Rekha rejoices in the fond memories of her childhood when her mom and grandmother used to make mouth-watering pickles at home. Her passion for pickles grew at home and she started her pickle business 3 years ago. Before the pickles business, Rekha had a sweets (mithai) business which she ran for almost 13 years. Her current focus is on pickle business and transferring her skill of making pickles to women living across the country looking forward to starting their entrepreneurial journey. 

Disaster Experience 
Rekha had switched her business from sweets to pickles. She already had a good customer base who supported her in her pickle business too. Her business was prospering and she had made a good network for selling her products overseas as well. When the pandemic loomed over the world it affected Rekha’s business a lot. She had already prepared the orders for her overseas clients which got stockpiled at her store as the world had gone into the hibernation phase. Staying at home and doing nothing was not in Rekha’s nature, she is constantly on the move. 

When she came across the chance to get associated with Udhyami Utthan Campaign and get training on ‘Building Resilient Businesses’ she thought this could be a great learning experience while staying at home.

“Fostering Resilience of Women-Led Businesses (including home-based women producers) and Consumers” is a project being implemented by Thulo.Com and Enterprise for Management, Economic Reform, and Gender Equality (EMERGE). The project is supported by United States Agency for International Development (USAID)’s Tayar Nepal - Improved Disaster Risk Management Project and also contributes to Udhyami Utthan (UU - https://udhyamiutthan.com/about-us/ ), an entrepreneurship empowerment initiative.

Experience as a Project Beneficiary
Rekha is super passionate about her business and equally passionately trains other women entrepreneurs to make pickles. While being occupied with her work she took out some time for her learning too. 
The overall training package was a great learning experience. She felt that learning to manage the disaster risk is extremely important for all the entrepreneurs whether they run a small or big enterprise. Therefore, she felt that keeping everything aside she found the business continuity management module extremely essential for her to run a resilient business.

Rekha shared that her experience of e-commerce through Thulo.Com has been wonderful. Using digital platforms to market and sell the products is the need of current times while the pandemic is still on the surface. 

Rekha believes, “E-commerce is the key to growing MSMEs during any kind of disaster as e-commerce companies can build up the system to onboard these entrepreneurs and cater the hard to reach the market with their products.”

Future Plan
Rekha wishes to grow her business and plans to build the skills of hundreds of women across the country to become entrepreneurs. She will be continuing her association with Thulo.Com and Udhyami Utthan as she wants to keep up with her learnings in the future as well.

Rekha is the owner of RIK Food Udyog.
Visit her Online Shop at Thulo.com/uu