Frontier Markets is a social tech commerce enterprise that focuses on rural India. It is an end-to-end commerce platform that provides last-mile products and services, delivered at the doorsteps of consumers in villages through an assisted commerce model run by rural women entrepreneurs called Saral Jeevan Sahelis. Today it operates in 5,000 villages in India, managing 25,000 Sahelis using their technology platform called the Meri Saheli App, to facilitate access to products and services in agri, digital inclusion, home appliances, clean energy solutions, since covid, essential services, and finance to over 1,000,000 households. In partnership with Frontier Innovations Foundation, Ajaita launched an initiative called She-Leads Bharat, supporting Frontier Markets' effort to build a coalition of community, government, and solutions providers to elevate the entrepreneurial drive of women through its technology, launching She-Leads Bharat: Udyam and Mahila Kisaan - this is a gender inclusive initiative support climate and sustainable livelihoods - Frontier Innovations Foundation launched She-Leads Impact Fund - the first blended finance facility to support this endeavor in India. The Impact Fund is set to unlock $100MN of debt financing, and GMV for agriculture, clean energy, financial services and e-commerce.
Purpose
The mission of Frontier Innovations Foundation (FIF) is to promote and support organizations that investing in the economic empowerment of women and vulnerable communities around the world. To do this, FIF aims to bring together the technologies, new business models and investment to grow and support a community of last mile distribution organizations. We believe that our approach will help social entrepreneurs address their common challenges that are necessary to scale global access to digital first solutions, high impact solutions in healthcare, finance, climate, agriculture, and more promoting opportunities for income and resilience for all. As it learns, FIF commits to share its insights with this growing community. Established in 2013, Frontier Innovations is a 501(c)3 non-‐profit that promotes organizations, captures learning and insights from the field, aggregate capital from donors to invest in organizations’ ability to drive gender-lens solutions, and creates pilot experiments to find novel business models that can address two core challenges for last-‐mile organizations. We believe those challenges are: how to invest in a gender-lens model at scale, and how to finance growth women entrepreneurs. We aspire to support a global community of last mile organizations around the world that comes together to collectively tackle common challenges for women around the world. By harnessing the power of disruptive ideas and ensuring accountability in implementation, we believe that sharing learnings and failures will help unearth the most innovative models and solutions to our common challenges in the clean energy sector. These experiments will lead to successful, replicable, and scalable solutions to help social entrepreneurs improve their business models to scale access to clean energy. Frontier Innovations Foundation (FIF) aspires to fund, facilitate and feature 15 partnerships globally that will generate groundbreaking solutions impacting the lives of 100 million women by 2030.
