Empowering Lives and
Embracing Choices

Satyavir Chakrapani (Satya), the Founder of Shikhar Microfinance had discovered that the poor with entrepreneurial needs remain poor due to lack of timely credit. In the endeavour to make a difference, the Microfinance (MFI) journey started for the founding team (Satya, Vinoy, and Nitin).
During the journey of more than a decade where the team touched the lives of more than 500,000 poor people in North India and impacted the life of most of these, the team discovered that families at the bottom of the pyramid need to be helped, worked with and addressed comprehensively.
The fear of playing God or Government held them back with intervention limited only to access to credit i.e., Lending to poor and very basic insurance solutions, although a lot of innovative needs were incorporated in their financial products to process like mandatory financial literacy and discovering the empowerment on the journey to been literate. With the difficult economic environment in India since 2017 and finally with the terrible Covid pandemic and lockdown the team has now stepped out to play/do what is required.
Looking at the household income, improving it, bringing basic financial tools (insurance, savings), helping and creative a pull for these, bringing literacy to the household through skilling, working through microenterprises on backward and forward linkages, capitalising on clusters of artisans across geographies, bringing skills into play across urban and rural and thus creating a community of positive influence at the bottom of the pyramid and facilitate movement higher up the pyramid.
While the ready focus is on 120 million unique microfinance loan clients which means an opportunity to impact a population of nearly 600 million. However there are those who have not been part of the microfinance story who also fall in the same bracket and that would make it nearly a billion.
The experience of Microfinance has taught us that families have opportunities to earn more and better incomes if appropriate interventions are available.
So as a start a low hanging fruit and desperate post pandemic environment intervention TuraHee plans to connect job seekers to job opportunities, evaluate skills in the household and push the case for skilling and intervene with financial solutions for these households. SAKHI-MEMSAB is the next level initiative of TuraHee to connect SAKHI (Home Maids) to MEMSAB (Employer) to have increased cashflows and flexible work options for the families at the bottom of the pyramid.
And as we start off working, TuraHee will expand from facilitating Jobs further into connecting Micro-Businesses and those sustaining on Agriculture / Farming across India and other nations to Opportunities to Enhance their Incomes and Improve their Quality of Life.
We invite and look forward to like-minded individuals and institutions to join us in this endeavour to impact the lives of the poor across the nations.

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