Karst's claim is that India's women-entrepreneurship problem has been misfiled — logged as charity or a mission topic when it is arithmetic, and arithmetic that fails at one very specific desk. Her&Now, the Indo-German project she runs for GIZ with the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, deliberately screened for growth potential and employment rather than need: more than 800 women across the eight northeastern states, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Telangana and Maharashtra, with roughly a quarter each in food processing and in textiles and handicraft, but also biofertiliser, soap at scale and a marketing agency. The programmes ran six to seven months and spent most of that time on funding readiness — compliances, paperwork, financial management — because GIZ is not a bank and cannot write the cheque itself. It still barely moved the needle: about a quarter applied, half of those were sanctioned, and many for far less than they asked. Her diagnosis is unromantic. These enterprises average three employees; they have outgrown microfinance and are nowhere near venture scale, and the roughly ₹7.5 lakh they need arrives — or doesn't — at the discretion of a single branch officer weighing collateral a woman was never given. Around that sit the softer failures: outreach that must first convince women they are eligible to apply at all, families that bless a supplementary income but not an ambition, and a participation rate falling while degrees rise. Her conclusion is that the real intervention sits upstream of the loan desk, at five or six years old, with role models a girl can actually relate to.
Worth your time if you are
Bankers who sanction small-business loans one branch at a time
Programme designers building incubators for first-time founders
CSR and impact teams tired of one-district pilots
Policymakers drafting schemes that assume a male applicant
Anyone who still files women's entrepreneurship under charity
