Jilin women taking part in a handicraft program for embroidery, on May 24. [Photo by Shi Lei/ chinajilin.com.cn]

The Women's Federation of Jilin province, based in the capital, Changchun, has started three female employment projects - e-shops, handicrafts, and housekeeping - to give female labor a chance in areas that are becoming popular now.

Jilin is an old industrial center for China that was over-exploited over the past decades but now faces serious employment problems. So, to relieve this pressure and improve women's employment situation, the federation turned to innovative ideas that can inspire women and give them the desire to start a business of their own.

The e-business program, which actually began in 2013, trains females in ways to set up their own e-shop, covering management, connecting with real enterprises, purchasing, start-ups, and advertising to give them business ideas with zero investment and zero risk.

One beneficiary of the program, Wang Chunbo, who is running a fresh foods e-store, says that e-commerce has grown in the province with strong government supports and that she's seen an increasing number of customers annually. There is also training in photography for shop owners who don't know much about online photos so they can promote their products, and free webpage and online shop designs, and supply sources.

The federation, in training, uses provincial resources such as institutions of higher learning and vocational education centers, to establish training centers and getting help from professionals and experts so that it has a training system complete with textbooks. It has trained 3,267 women so far and has seen the birth of 1,960 e-shops.

It also focuses on university education, for example, Qiu Huimin, a 2014 graduate of the Jilin Business and Technology College, whose father is a bee keeper in Changbai Mountain, and who naturally took part in the program to help her father run an online honey shop called Uncle Qiu's Honeyland. Thanks to her help, her father's honey is selling better and has 13 online franchise outlets and 10 off-line.

In the area of handicrafts, there is an advantage of flexibility for housewives, with fewer investment risks, and it can be green and environmentally friendly, so the federation naturally turned to this program back in 2010, which combines tradition and modernity in culture to help women make a living with handicrafts and since then, the many new handicrafts have gained an audience in other cities. Then, an enterprise incubation center was started in 2012 to further encourage women in the handicrafts industry by providing a workplace and facilities, legal and policy consultation, and fiscal and market management.

In commenting on the results of the program, the head of the Qingyue Weaving Company in the city of Yushu, Li Xiulan, describes her gratitude for the center's help in exhibiting her art products, which now sell overseas.

The third work program, housekeeping services, allows the province to export labor outside, mainly by helping the women look for jobs such as baby-sitting, home nursing, medical care, as well as cooking and cleaning. It provides training sessions and job opportunities across the country and its standardized mode of operation has even helped the group of female Jilin housekeepers a name brand in other provinces. The program has helped 55,059 females find work in other parts of China, and 53,045 fine employment in Jilin, where they have a good reputation and few customer complaints.

Li Xiaojie, the president of the Jilin Women's Federation, says they are promoting more programs to improve female employment.