For some women in Singapore, a full-time job is simply out of reach. Caregiving duties, health challenges or family circumstances make fixed office hours impossible to sustain. A local charity, Rise and Thrive, was built around that reality, helping women from lower-income households turn home-based skills into a steadier income.
The charity has its roots in an unplanned moment of volunteering. In 2019, Sapna Kewalramani Malhotra began tutoring a secondary school student in mathematics. She soon stepped back, feeling she was not the right person to teach the subject. Instead, the volunteer manager who had paired them made an unusual suggestion: help the girl's mother.
That mother, Nooril Azurah Suntek Noor, had five children, one with special needs, and was baking Nutella tarts from a small rental flat to make ends meet. She was earning only a few hundred dollars a month and needed to earn more. Drawing on her own experience running a branding and illustration business from home, Kewalramani began meeting her each week to talk through pricing, packaging, product differentiation and branding. The business, Qwalaaa, grew.
More introductions followed, first to a woman running a home-based Malay food catering business, then to another selling murukku part-time. As word spread, volunteers with backgrounds in marketing, communications, finance and photography offered their time. What started as an informal effort became a registered charity in 2025.
To date, Rise and Thrive says it has helped 91 women from lower-income households build small home-based businesses, ranging from food and craft work such as sewing and crocheting to beauty services like facials and manicures. Qwalaaa now takes larger corporate and repeat catering orders, and Azurah has since moved from her rental flat into a Housing and Development Board home.
Kewalramani, 40, a British national and Singapore permanent resident, comes from an established entrepreneurial family. In 2018 she joined the family's Kewal Ramani Foundation as director of grants, overseeing funding for education, health and programmes for women and children across India, Singapore, Nigeria and the United Kingdom. Wanting to do more on the ground, she took courses under the National Volunteer and Philanthropy Centre's Company of Good and began volunteering with South Central Community Family Services, where she now sits on the board.
Her grant-making work, she said, revealed a gap. Foundations could fund organisations that help women return to stable employment, but many of those women later dropped out of their jobs because they needed to be physically present at home. "A stable home is the foundation on which financial stability is built," she told CNA Women, arguing that income alone does not help if a family is struggling.
Rise and Thrive structures its support as a roughly three-year journey for the women it calls "Risers." The first six months focus on business essentials such as branding, pricing and marketing, taught by a mentor. The women are then connected to corporate and consumer sales through the charity's network, with optional add-ons like book-keeping to build financial literacy, before moving into an alumni programme where some return as ambassadors and mentors themselves.
Risers are referred through social service agencies. To qualify, a household's per capita income must be below S$1,600, and applicants need access to a phone and a tablet or laptop, basic business English, a marketable skill or product and a willingness to commit. Demand outstrips capacity: last year the charity accepted 20 of 47 referrals because of limited mentors, and it has 30 places this year. The community spans teenage mothers, grandmothers, former offenders and women whose husbands are incarcerated.
The charity says it invests about S$6,000 in each woman over three years, funded by grants, donations, corporate partnerships and its own programme income. In March 2026, public donations were set to be matched dollar-for-dollar under Tote Board's government-backed Enhanced Fund-Raising Programme. After a year or so in the programme, Risers typically earn an average of around S$1,300 a month, helping them through a period when full-time work is not an option; many return to full-time jobs later.
One of them is Chitra Munusamy, 47, founder of the home bakery Chitz Bakez. A mother of three, she turned to baking to support her daughters after years of part-time and temporary work, and said the programme helped her grow both her business and her confidence. "I bake with a lot of love and extra care," she told CNA Women. "I don't want people to buy from me out of pity. I want to make the best products so that people who eat them feel good."
For Kewalramani, the case for supporting such businesses is also a case for how Singaporeans spend. Buying from a home business takes more effort than a quick purchase at a shop, she acknowledged, but the effect goes further than the transaction. "When you purchase consciously, host consciously, gift consciously, you are investing in women who invest in themselves," she said.