By Ellen Tacoma, Co-Founder, Joint Managing Director of Women on Wings
- Perseverance is required to prove critics wrong
- Scaling requires business rigor, not just enthusiastic beliefs
Our journey began in 2007 with two women (Maria van der Heijden and myself, Ellen Tacoma) in the Netherlands and a goal to co-create one million jobs for women in rural India.
We were a startup asking for funding for a model centered on sharing knowledge rather than a tangible product like an app. We would not offer grants or train women in rural areas. Our idea: professionals provide tailor-made pro bono consultancy for Indian social enterprises so they can grow and create jobs for women.
Visiting with Kakuli an employee of a partner in West Bengal.
No track record, proof needed
Critics, potential funders hesitated on why they should contribute to an organization with no established track record. They suggested revisiting the idea in a year, probably expecting us to disappear.
It required perseverance: delivering multiple presentations to potential funders across the Netherlands to build a network and create awareness. We felt the only reason to fail was to stop trying; otherwise, we reasoned, there is no reason to fail. Our early work with Sadhna, a growing women’s cooperative in Udaipur, provided the first proof of concept in the market.
Sanju Maurya used funds gained from her agri-entrepreneur consultant role with our partner Udhyami Mahila FPC to start her own shop.
Spread sheet illusion
In the early days, we confronted the stark reality of an Excel sheet calculation illusion which was the enthusiastic belief that simply finding 1,000 partners could lead to one million jobs. The harsh reality was that many social enterprises were not “scale-ready”.
Experts are more than volunteers
From the beginning with our experts, there were moments where someone simply just did not fit the culture or philosophy of our organization. In a volunteer-driven model, it is incredibly difficult to “fire” or reject free help. We learned the hard truth: Volunteering is not without obligation.
Very early on we stopped viewing experts as nice-to-have volunteers and started treating them as professional consultants with strict profiles who also co-create with our partners. Our experts, a powerful cohort of Indian and Dutch senior professionals ensure domain-specific advice from supply chain and finance to marketing translates directly into tangible business action.
Western logic
While we approached the work with an open mind to cultural differences, we realized daily that our own Western logic was fundamentally challenged. We had to learn to pick up more subtle signals, almost reading between the lines to understand an answer. Which became foundational to how we built resilient partnerships and our network.
This required continuous learning and an open mind. We regularly left a meeting in India after a fantastic conversation, thinking we had an agreement, only to see nothing happen. So we did not pick up the signals properly.
And we kept going
To date, we have co-created 456,072 sustainable jobs for women in rural India. An amazing number that we could not have reached without the enthusiasm and talent of our experts that consult pro bono, the trust from our generous funders, and dedication from our incredible government institution and social enterprise partners in India.
Next week in our 2025-2026 Annual Report we will share our latest number of jobs co-created.
Stay tuned.
Ellen Tacoma is Women on Wings’ Co-Founder. Since 2023 she has been its Joint Managing Director with Shilpa Mittal Singh.
Ellen Tacoma co-founded Women on Wings – consulting for social entrepreneurship in 2007. Following seven years supporting international social enterprises and serving on the Women on Wings board as a non-executive, in 2023 she stepped back into the executive leadership team alongside Shilpa Mittal Singh to steer Women on Wings through its next chapter of systemic growth.
