Saath Livelihoods proposes to establish an incubation centre that focuses on providing support and experience in terms of handholding, mentoring and strategy making for social entrepren Ashray eurs/enterprises in collaboration with like-minded partners.

The Incubation Centre will promote social entrepreneurship in association/collaboration with

• Entrepreneurship Development Institute (EDI), a pioneer in entrepreneurship training
• Ashoka Innovators for the Public is the largest network of social entrepreneurs with nearly 3000 Ashoka Fellows in 70 countries across the globe and more than 350 in India alone.
• Incube Ventures Pvt. Ltd. is committed to nurturing and evolving ideas that possess potential to create social impact through seeding & mentoring.

Enterprises incubated will focus on livelihood generation, financial incubation and provision of affordable housing.

The process of incubation will be based on the following process:

• Selection Process
• Crowdsourcing to scout for entrepreneurs through academic institutions, partners and angel investment/NGO networks. Competitions to invite ideas which are being worked upon and award leading ideas which can be taken up for incubation. The shortlisting of entrepreneurs and enterprises at this stage would be based on ideas that are relevant, replicable, affordable, sustainable and scalable. This will be followed by a multiple stage screening process.
• Incubation activities
• Incubation activities involve technical assistance and seed funding rather than direct financial assistance to the entrepreneurs. The technical assistance would be in the form of mentoring, business validation support, peer learning and on the ground support.
• Scaling
• Scaling will take place when external investors are interested in investing capital to accelerate expansion/scaling-up of an enterprise. It can also happen during the exit of the investor when the targets established at inception are met and/or surpassed.

Towards this end, Saath Livelihoods plans to set up Aashray on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. Aashray is an incubation and research centre for promotion of innovations, setting up social enterprises and scaling up innovative ventures and grassroots technologies.

To read more about Aashray, please click here.