Can Your Innovation Boost Farmers’ Livelihoods or Drive Plastic Circularity in India?
Published on: 28/10/2024
TRANSFORM India Challenge
The TRANSFORM India Challenge is an initiative that aims to identify and support impactful enterprises working to improve livelihoods for smallholder farmers OR driving solutions to drive plastic circularity. If you work in this area…
Challenge Overview
We invite Indian social enterprises working on innovating solutions that can demonstrate:
- Positive social, environmental and economic impact
- Ability to scale across Indian geographies
- Business model sustainability
- Up to 4 start-ups will receive grants and a wide range of innovative, technology and business support through TRANSFORM and its partners.
Focus Areas:
1. Improving the livelihoods of tea, coffee, tomatoes, spices and dairy smallholder farmers in India by at least one of the following:
Capacity Building & Behaviour Change – Deliver trainings or programs to build capacity among smallholder farmers, promoting best practices that increase productivity and yields, reduce costs and improve livelihoods.
Financial Inclusion – Support deployment of technologies that create access to terms of credit, savings and/or insurance.
Market Access and Fair Pricing – Design platform or systems to create market-linkages, ensuring fair pricing and reducing influence of middle traders.
Post-Harvest Management & Value Addition – Design initiatives that help diversify their income sources, ensuring sustainable livelihoods and reducing dependency on a single crop or farming activity.
Climate Resilience & Adaptation – Develop tools and techniques helpful to adapt to climate change, ensuring crop resilience and sustainable yields in the face of unpredictable weather patterns. Innovative business models with access to climate resilient agri inputs, know-how and agri-tools.
2. Driving circularity of plastics, especially low value/ flexible multilayered plastic waste by at least one of the following:
Collection & Processing – Expand collection and processing, specifically for flexibles (eg. Small sachets)
Inclusive Livelihood – Ensuring plastic collectors are part of the solution and continue to promote dignity and fair wages
Expand New Business Models – Source & Scale refill-reuse enterprises. Material innovations that close the plastic loop
Call for applications now open
Up to 4 selected start-ups will receive the following
- Innovation grants of up to 1.30 Cr, for the duration of the 12–18-month project.
- Hands-on support from Unilever Professionals, including an opportunity to test products or services in Unilever’s Value Chain
- Hands-on support from EY Professionals, including the opportunity to access EY Professional Consulting (EY Teams work with enterprises for up to 12 weeks, offering support to improve their businesses’ productivity, resilience, and capacity to scale), dedicated 1:1 business Coaching, skills development workshops and training.
- Network Access – Exposure to the wider network of stakeholders (corporates, government agencies, international development agencies etc.) as well as high visibility opportunities offered by TRANSFORM, through its partners Unilever, the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and EY.
- Knowledge Services – Monitoring and evaluation technical assistance to enable evidence-led socio-economic impact assessment
Key dates
- Last date to submit the applications – 31st Oct ‘24
Application deadline: 15th Dec ‘24 - First round of evaluations: 31st Jan ‘25
- Grand Jury round: 31st March ‘25
- Announcement of selected start-ups: April ‘25
Contact us
For any assistance needed in filling out the application form, please reach out to
