Lakshwin Muruga

At a young age, Lakshwin Muruga had the privilege of seeing his mother build a nonprofit organisation. Through that experience, Lakshwin learnt the nitty gritty of starting an organisation from scratch and rallying others to support those in need.

The value of giving his time and effort to uplift marginalised women started during his foundation years. In his volunteer work, Lakshwin understood how much it transformed lives. One of his proudest moments was when he helped an entrepreneur raise her income by increasing her prices for a product she was losing money on.

Lakhswin moved on to pursue his undergraduate studies in Marketing with Psychology from the University of Portsmouth. Six months into his job at a multinational company, he started to reconsider work and life fulfilment. It was then that Women Of Will (WOW), an NGO focused on empowering women through entrepreneurship gained a new employee.

To Lakshwin, by helping women increase their income, they can better support their families and communities to create sustainable change. In the early years of joining WOW, Lakshwin was focused on managing projects in Sri Lanka, Nepal and rural women farmers in Sabah. WOW provides B40 women in Malaysia with business capital, training on entrepreneurship and coaching to support them in developing sustainable and profitable businesses.

To date, 2,000 women have been empowered from 23 communities. WOW works to develop women entrepreneurs into women communities and has successfully created 23 community leaders. The community leaders have been working on various community projects run by WOW, such as Community Kitchen, Community Sewing Centre, and Community Business Centre in PPR communities.

Looking into the future, Lakshwin hopes for more social support services for women to reach their full potential.

To find out more info on Women Of Will (WOW), click here.