The woman who trained forty others, then gave them her customers

Malvi Payalben Hamirbhai lives in Dhokadva, a village in Amreli district where SSKK has run the Better Cotton programme since 2015. Her father, Hamirbhai Malvi, had been associated with the programme for years. Payalben knew very little about it — she had been studying outside the village while it took root at home.

That changed when she met Manaliben through a beauty parlour training course.

Seeing the gap

What struck Payalben was not the training itself but the absence of it everywhere else. There was no skill-based training available in her village at all. Women who wanted to earn had no route to a trade, and no reason to believe one existed.

So she decided to start beauty parlour classes herself.

The obstacle was not curriculum or equipment. It was time — and permission. Rural women balance household work and farm labour, and a training session in the middle of the day competes with both. Convincing families that a few hours a week was a reasonable thing for a woman to spend on herself turned out to be the hardest part of the whole exercise.

Payalben and Manaliben worked at it through community meetings and awareness campaigns, one household at a time. They eventually launched with forty women.

What it cost her, and what she learned

Running the training pushed Payalben into unfamiliar territory of her own. She had to learn Zoom for programme meetings and Google Drive for documentation — tools she had never used. Travelling to Amreli for training sessions was daunting; it was a new environment and she went alone.

She did it anyway. The confidence that came out of that, she says, mattered as much as the technical training, and it came with something she had not expected: a network of women in the same position.

The part most programmes miss

Payalben’s own parlour grew. A business that had been barely known in the area started taking bookings well in advance, particularly around Diwali.

Then she did the thing that makes this story worth telling.

She understood what her trainees were about to walk into — a small village market, already served, with no capital and no customers. So she shared her own client base with them, passing on work she could have kept. She let them use her parlour’s equipment until they had earned enough to buy their own.

Women who had hesitated even to leave the house for a training session now run parlours of their own and contribute to their household income.

Why this is the model

It would have been easier to count forty trained women and close the file. The reason Dhokadva now has multiple working parlours instead of forty certificates is that someone with an established business chose to make room rather than defend her market.

Payalben continues to support new trainees. Her view is straightforward: the skills only count once another woman is earning from them.