NEW DELHI: A survey of more than 145 organisations working in the social impact space shows that over 57% of non-profits have at least one female founder – more than three times the 18% share reported among Indian startups. Moreover, female representation in the nonprofit sector outpaces corporate leadership, where women hold just 1.8% of CEO positions, 4.4% of CFO positions, and 29% of executive director roles.These findings are part of accelerator for non-profits Change Engine’s ‘East of Doing Good’ report – “Access to flexible funding: a Gender Lens”. The survey covers small organisations (annual budgets less than Rs 1 crore), medium (annual budgets between Rs 1 crore -5 crore) and large organisations (Rs 5 crore and more). The study sample also had an almost equal split between organisations eligible for foreign funding (with FCRA or US 501(c)) and those that were not.Out of the 145 plus organisations surveyed, nearly 31% have only female founders, while around 27% have both male and female founders.The research also shows that women are not only founding more nonprofits, but women founded organisations are better funded and hold more long term flexible funding.The study found that non-profits with atleast one female founder also had bigger budgets. The data shows that 70% of organisations with at least one female founder have an annual budget of over Rs 1 crore, compared to 43.5% of organisations with only-male founders.Also around 21% of organisations with at least one female founder have more than 25% of their budget in flexible unrestricted funding, compared to just about 13% of organisations with only male founders. Flexible funding is the non-programmatic funding that nonprofits can use to invest in talent, technology, research and strengthening the organisation.As far as long-term grants are concerned it turns out that over 65% of organisations with at least one female founder have access to multi-year funding (three years or more), compared to around 56% of organisations with only male founders. Among these, around 27% of organisations with at least one female founder have received multi-year grants above Rs 1 crore, compared to just about 11% of only male founder organisations.The report highlights that when asked to rate (on a scale of 1-5) how easy it was to raise unrestricted funds from corporate social responsibility (CSR), high net-worth individuals (HNIs), domestic foundations, foreign foundations, and crowdfunding/retail, organisations with at least one female founder scored consistently scored higher across every category with an average score of 2.41 in comparison with 2.06 of organisations with only male founders.However, challenges remain. The study shows that cheque sizes remain small for everyone: “A staggering 82% of organisations with at least one female founder and 83% of only male founded organisations said typical unrestricted cheque sizes in India are less than Rs 25 lakh, showing that the small-cheque problem cuts across gender lines,” the study highlights.
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Varun Aggarwal and Shubham Bansal, co-founders, Change Engine highlighted that the findings show that women are leading India’s social sector and building bigger and better resourced organisations. We need to encourage more women to come into this sector,” Aggarwal asserted. “In our accelerator, we meet women founders who are building strong, ambitious institutions to tackle some of India’s biggest social challenges. It’s encouraging to see that what we’ve been observing on the ground is now backed by data. Six in ten nonprofits in our survey were founded by a woman founder,” Bansal added.However, the Change Engine founders highlight that the access to unrestricted flexible funding remains consistently low across the board with 80% of the surveyed founders reporting that they struggle to scale their work due to the lack of unrestricted funding. “This funding rigidity forces organisations to spend disproportionate time on fundraising, rather than focusing on innovation and impact,” they added.
