Irani's gender alliance raises $2M in 48 hours for India's women entrepreneurs

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Smriti Irani announced that she had raised $2 million in just 48 hours toward an ambitious $100 million fund designed to support 100,000 women-owned small businesses across India. The former union minister, speaking from the WeLead Lounge—a space some attendees call the Tulsi Lounge, a nod to her decades-long television career—described the fundraising push as part of a larger effort to make gender equity not just a moral imperative but an economic one.

Irani became India's first gender minister in 2024 under Prime Minister Narendra Modi's leadership, a role that brought her to Davos to lead an Indian delegation. That same year, the Alliance for Global Good—Gender Equity and Equality was formally launched here, a partnership between the Confederation of Indian Industry, the Gates Foundation, and the World Economic Forum serving as network partner. Now in her second consecutive year attending the annual meeting as the alliance's founder and chairperson, Irani framed the work as an attempt to translate abstract principles of equity into concrete economic outcomes that could be replicated globally.

The centerpiece of this effort is a program called Spark, which operates across roughly 300 cities in India with the explicit goal of channeling commercial capital to women entrepreneurs. Over the past two years, Irani noted, the alliance has engaged with approximately 21,000 international delegates at Davos alone, using those conversations to develop what she described as replicable models in Indian manufacturing that could serve women's needs worldwide. The $2 million raised in the first 48 hours of this year's meeting represents early momentum toward the $100 million target, though the full timeline for reaching that goal remains unspecified.

Beyond the Spark initiative, the alliance has begun work in areas including maternal mortality reduction. Irani also highlighted a separate $40 million investment focused on women's wellness, specifically targeting hormonal health, bone health, and brain health through products grounded in Ayurveda. This investment, she emphasized, would be manufactured in India, positioning the country as both a source of traditional knowledge and a hub for commercializing wellness products derived from that knowledge.

Irani's ascent to the gender minister role carries personal weight for her. She reflected on the unlikelihood of her own trajectory—a television actress with a 25-year career who transitioned into politics and eventually into a cabinet position. She described the experience as one she had never anticipated, even as she navigated a long political journey. She also noted that India's recent passage of a law providing legislative reservation for women represents a historical shift, one that she framed as creating equal capacity and ability for men and women to serve the country. Her comments suggested that the work ahead involves not just funding and programs, but also ensuring that political systems actively surface and elevate women with demonstrated potential or prior public service experience.

When asked about her return to television screens, Irani characterized it as an experiment—an attempt to sustain two parallel legacies, one in entertainment and one in public service, in a way that few personalities have managed. She left open the possibility of further ventures, offering a characteristically open-ended response: from her, she said, one should always expect more.