Kochi :
When Sheeba S began selling rice and wheat flour and later cashew nuts and powdered pepper in small packets from a makeshift room attached to her small house in Kollam—an old seaport and city on the Laccadive Sea coast in Kerala—her immediate objective was to make both ends meet and if lucky to get one or two ‘mom and pop’ stores to sell the products. Twelve years into her journey as an entrepreneur, Sheeba’s Amba Foods is now taking the business to the next level—bar coding the products to give them wider acceptability especially in supermarkets, and building a new unit that will have much higher capacity.
Bindu Pallickal began selling ‘kachiya enna’, the traditional homemade conditioner, back in 2007. Now, she sells about 21 products including home-made jam, ‘thali podi’ and Brahmi oil under her unit Athira Herbal.
Sheeba and Bindu are not isolated cases. There are several hundreds of women in Kerala who are looking to expand their tiny business ventures—which are into selling anything from curry powders to pickles and jams, garments to home-made soaps, ready-to-eat items and other baking products—to running home stays, cafes, retail shops and IT firms across the state.
It is estimated that there are at least 70,000 enterprises run by women under the Kudumbashree, an women-empowering project run by the Kerala government. The Economic Review 2014 says, 25 per cent (58,562) of the 2,34,251 working small scale industry and micro small and medium entreprises (SSI/MSME) units in the state are run by women.
Kerala State Industrial Development Corporation (KSIDC), in fact, has plans to handhold the high-potential women-run ventures to scale up their business to a much bigger scale. “Our plan is to shortlist 150-200 most promising ventures from across the state. We will narrow down the list to may be 25-50 for mentoring and funding to help them scale up their operations,” said B Jyothi Kumar, executive director of KSIDC. The ‘We Summit’ to be held in Kochi on November 19, the UN Women’s Entrepreneurship Day, will be a step in this direction, said KSID officials. Over 2,000 women entrepreneurs are expected to attend the event.
source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> The Sunday Standard / by Rajesh Abraham / August 16th, 2015