Key Highlights:

  • BRICS Women's Business Alliance and BRICS Business Council presented their 2026 Annual Report under India's chairship.
  • WBA Chairperson Avarna Jain called for women entrepreneurs to move from participation to leadership and scale across BRICS markets.
  • Jain framed women's economic empowerment as an economic strategy rather than a sectoral issue.
  • BRICS Business Council Chair Jai Shroff called for stronger trade, investment, value chains and technology sharing among member nations.
  • Shroff aligned the Council's recommendations with India's four BRICS Chairship pillars: resilience, innovation, cooperation and sustainability.

Business Bodies Present Their Vision for BRICS Growth

The BRICS Women's Business Alliance (WBA) and the BRICS Business Council on Sunday called for expanding opportunities for women entrepreneurs, strengthening intra-BRICS trade and investment, and deepening business cooperation to drive growth across the grouping, presenting their respective 2026 Annual Reports under India's ongoing chairship.

A Push to Scale Women-Led Enterprises

BRICS WBA Chairperson Avarna Jain outlined the case for expanding support to women entrepreneurs across the bloc, noting that women across BRICS nations are already building businesses, creating jobs, driving innovation and contributing meaningfully to economic growth. "The next step is to enable more women entrepreneurs to move from participation to leadership, from small enterprise to scale and from success in one market to opportunities across BRICS," Jain said, framing the challenge less as one of initial access and more as one of scaling existing momentum into cross-border opportunity.

Reframing Women's Empowerment as Economic Strategy

Jain was explicit in positioning women's economic empowerment not as a narrow, sector-specific concern but as a broader economic strategy in its own right. This framing suggests an attempt to shift how such initiatives are prioritised within BRICS's overall economic agenda, arguing that supporting women-led enterprises carries direct implications for the bloc's aggregate economic performance, rather than functioning as a standalone social policy objective.

Specific Recommendations From the WBA

According to Jain, the WBA's recommendations centre on creating conditions that allow women-led enterprises to grow, expanding their access to capital and innovation resources, strengthening economic resilience through women-led solutions, and scaling successful initiatives across the wider BRICS grouping rather than confining them to individual member countries. Jain also acknowledged Prime Minister Narendra Modi's role in placing women-led development at the centre of India's own growth narrative, linking the WBA's broader BRICS-level advocacy to a theme already prominent in India's domestic economic policy.

A Parallel Call for Deeper Economic Integration

BRICS Business Council Chair Jai Shroff, presenting the Council's own recommendations, called for greater economic integration among BRICS countries through increased trade, investment, stronger value chains, technology sharing and new partnerships between businesses across member nations. "Our opportunity is to connect the strengths more effectively, to trade more with one another, to invest more in one another, build strong value chains, share technologies and create new partnerships among businesses," Shroff said, framing the challenge facing BRICS less as one of building new economic capacity and more as one of better utilising capacity that already exists within the grouping.

Turning Existing Capacity Into Tangible Opportunity

Shroff was direct about this distinction, noting that BRICS already possesses enormous economic capacity collectively, and that the immediate task facing member nations is translating that latent capacity into concrete opportunities for businesses and entrepreneurs. This framing implicitly acknowledges that BRICS's scale, spanning some of the world's largest emerging economies, has not yet been fully converted into proportionate levels of intra-bloc trade and investment, a gap the Business Council appears keen to help close.

Aligning With India's Chairship Pillars

Shroff explicitly tied the Business Council's recommendations to the four pillars underpinning India's BRICS Chairship this year, resilience, innovation, cooperation and sustainability, offering a concise explanation of how each pillar translates into economic value for the grouping. "Resilience gives our economy strength, innovation gives us competitiveness, cooperation gives them skill and sustainability gives them longevity," he said, effectively mapping the Business Council's private-sector priorities directly onto the summit's official thematic framework.

A Shared Call for Business-Led Participation

Taken together, the two business bodies underscored the need for stronger collaboration and greater participation of businesses across BRICS as the key mechanism for converting the grouping's substantial economic potential into tangible outcomes for entrepreneurs and enterprises, positioning private-sector engagement as a necessary complement to the government-level agreements and declarations emerging from this year's summit proceedings.