New York: Bano Fatima, a young entrepreneur who helps the weavers known as Julahas in Uttar Pradesh, has received the HP LIFE Entrepreneurship Award at New Yorks Global Citizen Festival. This prize was awarded as her incredible entrepreneurship story received the maximum online votes from the HP LIFE/Global Poverty Project community than the stories of four other highly inspiring HP LIFE entrepreneurs. Musician Jake Clemons presented the HP LIFE Entrepreneurship Award (including $ 5,000 and a trip to New York City) to Bano Fatima of Weavers Hut.
For Bano Fatima, a final year undergraduate at New Delhis Lady Shriram College, her journey began when she took up a course in Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow.
Fatmias ancestral village near Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh is famous for traditional handloom weaving but for over past four to five decades, the weavers have been facing cash crunch. “Coupled with caste discrimination, the Julahas, a community of artisans who weave on handlooms, find themselves in abject poverty because they are looted by local middle men and they also donot have the means to market their products beyond a restricted geographic region”, explains Fatmia.
Along with her cousin, Nabila Kidwai, also an undergraduate student at Delhi University, Fatmia decided to start Weavers Hut, a social enterprise that mentors and trains weavers and connects them to the urban markets like Delhi and Mumbai.
Bano Fatima is a young entrepreneur undaunted by the scale of the social and economic inequality that she discovered in a weaver community, known as the Julahas, in the village of Baragaon, Barabanki in Uttar Pradesh. This political science student, who was just 19 years old then, decided that she should make a difference. Aided by her cousin Nabila Kidwai, she established Weavers Hut, a small-scale social enterprise, to strike at the root of the social discrimination and economic exploitation experienced by this artisan community,sources say.
She found that the social status of weavers in India is extremely low and so are their educational and financial prospects, their weaving work requires high labour input, but achieves low productivity and carries health risks. Bano needed to develop her own technical and communication skills in order to help this community. So she selected and completed the HP LIFE (HP Learning Initiative for Entrepreneurs) training, now also available online as a free, cloud-based HP LIFE e-learning training program. Through the HP LIFE training, she became proficient in using MS Excel for accounting purposes and MS PowerPoint for high-impact sales and marketing presentations.
