Upscaling the Kalanjiam Program: The Institution aims to reach out the community banking program to large number of poor women. The institution would evolve new methods of upscaling and develop innovative strategies to reach the left out poor. As part of upscaling the Kalanjiam Foundation follows the following approaches.

• Direct action by Kalanjiam Foundation

• Partnership with other NGOs –Promoting Kalanjiam Affiliates

• Acting as a resource centre – Capacity Building support to Govt., NGOs and Banks

In addition to direct action, the organisation would promote collaboration with other institutions guided by the philosophy of enabling and self reliance and willing to reach large number of poor. It would also act as a resource centre to build the capacity of other players in the sector and also influence the policies to create an enabling environment for reaching out the ‘Community Banking’ to many poor.

Create, Nurture and Sustain Community Organisations of women in Microfinance for Development: The Foundation will focus on reaching large number of poor women in thousands of villages in the country through savings and credit program and promote nested institutions, owned and controlled by poor women living in rural, urban and tribal contexts. It will involve in promotion, development and sustaining of these institutions at various levels and link them with mainstream financial institutions to channelise funds. Nested institutions (groups, clusters and federations) are promoted to provide sustainable microfinance services to begin with and these people organisations would be supported to graduate as civic institutions in the course of time to catalyse development action. In addition to providing financial services these institutions provide space for practicing democracy at the grassroots through developing women leaders.

Deepening the Microfinance for addressing poverty: The Institution would go beyond microfinance and develop methods and processes which would significantly address poverty. Microfinance seen as a means to organise the community and linkages are being established with other development institutions to impact livelihoods and address other development needs of poor. Focus would be given to build the capacities of people and their organisations to go beyond microfinance. The deepening of microfinance would include experimentation and development of suitable products to address development issues of poor in addition to providing business development services for sustaining the livelihoods of poor.

The guiding principles that are fundamental to the institution are

Promote Self-regulation and self-renewal processes both at peoples organizations and at Kalanjiam Foundation. ‘Self-regulation’ would be seen as a critical element of growth and development of the people organizations at each level. The groups, clusters, federations and movement would act as self regulatory organizations at each level and evolve the suitable process and mechanisms for practicing self-regulation. Promoting value based leadership and governance practices would guide the self-regulation for constant self-renewal and growth of the Kalanjiam Organisations.

Promotion of people institutions with the prime focus on self help, mutuality and sustainability. The primary group controls the supra structures to ensure the practice of democratic management and sustain the institutions. The focus will be on enabling the women and build the leadership to address gender inequalities. Building nested institutions of poor women through constant evolution and devolution of roles to build the grassroots leadership and capacity of the women to sustain their institutions and address their development.

Value collaboration with mainstream financial and development institutions and promote direct linkages between community organisations and mainstream institutions to demonstrate the viability of linkages and sustain the collaboration. Promoting direct linkages between primary groups and mainstream financial institutions to ensure continuity and build mutually sustainable and viable relationships. This provides an opportunity for the poor to create demand on the mainstream and establish long term working relationship. The collaboration would move from ‘financial’ dimension to development dimension. The focus of collaboration would be to broaden the perspective of partners to promote development.

Promotion of sustainable nested institutions and graduate them as civic institutions. Going beyond microfinance to focus on poverty and women development through supporting and promotion of livelihoods, health, education and other social development of poor, more importantly to contextualise the community banking to address poverty. In order to address poverty the nested institutions of poor would be graduated as civic institutions. Microfinance alone cannot address poverty and there is a need to find out the relation between microfinance and other development needs of poor.