Udyogini was set up to co-ordinate and facilitate management training for grassroots women's groups for the World Bank Institute-funded Women's Enterprise Management Training Outreach Program (WEMTOP). This was a three-year participatory action-learning project aimed at developing an appropriate curriculum and visual-based training materials on micro enterprise management to build capacity in NGOs to do enterprise as well as to train women at the grassroots to manage enterprises. The training program consisted of Grassroots Management Training (GMT) carried out for women producers and the Training of Enterprise Support Teams (TEST) for the trainers of GMT. 

During the WEMTOP phase, Udyogini worked with 21 Voluntary Organizations (NGOs) in three states of Orissa, Bihar, and Rajasthan. The outcome was not only a total of 130 trainers, 1,077 trained producer women and NGOs who established enterprise programs, but, more importantly, an innovative grassroots enterprise management curriculum and a menu of training materials to make semi-literate and illiterate women understand basic aspects of managing businesses. Women learnt, among other things, how to cost and price their products, how to plan their production, undertake a market survey and do marketing. The curriculum and materials have been used many times over since WEMTOP and has helped us train over 3500 enterprise promoting staff from NGOs and government with a combined GMT-eligible base of at least 3,50,000 women.

It was exciting that Udyogini was able to train so many women and NGOs that worked with women and continues to do so. But to remain at the cutting-edge in building women's capacity for enterprise, Udyogini had to help them maneuver in emerging and complex market conditions. This meant piloting and scaling a range of business services directly at the grassroots to from mobilization to market.  Hence, in 2002, for its grassroots initiatives, Udyogini selected sectors of the economy in which women were concentrated in large numbers and in which they were mainly producers or wage laborers. It selected locations that were remote and, hence, underserved but still offered a resource base – either skills or natural resources -- that could be harnessed for enterprise development. Udyogini undertakes microenterprise initiatives in such locations covering a range of business development services (BDS).

By early 2010, Udyogini had a presence in 7 states of North, Central and Eastern India working on aggregating and/or value-addition to commodities as diverse as lac, mahua, honey, bamboo, silk, other medicinal plants, maize, mustard, vegetables, and pulses and services like child-care centers --- demonstrating considerable scale and breadth of experience and impact. It had also facilitated registration of producers' institutions called UJAS in three of its locations. UJAS is now an established national brand identity for producer-owned entities and business products. 

Most significantly, in 2010, it has taken up the challenge of microenterprise development for older sex workers who want to move out of the profession and want to ensure that their young daughters develop employable skills so that they are not vulnerable to sex work.