Vocational skills for disadvantaged Bengali girls

In 2008 a team of volunteers from Hands Around the World worked with local builders to construct a second school building for the New Life Centre school in Sarberia, West Bengal. The classrooms are used in the morning until midday for the school, but since 2008 when the building was completed, one of the classrooms has been used in the afternoons for a Tailoring workshop for local women. They complete a course here and receive a certificate. The trainees are young women who have dropped out of school with no qualifications, and need vocational training. Mr Naskar provides this in the Vocational Training Centre (VTC).

Since 2008 over 200 women have completed the course, a lot of them becoming self-employed in the area to make garments for shops or to sell from home.

Hands Around the World ran this appeal through GlobalGiving to support Vocational Skills for Disadvantaged Bengali Girls, and thanks to your donations, we reached our target and were able to provide additional support for this programme. 

Alindra set about ordering new sewing machines and fabric for the women who are training at the VTC and you can see the results in the photos below.

Chumpa who is shown below with one of the engineers assembling the new machines, and stocking the fabric cupboard, is a member of Alindra’s extended family. She came with Alindra and his family from Purulia, where he worked for the Leprosy Mission in 2003 and had already studied tailoring. Chumpa has been in charge of the VTC since 2008.

The Tailoring course consists of learning how to make patterns, which is what some of the new recruits are doing in the picture above.

The funding supplied not only new machines but plenty of fabric, which the trainees have already started making into garments.

Many thanks GlobalGiving for the opportunity to help this enterprising scheme, and thank you to all those who funded this vital source of income for the women of Sarberia.