KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA: The Women, Family and Community Development Ministry plans to introduce various entrepreneurship programmes to help underprivileged women, such as single mothers, earn extra income.

This is to help them deal with the present rise in cost of living following the recent hike in fuel prices, said its minister Datuk Dr Ng Yen Yen.

The programmes include teaching the single mothers and unemployed women housekeeping, tailoring, cooking, baby-sitting and even farming.

"We have already started the baby-sitting and farming courses," she said at the Parliament House yesterday.

She said the home-based baby-sitting programme has trained some 250 single mothers so far, of whom 41 were running the business from their homes.

Ng said the ministry was also monitoring a group of seven single mothers in Raub, Pahang, who were involved in planting jasmine flowers on a plot of vacant land.

The flowers were sought after by several businessman running the jasmine tea business, she added.

On housekeeping classes for women, she said this could help reduce the country's dependence on some 320,000 foreign maids.

Ng said the housekeeping programme would be offered as an entrepreneurship programme by year-end.

"In western countries, there is no such thing as live-in servants.

"But there are professional housekeepers who are employed by individuals to upkeep their homes and do the grocery shopping for them," she said.

Earlier, speaking after launching the Children's Protection and Self Defence Workshop at the Institute of Islamic Understanding, she said the ministry wanted to have laws in place to penalise negligent parents.

The ministry was collecting inputs from various quarters before deciding on coming up with legislation.

"Some say that such laws are not viable because children these days are very naughty but nevertheless, let us hear what the people have to say."