Behind DVISSA's growth is a network of women entrepreneurs in rural Bihar and Jharkhand who handle everything from packaging to quality control.
When DVISSA began mapping its supply chain in 2019, something unexpected emerged from the data: in household-level beekeeping operations, women were doing the majority of the work — monitoring hives, timing harvests, managing extraction hygiene — but men were almost always the ones receiving payment and signing agreements. DVISSA's procurement team made a deliberate decision to change this.
Starting in 2020, DVISSA began requiring that at least one woman in every partner household be a named signatory on procurement agreements. This wasn't tokenism — it came with real consequences. Payment for honey deliveries went directly to accounts held in women's names. Training programmes were scheduled to accommodate women's schedules, not just men's. Women who demonstrated aptitude for quality assessment were invited to join DVISSA's on-ground quality team.
The results exceeded expectations. Within two years, DVISSA had 140 women as named procurement partners. By 2024, that number had grown to over 300. Many of these women have gone beyond simply being honey suppliers — they have become local entrepreneurs in their own right. Kavita Devi in Darbhanga now runs a small packaging unit that employs eight women from her village, handling makhana sorting and bagging under contract to DVISSA.
The impact is visible beyond the direct economic numbers. Women in DVISSA's partner network report higher household decision-making authority, greater access to personal savings, and increased respect within their communities. In one village in Palamu, a women's self-help group that formed around DVISSA's training programme has since pooled resources to start a goat farming collective unrelated to DVISSA entirely — using skills and confidence built through the partnership.
For DVISSA, the investment in women's economic participation is both ethical and practical. Women partners have, on average, lower batch rejection rates than the overall network — a finding the quality team attributes to more rigorous attention to hygiene protocols. They are also more likely to participate in feedback sessions, share knowledge across families, and remain partners long-term. The data and the values, in this case, point in exactly the same direction.
"DVISSA didn't give us anything we didn't already have. They just made sure we got paid for it."