When the Kudumbashree all-women construction group was formed in Ernakulam in 2013, the team, despite being trained, had to wait a year to receive a construction assignment.

The team has now worked on the construction of houses under schemes such as Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana and LIFE Mission, besides the ongoing State government project of constructing houses for flood-affected families.

Beena Paul, who was part of the initial team of 40 women trained in masonry for 90 days as a pilot project in Ernakulam in 2013, is glad she did not give up when the team did not get any work. “We would visit the Collectorate every morning to see if there was any work and return disappointed. It was almost like we were working at the Collectorate. Most people left and only two of us of the initial 40 are doing the same job,” she said.

Ms. Paul was speaking at a TiEcon conference on women in business held in the city on Saturday.

In 2014, the team got its first break with a construction project of 100 houses for tribals in the district. “We built ten houses in four months and 87 totally for the project,” she said. The terrain was challenging, there was no water, electricity or approach roads to the construction site, but they completed the construction by sheer force of will, she added.

Ms. Paul, a contractor, heads one of the seven construction teams in Ernakulam. While women would earlier work only as helpers on sites, they are now equipped to be masons and mix materials in the correct ratio, besides use levelling instruments and laying bricks. Each site employs around 10 women and each worker earns ₹750 daily. “Men would visit the site just to see how a team of women could construct a house. They would push the walls to see if anything would fall apart,” she said.

Programmes such as Kudumbashree, with an understanding of the problems that women face, were sustainable models of entrepreneurship that maximised value for the people around, said former telecom secretary Aruna Sundararajan, who inaugurated the conference.