A milestone project of our initiative…

Our close and continuing interaction with various types of artists has revealed one common issue: they are fully dependent upon others for supply of raw material since they don’t have any disposable income or savings. This dependence not only eats into margins and causes losses but also leads to a misappropriation of credit for artistic work. The cascading impact of this dependence is that artists remain at the mercy of corporations who are able to grant enough capital. Furthermore, the artists are not free to display their creativity and are forced to work as per orders.

As one of the main objectives of our Herkala initiative is to empower rural artisans, our efforts would be incomplete without providing them with financial independence. Since the launch of Herkala.org, the vision has been to develop a system that would allow artists to get soft loans seamlessly, without any exploitation. Since these rural artisans don’t have collateral, the lenders should trust their skill.

I came across an organization, Florence Capital (based out of Gurugram, India) which has combined FinTech with financial empowerment for women. I interned with Florence Capital in 2021 to understand how they leverage the best practices in FinTech and EdTech to make this possible and how Herkala and its artists can benefit from Florence. Since their aim is to financially empower women, I was able to convince them to start a pilot scheme of providing small loans to artisans.

After finalizing the plan of action, we had our first customer: Ms Geetaben Laxmanbhai Meriya, Sumrasar Village, Bhuj, Kutch, Gujarat. She has been extended a loan of INR 25000/- for a period of 6 months at a nominal interest. The successful execution of this attempt gave us a tremendous boost to extend the same to hundreds of other artists and make them the master of their own art!