#SankalpChangemakers features Ajaita Shah of Frontier Markets, 2018 Sankalp Award winner
By Punita Maheshwari
India’s rural market has humbled some of the world’s biggest companies. With over
800 million people, it’s a landscape where “distribution” matters as much as “demand.” Scattered villages, weak logistics, and diverse local needs make it hard for conventional e-commerce to thrive.
But back in 2011, Ajaita Shah saw things differently.
“You don’t fight the rural market’s uniqueness,” she says. “You leverage it.”
And she did — by unlocking one of its most overlooked assets: women.
The Saheli Network
Ajaita founded Frontier Markets to transform rural women into tech-enabled entrepreneurs. Her “Sahelis” — over
35,000 and counting — use smartphones to sell solar lanterns, clean cookstoves, medicines, electronics, insurance, and climate-friendly farm inputs across 5,000+ villages in Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh.
The Meri Saheli app is their business-in-a-pocket — in local languages, with access to 200+ partner brands. It helps women browse products, take orders, track stock, and get paid directly. Frontier Markets manages the logistics, tech backbone, and partnerships
with brands and financiers.
What most companies treated as a market “gap,” Shah turned into a distribution infrastructure powered by women.
The Economics of Empowerment
A Saheli earns an average of ₹65,000 a year. Top performers, like a grocery-store owner from rural Rajasthan, generate
₹18.5 lakh in annual business value.
For every ₹15,000 invested in onboarding and training, the model delivers
4× business turnover within a year — and a 95% retention rate.
Since inception, the network has:
- Enabled ₹80 crore in income for women entrepreneurs
- Connected 210+ companies to rural markets
- Served 43 lakh rural customers
- Sold over 10 crore essential products
To put that in perspective — those 10 crore products are enough to reach every household in a city the size of Delhi, twice over
“Now I Earn with Pride”
“My confidence has increased very much, and people’s respect towards me has improved,” says
Savitri, a Saheli from Lachhmangarh, Rajasthan.
“Now that I’m earning, why shouldn’t my children go to a better school? I moved them to a private school with my own income. Through She Leads Bharat and Frontier Markets, I learned business and marketing skills, and now I earn with pride.”
Stories like Savitri’s multiply across thousands of villages — each smartphone becoming a shopfront, each woman a CEO of her own enterprise.
The Power of Partnerships
Frontier Markets’ growth has been anchored by collaborations that blend tech, finance, and trust:
- Microsoft – digital commerce and AI-enabled product discovery
- Mastercard – She Leads Bharat: Udyam programme, onboarding 100,000 women entrepreneurs
- Airtel Payments Bank – enabling rural banking services to 5 lakh households
- 200+ consumer brands – from clean energy to insurance
Investors such as Acumen, Beyond Capital Ventures, The Rise Fund, and
ENGIE have backed the model, with US$4.8 million raised across seven rounds.
Scaling Through Policy and Vision
In 2025, Frontier Markets signed an agreement with the Government of Andhra Pradesh to integrate the Meri Saheli platform with self-help groups in
Kuppam district, a move praised by Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu.
Recognition soon followed at the national level: on International Women’s Day 2025,
Prime Minister Narendra Modi temporarily handed over his social media account to Shah — a symbolic nod to the power of women-led rural entrepreneurship.
What’s Next
By 2030, Frontier Markets aims to reach 1 million women entrepreneurs and
100 million rural households, building a digital infrastructure that connects India’s villages to modern markets.
Scaling from 35,000 to a million is a different journey altogether — one that will test systems, sustainability, and culture. But Shah has spent two decades preparing for this, balancing the heart of a development professional with the discipline of an entrepreneur.
One village, one woman, one smartphone at a time.
Editor’s Note
Ajaita Shah won the Sankalp Global Award in 2018 for her pioneering work in last-mile rural distribution and women’s entrepreneurship. Frontier Markets’ model continues to inspire Sankalp’s conversations on inclusive innovation and the future of rural commerce.
