6 women-led startups win COVID-19 Shri Shakti Challenge organized by MyGov with UN Women
Six women-led startups have won COVID-19 Shri Shakti Challenge which aims to encourage and involve women-led startups to come up with innovative solutions that can help in the fight against the pandemic or solve problems that impact a large number of women.
The challenge was first launched in April this year by MyGov in collaboration with UN Women. It received an overwhelming response with a total of 1,265 entries, from across the nation.
After thorough screening, 25 startups were shortlisted for presentations to the jury which included Debjani Ghosh, President NASSCOM, Rohini Srivathsa, National Technology Officer (CTO) Microsoft India, Dr R Ramanan, MD Atal Innovation Mission, Nishtha Satyam, Dy Country representative, UN Women India and Abhishek Singh, CEO MyGov.
The Jury which evaluated the solutions proposed by the startups on the parameters that included innovation, usability, relevance and impact of their idea on the society and after thorough review 11 finalists were chosen for the next stage. Each of 11 selected startups were provided a prize money of Rs 75,000 to further develop their ideas.
Mentorship sessions were organized to enable graduation of the ideas into Proof of Concepts that can be scaled up.These sessions were topics that included Business Modelling, Financial Modelling, Legal Certifications, Digital Marketing, Product Design, Art of making Pitch and were conducted with the support of NASSCOM, Industry Experts, and the Atal Incubation Centre at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology.
The final presentations were made to the jury on October 27. After intense discussions and deliberations, the Jury selected top three entries as winners and in view of the high quality of solutions presented decided to recognize three additional entries as ‘Promising Solutions’.
In addition to the earlier announced reward of Rs 5 lakhs for the top three winners, UN Women agreed to reward Rs 2 lakhs each to the three startups chosen for their promising solutions.
The top three entries that won the challenge are — a non-alcoholic hand sanitizer that is relevant not only for COVID- 19 but also for other infections, an UV sterilization box for safe reuse of PPEs and masks that can help reduce costs for hospitals and other service providers and an anti-microbial solution that could be sprayed into handkerchiefs or dupattas for making them safe to be used as face masks.
