KOCHI: India currently faces some of the most pressing global challenges like unemployment, lack of affordable healthcare and quality education, among others. The need of the hour is to find bold, unconventional, profitable and scalable solutions to these problems. Rising to the occasion to fill this gap is the role of social enterprises. They show the potential to innovate and to become profitable. However, they need investment support and much beyond that, in terms of mentoring and deep networks to grow. Villgro is back with the second edition of iPitch to enable just that! And, Unconvention is the culmination of iPitch.
It is the confluence of stakeholders and collaborators in the field of social entrepreneurship to share knowledge, inspire, and network with each other with the shared goal of creating business solutions for people at the bottom of the pyramid.
Each conversation will deeply examine challenges unique to the sectors of agribusiness, health, education and employability, and energy and allied sub-sectors in India.
Unconvention, a national conference, to be held in Bengaluru on December 7 and 8 will see a total investment in multiple enterprises of over `3.5 crore announced here. Through Unconvention, the organisers aim to identify, connect, and inspire all the key stakeholders in the social entrepreneurship and impact investing space.
Day 1 of Unconvention will see experts talking about the various facets in starting and running a business. Various questions including how can you understand your customer’s pain better, how can you make prototypes cost-effectively, how can you pilot my solution, how can you raise funding for your social start-up and how can you convince teachers, doctors, nurses and farmers to use your product will be discussed by the experts.
Winners will be celebrated and participants will get to network with like-minded people.
Day 2 will have all the four sector conferences happening simultaneously under one roof. In Agribusiness discussions will be held on the opportunities and challenges of food loss reduction across the value chain, opportunities and challenges of innovation in animal health and nutrition space and from the lens of a mature food start-up on navigating through scalability challenges.
Healthcare will see talks on what does the current National Health Policy mean for social entrepreneurs, the sustainable development goal for universal healthcare and how Government of India support med-tech startups and how they can be engaged better.
In education and employability session, the topics that will be dealt with are crossing 3,000 - the enigma of scaling sales to schools, where's the money? - with more money coming into social impact investing, the top CSRs are funding education, yet funding for market-led education companies is hard to find. The session will try to find out what, how and when of making this happen.
For registration and further details, visit www.villgro.org/unconvention.