Enhancing Women Empowerment and Encouraging Natural Food Habits with Farm Didi, Manjari Sharma

Manjari Sharma is the founder of Farm Didi, a food-tech startup that creates products that are 100% natural and real with ingredients supplied directly from farms and no chemicals or preservatives. Farm Didi provides delicious food to a person’s table, home, and hectic life.

IIM graduate Manjari, a corporate employee, made the decision to leave her position to assist these women in growing their enterprises and achieving financial independence. She founded the Farm Didi for-profit social company to help rural women.

Manjari collaborated with the Bihar state government in 2016 as part of her IIM research to understand the status of women’s empowerment. Manjari witnessed the migration issue while the country was under lockdown, which encouraged her to launch a business with the goal of empowering one million rural Indian women. She believed that the food industry would be the best place to start because 80% of rural women are familiar with the food industry, are already involved in the agricultural value chain, and had traditional knowledge and experience in this field. And so, Farm Didi was launched in 2021 with an emphasis on 80 rural Maharashtrian villages. Manjari believed the state was an ideal “neutral” location to launch the business because she had lived in Pune for five years and spoke Marathi fluently.

Her future plans most likely involve taking advantage of FarmDidi’s popularity as a household name for handcrafted food items that has directly and indirectly benefited 5 lakh rural women farmers.