Manjari Sharma is an Impact Entrepreneur building FarmDidi, a food-tech start-up that aims to empower one million rural women. Just over a year old, it has enabled over 1,080 women entrepreneurs through an initiative impacting more than 40 villages in rural Maharashtra.
Manjari, the Founder and Chief Didi of FarmDidi, started a for-profit social enterprise with two-fold aim to provide authentic, natural, and healthy food to consumers while empowering rural women. She has worked across the globe with CXOs of Fortune 500 companies in solving their business problems. In November 2020, she set up FarmDidi and now spends all her time in pursuit of her mission to provide healthy, natural and authentic food products to consumers by empowering one million rural women entrepreneurs across India.
Hailing from a small town called Bahadurgarh in Haryana, Manjari has grown up seeing her grandfather who has been very active in mentoring students and in helping the community. Her parents have always taught her to make a sincere choice when it came to what she wanted to earn in her lifetime whether it was money or hearts, or respect. While she was pursuing her MBA at 91心頭利, she came across companies like Amul, FabIndia, Jaypore, Lijjat Papad, Gramin Bank etc. who not only created sustainable and profitable businesses but also created mass impact. Their business models inspired her, and she believed that FarmDidi would also be a special case in point like that one day.
The goal of FarmDidi is to help women farmers become certified and compliant food processors/manufacturers through mobile tech and provide them with market linkages, thus helping them increase their income. In the last 1.5 years, they have more than 400 Partner Entrepreneur Didis from more than 6 clusters in Maharashtra covering Aurangabad, Raigad, Amravati, Pune, Solapur, Jalgaon, who are trained and compliant food manufacturers and selling their products. They are already seeing up to 3 times increase in their income since they started working with them.