Help Women in India Become Professional Drivers

Since April 2014, we have reached out to thousands of resource poor women and their families and enrolled 42 new women in Delhi for the Women on Wheels programme to enable them to become professional drivers. Your generous donations contributed to this amazing achievement – thank you for your kind support. 

About Azad’s outreach and mobilization activity

Our outreach activities mobilise poor women to exercise their choice of living lives with dignity by choosing bold and remunerative livelihood opportunities. We also work with women and their families and communities to create a more supportive environment for the women to fulfill their dreams.

To achieve this we work with a team of community mobilisers, who are supported by a full time team of mobilization programme officers and coordinators. Our outreach work is taking place in five locations: east, south and north Delhi, Gurgaon, and Jaipur.

How do we do it? We start with transit walks gathering information about an area. This helps us plan the next steps to reach out to women in this location. Afterwards, we organize large public events to raise awareness about our programme, and smaller events to enable one to one or group conversations. Through meetings and employment camps we identify women and families who might be interested in the Women on Wheels programme. This is followed by more focused conversations with interested women about driving as a profession to understand the obstacles and enabling factors they face, and confirm if they are eligible for the programme. We also share inspiring stories to get them motivated. Women who are eligible and decide to join the programme are provided with more counseling if needed. We make home visits and speak to family members to motivate them to support women in their bold decision. We then invite the women to visit our office to finalise the enrollment and confirm the conviction with which the women are joining the programme.

Your support helped us reach out to women like Rajkumari…

Rajkumari is a 22-year-old woman from Jahangirpuri in North Delhi. Rajkumari wanted to be a police officer but she had to leave her studies after class 8^th due to difficult economic situation of her family. Her elder sister was married off when she was 14 years old, and went through a violent married relationship that affected her a lot. Because of the difficult financial situation at home, Rajkumari took up a job of a domestic worker along with her elder sister who had walked out of her violent marriage.

During the outreach and mobilisation programme in Jahangirpuri, Rajkumari’s sister picked up Azad pamphlet and gave it to Rajkumari. Both sisters eventually enrolled in the programme. Rajkumari was initially shy and reserved but slowly started opening up, speaking about herself, her dreams and her fears. She now says that she would never tolerate violence in any way. Rajkumari cleared the Sakha test in May this year and is ready to take up employment with a woman with special needs.  

Your suggestions needed

We want to reach out and train even more women to enable them to become professional drivers and earn livelihood with dignity. Do you have any ideas for how we could attract wider support for our work? Please share them with us – contact us through our Facebook page.