Cartier Women's Initiative Awards

Nandini Pandhi: “I’m delighted to be working as part of a project that prioritizes women’s entrepreneurial achievement”

The dotcom revolution of the late 1990s proved the viability of electronic sales tools. But if you live in a country where the Internet isn’t readily accessible, how can you take advantage of new communications technologies to grow your business? Nandini Pandhi, a Computer Sciences graduate, has a plan that might provide the answer. Nandini began her career as a computer programmer in California’s Silicon Valley during the peak of the dotcom boom. “There was incredible excitement and entrepreneurial energy”, she remembers, “a lot of which remains with me even now. But I wanted to try to deploy my business interests in more socially beneficial context, so I enrolled for a Master’s in Local Economic Development at the London School of Economics [LSE].”

Market access for entrepreneurs

“I began to form a clearer vision of how I wanted to channel my entrepreneurial ambitions, a vision which involved combating the three principal challenges that the low-income entrepreneurs in developing countries face: lack of access to credit, lack of business information and poor access to markets.”
In 2004 Nandini took up a position at Women’s World Banking (WWB), a microfinance organization in New York. “This was where I met Yasmina McCarty, now my business partner, with whom I shared ideals, goals and a common background: she too had worked in Silicon Valley in the late nineties.”
Nandini and Yasmina began to consider the two other challenges [beyond credit scarcity] faced by the working poor: information paucity and market inaccessibility. Their thoughts led to GreenMango…
“We're convinced that there is a way for hard-working micro-entrepreneurs to build businesses that earn more than the current average of 2$ per day. Today, they are forced to compete with their large competitors solely on price because they do not have the marketing power or visibility to compete with them on quality. GreenMango was designed to provide tailors, electricians, carpenters, domestic help and all other working poor labour in urban India with a platform to demonstrate the quality of their work and earn a fair price for their services."

Word-of-mouth, amplified

GreenMango will attempt to change the way business is done in the informal economy by creating a virtual marketplace where low-income entrepreneurs and their consumers can find each other. GreenMango is a search platform where shoppers can browse through virtual, personalized storefronts of local vendors. Unlike any existing local search engine or directory service, GreenMango goes a step further by providing each shopper with vendor reviews from people they know and trust. It brings the collective knowledge of your social network into your shopping experience online. “Our ambition is to level the playing field for low-income entrepreneurs to compete with larger companies in acquiring new customers and growing their businesses,” says Nandini.

“I’m delighted to be participating in a competition that prioritizes women’s entrepreneurial achievement,” says Nandini. “I’m also very excited that through the Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards we’ll soon be discussing our idea with experts from McKinsey, Cartier and INSEAD. We’re keen to garner as much knowledge as we can about how to operationalized our idea. Winning would enable us to start testing the concept on the ground.”