The Keralan Women's Network Minting Entrepreneurs
Kudumbashree, a government program in Kerala, has 4.3m+ members across the state. It's helping create jobs and new businesses in a state where the female unemployment rate was nearly 5x that of males in 2011.
Sindhu Balan was haunted by a story in her local paper. Six months after their wedding, a man abandoned his wife and took her gold jewelry; he had another family in the Middle East. “If they had done some careful checking...they would have found out about his character and this would have never happened,” Balan said.
Background checking can be difficult, but Balan thought of the 150 women’s groups, who met weekly in her village of Porkulam in central Kerala, and their vast family networks. Similar groups existed across the state, and they could be used to vet marriage profiles. In 2016, Balan launched Kudumbashree Matrimonial. Men are charged ₹1,000 ($14), and women can join for free. The site has 16,000 profiles and has arranged 140 weddings so far. Its users span Kerala and other Indian states. There are even users from Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and the United States. “Basically, we have profiles from wherever there are Malayalis,” Balan said.