Shawls with intricate work of art. “When we founded Pashtush, we were the fourth generation of manufacturers of shawls and stoles. It was very challenging initially, for us to scale on a global level and it was very important to streamline these processes and the art of making shawls,” she explained.

Pranav Malhotra, Director, Pashtush India, added here, “Even though the traditional design, they're beautiful, and they're so detailed, but to make some commercial sense, they need to be in sync with what is in fashion on a day to day basis. For a long amount of times the artisans in our industry, were at the mercy of these wholesalers. And that's where we come in. We take products that are made by these artists. And we directly connect them to consumers all around the world.”

Driven by a desire to help Indian farmers alleviate their financial hardships and enrich their lives, Anveshan empowers farmers to add value to their produce and democratise access to resources and markets. Founded by three IIT Guwahati Alumni, Anveshan basically sets up the centralized food processing units in villages, so that they can manufacture high quality food products. And at the same time, they can empower and provide employment to rural people living in these villages. “Developing the rural economy in that sense, creating more jobs in the rural area. So the whole ecosystem, I think has been benefited through innovation,” said Ayushi Khandelwal, Co-founder, Anveshan Farm Technologies.

Sheryl Sandberg shared more stories of local businesses getting a whole new platform and recognition through Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and said, “We talk about it all the time, ‘democratising access’, anyone can use it and use it for free. At Meta, Facebook, we are deeply committed to helping small business owners like the three of you across India and we recently launched a small business loans initiative, which is enabling our small businesses to apply for business loans through third party lenders. We’re about to launch Facebook Business Coach which is a free to use, low data cost, educational chatbot tool on WhatsApp.”

The full event can be viewed here : https://www.facebook.com/MetaIndia/videos/330268328660761/

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