Kudumbashree members to be digitally empowered

‘It will enable them to find an online market space’

Kudumbashree Mission launched a technical literacy initiative as part of digitally empowering its lakhs of Neighbourhood Group (NHG) members, on International Literacy Day on Tuesday.

The Ernakulam district mission started the programme with the online training of its 101 panchayat-level resource persons in small groups. They are being given training by seven councillors of Snehitha, Kudumbashree’s district-level gender help desk, and 27 community-level councillors who have been drafted in as master trainers.

This will be followed by the training of 1,838 ward-level resource persons, 9,500 vigilant group members and around 27,000 NHG facilitators. They will be imparted a week-long training, which would be wrapped up by the end of this month coinciding with the launch of training for NHG members.

Ernakulam has around 27,000 NHGs in 1,000 Community Development Societies accounting for over three lakh members. Any NHG member with a smartphone can be part of the initiative.

“While the immediate objective is to overcome the constraints of the pandemic-induced limitations in meeting, there is the larger goal of digitally empowering NHG members by familiarising them with basic online activities and various commonly-used features like online payment, online meeting, etc. It will also enable them to find an online market space for their produce thus taking the benefits of the programme way beyond the pandemic,” said Shine T. Money, district programme manager, Gender, Kudumbashree Mission.

The training will be restricted to an hour or so daily for a week as the focus will be on basic online skills. Audio-video tutorials will be shared with the members and their finer points will be discussed during online training sessions. Training sessions will be held in groups of 15 so that the trainer is able to attend to each participant.

The programme is also expected to help members to access the recently launched app, ‘Annasree’ for food and related-products of Kudumbashree enterprises, in a much more efficient way.