We are more than one-and-a-half years into the COVID-19 pandemic which has devastated lives and livelihoods alike across the world.
A large section of the society, especially the vulnerable sections, whose livelihoods have been badly hit.
Even among them, there are some who refuse to give up and through their sheer resilience are fighting back and are rebuilding their lives.
Munda Jublina Kandulna, a native of Ambatoli village in Jharkhand’s Khunti district is one such person.
Runs a small tailoring shop
The 45-year-old was running a small tailoring shop at Ambatoli village. Her livelihood and household requirements were met through the earnings from her shop. But the sudden complete lockdown in 2020 forced Jublina to shut down her business.
With Jublina’s main income source gone, the family of six struggled to put food on their table.
Initially, she tried joining her husband in the agriculture field but did not get enough returns as they only had a small plot of land. Both incomes, that of her husband and herself, were not enough to meet the household requirements.
It was during these struggles Jublina got introduced to entrepreneurship training.With the help of Torpa Rural Development Society for Women, an NGO and EdelGive Foundation, Jublina learnt entrepreneurship and improved her skills on the sewing machine.
In the early days of COVID-19 masks were in short supply, especially in the rural areas.
Seeing the requirement of masks as well as the unavailability of masks in the remote villages, TRDSW asked Jublina to start stitching them.
Jublina started with stitching reusable cloth masks from whatever leftover cloth she had. She began by stitching only 20 reusable cloth masks. All sold out at Rs. 20/- per piece in Ambatoli village, and she earned Rs 400/-.
However as the demand for masks increased, she stitched around 50 to 100 reusable cloth masks per day and sold them in nearby villages.
It wasn’t easy, Jublina and her husband travelled to nearby villages by foot and bicycle covering, mostly forest terrain and hilly area with no proper roads and erratic weather of extreme heat and occasional heavy showers of rain.
Her determination paid off and in a couple of months, Jublina was earning around Rs 20,000/- per month, which is a big amount for the family.
“Now I earn more than whatever I earned earlier. I can now meet all the requirements of the household. I have expanded and put up another tailoring center in Koytoli, she said”.
Other than selling masks, Jublina also distributed them for free to children, widows and the elderly people in the community.
With the support of her family, Jublina is now expanding her business into more cloth products such as pants, nightdress, nightsuit, etc., as well as teaching the tailoring entrepreneurship skills to other village women to secure their livelihood and pave the way for income generation for the vulnerable section of the community.
According to Naghma Mulla, the CEO of EdelGive Foundation, women like Jublina face several challenges in their entrepreneurial journey.
“Women entrepreneurs in rural and semi-urban spaces often face several challenges in getting their enterprises off the ground. However, when enabled and supported, women are capable of building and managing sustainable business ventures which yield stable and positive outcomes,” she said.
According to EdelGive Foundation’s ‘Landscape Study on Women Entrepreneurship’ which highlights how empowering women economically can have a positive impact on them, their families and society at large.
“Findings from the landscape study highlighted that 73% of women reported an increase in self-confidence, and 19% reported improved self-esteem because of the financial independence that they gained by starting their own enterprise,” she said.
Article Credit: indiatimes