Engage&Empower girls & boys for Girl Effect-India

Dear Donors,

Warm greetings from IDEA Foundation!

We are happy to share with you the success of our women empowerment programs for the underprevileged communiteis. Your contribution made a huge difference in the lives of many.

As you know ,Maharashtra presents the co-existence of both affluence and poverty at high levels. In India, economy has gone through a faster structural shift from Agriculture to industry.Then cities like Mumbai, Pune have attracted a lot of people from all over the country because of the job opportunities in the industrial sector.  Without much education to their credit many of them ended up taking up daily wages jobs with minimum pay which is better than whatever they could earn from agriculture. Most of them live in slums, even the basic facilities of proper sanitation and clean drinking water do not adequately reach the people.

Education of girls was not given much importance and employability of women is something these communities were never even dreamt of. This resulted in increased poverty as 50% of the population represented by women are jobless. These women, most of them married at a very young age , as soon as they complete 10^th grade are supposed to be at home taking care of the family and children. 

Here is where IDEA started our Women empowerment Initiative. Our 3 months training includes Home chef, tailoring classes, bag making, beautician classes etc which do not need more than high school education. Though the women were very apprehensive about their abilities to develop their skills , after 3 months training with us they have become so confident and started earning as much as their husbands earn, just by utilising their free time at home.

These women earn nearly Rs.10,000 rupees a month, which is really big help for their families welfare as well as to meet their personnel needs. They also take initiative to inform their neighbors and relatives to join our training classes.

Success Story – Sunita had completed 10^th and married at the age of 15. Her husband work as a PMC conductor and she has 2 school going children. When she joined our training program she never thought she will be able to do so much.  She has completed our NDLM program for basic  computer course, which gave her confidence in her ability. She could use computer and smart phone with ease and learned to use computer  for filling forms , paying bills and booking tickets etc.  After completing NDLM , she joined our tailoring classes and learned to stitch and started earning a good sum.  About 9 women from her community joined our tailoring courses. We have also taught these women bag making, in a very short time they learned to make good quality bags.  Recently, we have given them an order for 500 bags and they have completed it in 10 days.  Sunita was happy and content with herself that she really feels empowered and capable with her new skills and abilities to support her family. They have formed their own SHG group and identified their own special talents. Another girl -Mukta has marketing skills , so she decided to do the marketing for their products.  Now, whenever there is an issue they find a solution for it and they have formed a strong bond between them , which is helping them for a sustainable development of their community. For us , it is time to move on , to another community . Our sincere and hard working social workers are our treasure , they work from grass root level to mobilize the community and to  make these women aware of the different possibilities to get rid of the vicious circle of poverty.

Thank you dear donors , your generous donations are making it possible for us to do so much for our society, making it a place to live in harmony.