The major characteristic that marks the life of middle and late adolescents is the influence of friends or peers. It is regarded as a major adolescent trait to be taken into consideration while planning for development programs that cater to youth. In major transformative educational/ skill development programs all over the world, peer education programmes have taken advantage of this trait in a positive manner. Keeping that concept in mind, Kudumbashree has developed Young Mentors program for Balasabha members. Selected youth from each district are trained to impart knowledge and skills to their peers in an easily acceptable mode and context. The young mentors were identified from the high school and higher secondary level students of balasabhas. These groups are acting as mentor group for the younger ones. They can organize and implement classes, workshops, training as per the need of the area. The first phase of Young Mentor’s (Youth Resource Person) training programme for selected Balasabha members was conducted in the months of December 2016 and January 2017. The second phase of the Young Mentors programme was conducted in the months of October, November, December 2017 and January 2018. The second phase focused on five themes namely, leader ship skills, understanding Equality from Gender perspective, power, empathy and development of organisational capacity building. So far, 480 members were trained through these.

Coastal people have to face lot of problems in life socially, economically and financially. The problems they faced are insufficient money, middlemen exploitation, health issues and lack of education. Through Kudumbashree NHGs we can prevent middle men against exploitation to some extent. But still coastal people need to depend on external agencies to avail money for their daily needs. We could empower women belong to coastal area only through providing support financially to start their livelihood. Instead of asking people belong to coastal area what’s wrong with them, the organization should take a bottom-up approach. We should go there and enquire what they really need. Should give a proper support in starting ME, Educational needs of their children and help them in paying back their debt.

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Kudumbashree provide various trainings for Kudumbashree members, CDS Chairpersons and NHG members. Training has many benefits for Kudumbashree members that they acquire new skills, increasing their contribution to new projects and building their self-esteem. Main advantage of this kind of training is that mostly trainers are from Kudumbashree’s own group. Kudumbashree members turned trainers are taking class for others. In that way we could reduce the gap between training team and the ultimate beneficiaries and people show more interest to take part in that training.

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Central Government has been doing lot of initiatives from ages for poverty eradication. In this situation Government of Kerala introduced Kudumbashree which is entrusted with the responsibility of organizing Neighborhood groups (NHGs) of underprivileged community groups. The objectives of Kudumbashree include empowering these NHGs by providing them opportunities for socio-economic empowerment, representation in public policy discussions and developing programs to address their needs in the area of livelihood and development.

Kudumbashree get great appreciation from all over the world because of the work and motives behind it. Problems like Gender inequality, discrimination on the basis of gender, caste, religion etc., serious diseases, and violation of human rights create loneliness and depression which is more severe than poverty. This is why along with poverty eradication we aimed at these major problems and decided to start Special NHGs consisting of those who suffer mental and physical challenges (PWDs). Along with this it is decided to start Special NHGs for Transgender and elderly.

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Kudumbashree, the poverty eradication mission of Kerala, aims to enhance the women's economic development and enable women to become 'active citizens'. There is no doubt that the programme had been largely achieving in respect of the numbers of women involved, their levels of engagement with the local governments, and their increased ability to save money and access subsidized credit. The core objective of the initiative is to create awareness among the women in grass root level about their social responsibilities and improve their standard of living through knowledge.

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Social inclusion and universal reach have been important strategies that Kudumbashree has stressed upon since its inception. With a view to reduce marginalization of disadvantaged groups and strengthen initiatives for social inclusion, ‘Disha Campaign’ was launched in January 2017. The objective of the campaign has been to form special NHGs of groups like the elderly, migrants, members of the transgender community, persons with disabilities, members of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes communities as well as families belonging to coastal hamlets. Around 9,068 special NHGs were formed as part of this initiative. Strengthening neighbourhood activities of Kudumbashree was also an important component of the campaign, as part of which, a self-evaluation and grading exercise was carried out by all 2.58 lakh NHGs on 28th January, 2017. These NHG meetings were held across the state at the same time (between 10 am to 5 pm). Ministers, MPs, MLAs and Local Self Government representatives participated in these meetings. The meeting was also used as a platform to promote and create awareness on the objectives and purpose of the ‘Nava Kerala Mission’ which seeks to address the problems faced by people in four key areas – health, education, agriculture and housing.

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Participatory Assessment of Entitlements (PAE) is a SHG level tool that helps in generation of awareness on various entitlements(Government schemes) and local self-governance. The community cadre of the SHG network facilitates this exercise in the Gram Panchayats. The SHG members respond to each of the questions by tying ribbons of different colours around their wrist as a mark of having access to a particular entitlement. The use of ribbons makes the process more vibrant and interactive. Using PAE, the community understands the gap in entitlement access in each of the member’s families and the database that is created serves as the baseline for measuring success in achieving entitlements by the community. After the completion of the exercise in all the SHGs, the data is consolidated and the Village Organization (second tier of federation) sets achievable targets for achieving the gap in access to entitlements. Subsequently, joint consultative meetings between VOs and Gram Panchayatsare conducted for sharing these plans and working together. The entire exercise helps in generating a collective energy and positive environment for the Panchayat and SHGs to work together.

It is a space established in collaboration with Local Self Government to coordinate the activities for gender development and women empowerment under local government. Local Self Governments will provide infrastructure facilities and Kudumbashree will coordinate the activities and manage the running of Centre. Kudumbashree Gender resource persons and community counselors will be managed the center and facilitate the programmes. This year Kudumbashree aims to start 5 centers in a district. It aim to • Capacitate women in different levels • Analyze the status of women and design projects • To prevent and address the atrocities against women and children in the area • Support to Jagratha Samithi and other bodies to address the issues of women & children • Organize gender sensitization training to the elected representatives and other community leaders • Counseling support to the needy • Impart knowledge and resources for the community development programmes • Small studies and researches based on gender development and promote internships. • Convergent programmes of different departments

The concept of micro placement drive is arranging one or two employer at a small place for small number of job seekers. This concept also helps in DDU GKY candidates for getting jobs in their own locality. Most of the employers expect above mention sectors have small number of vacancies in accounting, administration, frond office, clerical staffs etc. In this Circumstances Micro placement drive helps to employers for selecting suitable candidates from a small group of Jobseekers.

DDU-GKY, the skill and placement initiative of the Microstry of Rural Development (MoRD) is a significant initiative that the Government of India and Kerala State have embarked upon to turn the advantage of our young population to become the largest pool of technically trained manpower in the country/world by investing adequately in their skilling and employability, turning this youth potential into reality. ‘DDU-GKY’ aims at skilling rural poor youth and providing them with jobs in the organized sector

Kudumbashree is facilitating the mobilization of aspirants from different parts of Kerala through concerted community action in partnership with Project Implementing Agencies (PIA). The major role of Kudumbashree is to disseminate the project information, identify the right beneficiaries, counsel and motivate the candidates and track the candidates.

Kudumbashree through its CDS-ADS-NHG structure has organized numerous camps at the panchayat, block and district level. Through this active participation in mobilization and follow up, Kudumbashree could able to complete training for 21, 617 students and placement for 12,000 candidates. Reaching out to the community is a humongous task involved in training and capacity building, public relations, social networking and last mile delivery. Active community based resource persons are required for support for this activity who know the local community, the youth and their aspirations. ThusKudumbashree has launched a new scheme for incentivizing community tracking and mobilization by organizing a pool of Community based Volunteers. As part of this scheme each Community Development Society are advised to select one community Volunteer and delegate the responsibility of mobilising, tracking and maintaining “Naipunya” register (skill register). Based on the performance of the community volunteers, Kudumbashree district mission will release the incentive to concerned CDS and CDS will release the amount to Community Volunteer. It is aimed that the community will take more ownership about the program through this intervention and reach out to the right beneficiary.