Help Women in India Become Professional Drivers

We're super excited to share with you that some of the senior women drivers - who were trained and employed through Women on Wheels initiative – are now training in driving other women at Azad. Passing on not only their expertise of working as professional drivers but also experiences of overcoming all the challenges along the way.

Your support has been crucial in enabling these female driving instructors to train a new cohort of Women on Wheels professional drivers over the last half year. Thank you for enabling women to help themselves and help each other to drive towards a better life.

First five female driving instructors at Azad

Fully trained women drivers trained by us have already been finding work as driving instructors with various driving schools – teaching women and men to drive on parallel clutch cars.

But being driving instructor at Azad requires a more substantial experience in driving. Once the Women on Wheels programme trainees complete driving school course, they are provided with additional on road driving practice by Azad driving instructors. This driving practice is provided on normal cars (without parallel clutch) and in actual traffic, so the trainees can further improve their driving skills and gain confidence in driving in any situation on their own. Almost none of the WoW trainees have a car at home, hence the training they get with our driving instructors is what enables them to build their driving to the required professional level. Driving instructors also teach car maintenance and help trainees use GPS when driving.

We’re delighted that we have been able to train and appoint five senior drivers as Azad Driving Instructors. They had previously been working with our strategic partner, Sakha Cabs for Women by Women, and have at least five years of professional driving experience behind them.

In June 2017, Azad provided a special three-week long training of trainers to six senior drivers, who were selected through a screening process. The training covered not just the technical aspects of how to train women drivers, but also adult learning principles and how to build a safe and respectful learning environment.

After the training, five female instructors – Khushi, Lalita, Geeta, Omkari and Poonam - have taken up jobs with Azad – each working in one of our four training centres in Delhi and the centre in Jaipur.

We plan to continue providing this training to more women drivers, so that at least 60% of all our driving trainers are women. We are pleased and grateful for being able to open up this new career option for women drivers, and enable ‘women on wheels’ to take a more active role in delivering the Women on Wheels programme :)

Thanks to your support, since April till December 2017, Azad’s training instructors have trained and enabled 184 resource-poor women across Delhi and Jaipur to become employable as drivers. For many of them having a female driving instructor made all the difference:

Sonam from South Delhi shared: "I am enjoying my training with my female trainer. I myself am less inhibited with her. That helps me in my training and I feel less nervous."

Dimple from East Delhi told us: "Earlier I would not share my problems but my lady trainer shared her experiences with me, which helped me in my confidence building. Initially my steering control was not good but my lady instructor held my hand and taught me how to steer the steering wheel properly. Now I am confident I shall go on Self Drive soon."

Thank you for enabling all this to happen, thank you for changing lives.

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