Remya, a 30-year-old newbie entrepreneur, wants to starts her own bakery and cake shop, taking her home baking skills a notch up to local markets. Her dream: a decent income every month and being able to tap local customers for birthday parties and home celebrations.

Shinila, around 35 years of age, has a way with scrap papers; she turns them into usable paper bags. Now, she is eyeing to put up a small-scale unit to produce paper bags on a scale.

Ebily, a 26-year-old, has a different plan though. With her husband, Adiva, a travel agent, she is soon starting a playschool for the kids of working women from her neighbourhood.

Then there’s another Remya, a middle-aged woman belonging to the economically and socially backward scheduled tribe called Uraly; she runs a small café from her home, but now wants to scale it up. Her friend Sushila has a catering business, named as Ruchi Catering, run along with three of her women friends and members of a neighbourhood group. Apart from catering to the weddings and other celebratory events, Sushila has a special supply of home-made food to the patients admitted to hospitals around her village. She intends to build it into a large scale. That’s not all. Cut to Surya, a musician who runs an all-woman musical band that plays bamboo-made instruments, from harmonium to flute to guitar. They are called the Malamuzhakki band.

The band now wants to go global – and so needs financial support and training.

These are assorted micro and small entrepreneurs from across Wayanad, the Aspirational District of Kerala, who are closeted in a two-day entrepreneurship development programme (EDP) hosted by the Kudumbashree community development society (CDS) at Kalpetta, the district headquarters. “Every single woman in this training here has plans or ideas that they want to realise,” says Rekha K.K., a micro enterprise consultant at the Start-up Village Entrepreneurship Programme of the Kerala’s widely acclaimed poverty eradication mission called Kudumbashree. Rekha’s role is to train women, help them develop their business plans, and hand-hold them. “It’s not a job for me but a mission,” she says of her love for her work. “There’s no bigger fun than to see these ordinary women flourishing with their businesses and growing in confidence, believe me.”

Over the next year, the Kudumbashree collective backed by the State Government would help these members actualise their dreams and start off on a journey of their own.

From running tens of micro-small-medium and large enterprises to delivery of services to leading social actions, from dealing with women’s empowerment to tackling violence against women, to gender discrimination, Kudumbashree collective today virtually does most things imaginable. As the assistant district mission officer Vasu Pradeep informed, “Kudumbashree collectives are also into constructing rural homes, some initial experiments have been encouraging.”

“It’s a household name,” says Reshma Nair, a young block coordinator with the Kudumbashree district mission office in Wayanad. “Almost everyone knows of it,” she says.

Over the years, the collective and the programme have evolved organically within the State. The challenge, as Reshma puts it, is to bring in young and educated women into the fold.

Kudumbashree in Malayalam language means ‘prosperity of the family’; it represents the mission and Community Network. Set up in 1997 following the recommendations of a Task Force appointed by the State Government, its formation was in the context of the devolution of powers to the Panchayat Raj Institutions (PRIs) in Kerala.

Kudumbashree has a three-tier structure for its women community network, with Neighbourhood Groups (NHGs) at the lowest level, Area Development Societies (ADS) at the middle level, and Community Development Societies (CDS) at the local Government level. The community structure that Kudumbashree accepted is the one that evolved from the experiments in Alappuzha Municipality and Malappuram in early 1990s, according to the official literature.

The mission’s community network was extended to cover the entire State in three phases during 2000-2002. Today it boasts of around 300,000 NHGs affiliated to nearly 19,500 ADSs and over a thousand CDSs with a total membership of 4.5 million women. Kudumbashree membership is open to all adult women, limited to one membership per family. In 2011, the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD), Government of India recognised Kudumbashree as the State Rural Livelihoods Mission (SRLM) under the National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM).

The focus is to invest socially and economically into women. “Very rarely will you come across instances of loan defaults,” says Jayesh Vellery, the district project manager for tribal sector.

Income generation apart, the collective lends impeccable social support to women. Remember, says Reshma, this is a state that sees a lot of men going to gulf for work. Back home, while being alone and tending to children, women find emotional and financial support from their networks. Across India, Kudumbashree is like a role-model for similar movements – Umed in Maharashtra, Sanjeevani in Karnataka, or Mission Shakti in Odisha. Not just that, it being one of the global best practices for poverty eradication and women empowerment, Kudumbashree has been selected as one of the partners for the Feed the Future – International training programme, an Indo-US joint initiative aimed at helping over two dozen developing countries of Africa and Asia to emulate the successful model adopted by India in agriculture and poverty reduction. The mission provides training and knowledge sharing for with these countries on its best practices.

Indira Sukumaran, chairperson of the Community Development Society in Kalpetta, put it very succinctly, “Every rupee spent on women is every rupee earned.” A highly motivated leader and motivator, Sukumaran has some 570 neighbourhood groups under her jurisdiction. Her plan, she says, is to make all these groups productive and income oriented so that every single member has financial stability. “They have to have something to make their own money, even if a small sum every month,” she says. “It makes a big difference to their confidence and personality.”

If we paint the enterprises run by the network of this collective on the Wayanad or state map, we will get a million pink dots jostling for space. They would be like a mosaic of small within big.