A community activity to help small business units in Kerala

The lockdown and its impact have made people innovate to overcome the crisis. A bunch of youth, including techies and students, have come forward to help small business units in Kerala, to sell their products in a gift box, with the help of a website developed by them.

Small businesses contribute to local economies immensely. They provide jobs, help to fight poverty and also help the local economy to thrive, Akash, one of the core team members, told DH.

Akash is a student at CUSAT, while others, who are part of this community activity are Sara Siddique, who has a business in UAE, Mushtaq who is an engineer in Bengaluru and students Hadiya and Amal Shamsudeen.

The small business units were affected when the Covid-19 induced lockdown was announced in March. A majority of these units were affected due to poor business, says Akash.

Lack of demand, difficulty in communicating with existing customers and digital illiteracy are among the top issues faced by these small businesses.

“Hence, we decided to start ‘Keep Kerala United’, a campaign to solve these problems for small businesses across Kerala. Our team reached out to affected small business units producing various products and curated them into gift boxes and made it available to buy from our website. The money from these gift boxes goes directly to these small business units,” said the team members.

The gift boxes contain products from different categories of taste, art, lifestyle, skincare, baby items, drinks etc.

“1 MillionSmilesKerala is our end goal,” said the team members. The team is also planning to contact actors to campaign for the same.

“Already, 15 gift boxes have been booked by the customers. Currently, we have contacted around 500 small business houses producing various products,” they said.

“The website (www.keepkeralaunited.com) also has a section where small businesses can register themselves to be part of this campaign and get help. The community activity to help the business will continue for the whole year,” add the team members.