Why in news?

• The NITI Aayog organized the Third Edition of the Women Transforming India Awards 2018 on December 17, 2018.
• An online portal for women entrepreneurs was also launched on this occasion.
• The Vice President of India, M. Venkaiah Naidu presided over as the chief guest of the event where he launched the WEP Portal 2.0 and conferred WTI Awards 2018.

Highlights:

• The Women Transforming India Awards were instituted to recognize and celebrate stories of exemplary women from across India. The theme of this year’s award is “Women and Entrepreneurship.”
• As many as fifteen candidates have been selected through an extensive six-month-long process for this award.
• More than 2300 nominations were received for WTI Awards 2018, and through a highly objective and transparent screening process, a total of 15 candidates have been selected for the award.
• On this occasion, the Women Entrepreneurship Platform-an online portal has also been launched by the NITI Aayog. This online portal will help to realize the dreams of Women Entrepreneurs across India.
• The Women Entrepreneurship Platform seeks to transform the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the country and shall be a one-stop resource center for future and budding women entrepreneurs.
• It seeks to act as a medium for various stakeholders in the economy to come together and offer integrated services such as Incubation Support, Mentorship, Funding avenues, Compliance, Marketing Assistance, etc.

Women Entrepreneurship Platform (WEP):

• On November 28-30, 2017, NITI Aayog, Government of India in partnership with the Government of the United States of America hosted the 8th Annual Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) in Hyderabad, India with the overarching theme of ‘Women First, Prosperity for All’. To take the idea forward, CEO, NITI Aayog announced setting up of Women Entrepreneurship Platform (WEP) to promote and support established as well as aspiring women entrepreneurs in India.
• WEP is the first of its kind unified access platform which enables meeting of several stakeholders in the entrepreneurial space on a single platform, work in collaboration with various partner organizations to provide a wide range of support services to women entrepreneurs under various service verticals of WEP.
• WEP partners such as Google, CRISIL, SIDBI, NIC, NASSCOM, UN India Business Forum, WEE Foundation, SEWA bank, MannDeshi Foundation, Shopclues,etc. to WEP registered women entrepreneurs under verticals such as Financial Assistance and Funding Support, Entrepreneurship Skilling, Incubation and Acceleration, Compliance Assistance, Marketing Assistance and a dedicated vertical for Social Entrepreneurship.