Amazon India on Wednesday tied up with Kudumbashree in Kerala for the ‘Amazon Saheli’ programme to promote women entrepreneurs. An MoU was signed by Kudumbashree executive director A Harikishore and Amazon India director and seller experience Pranav Bhasin in the presence of the minister of local self governance of the State AC Moideen.
Amazon Saheli is the flagship programme by Amazon to support, train and empower women in Kudumbashree to provide them with a platform to sell their products on Amazon.
To enable this, Amazon will provide a host of benefits to selected Kudumbashree workers to sell online at zero cost initially. In a pilot test that Amazon conducted, over 300 entrepreneurs were selected and trained by Amazon for this purpose, according to reports.
Speaking to the media, Pranav Bhasin, director of Amazon India said that a large section of the company’s sellers today were women and it has been growing ever since Amazon launched the Saheli programme. With Kudumbashree on board, this will increase and transform the lives of more women entrepreneurs, he said.
In the pilot workshop conducted by Kudumbashree, products from grocery and personal care made by women had been added into the Kudumbashree account and these have received orders from various states such as Himachal Pradesh, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh etc, according to reports.
Kudumbashree, launched in 1997 in Kerala, is the largest women empowerment programme in the world, with over 1,000 community development societies and four million women as members across the 14 districts of Kerala.
Amazon Saheli currently works with 17 partners and has over a lakh women entrepreneurs on board. In its training workshops, it will conduct training sessions in imaging, cataloging, packaging and shipping of products, inventory and account management etc. for women sellers.
The Kudumbashree programme took birth in 1998 in Kerala as a community-driven initiative that aimed at encouraging a woman to ‘save’ for the future. And after nearly two decades, Kudumbashree is considered a lifeline by countless women who have reaped its benefits to carve out an identity of their own in society. Read it's astounding history here.