Help Women in India Become Professional Drivers

Your incredible support and encouragement is helping bring livelihoods with dignity to underprivileged women in new places!

In December 2017, we opened a new training centre for the Women on Wheels programme in north Kolkata. For the past three years, we have already been working in south part of Kolkata, where we enrolled over 185 resource-poor women for the WOW programme. To date, 79 of them have become employable as chauffeurs.

But thanks to this new centre in the north, we will be able to reach out to new areas of the city and provide livelihoods in professional driving to many more women.

The centre is located at Vivekananda Road, and is close to many slum areas as well as affluent areas, which offer good employment opportunities for the trained women drivers.

This year, we are planning to enrol 45 women for the Women on Wheels programme in the new centre.

Over the last months, we have started working in the slums, building contacts and connections with the local communities. We have been spreading information about Women on Wheels programme and importance of non-traditional livelihoods for women. We have covered 12 slums in 4 wards of the area and reached over 1,109 women with direct outreach activities, such as household survey, community meeting and leafleting. We have also conducted a range of mass outreach activities, such as auto campaigns and theatre and dance performances as part of One Billion Rising against Violence on Women campaign.

As a result, the first group of 8 women have already commenced Women on Wheels training in the new centre. Most of them have already acquired learner’s driving license and are now learning driving at Khanna Motor Training School, as they also undertake self-development and empowerment modules.

What does it mean for a woman to join Women on Wheels?

So many things…here is a story of Sunanda from Kolkata that says it all.

Sunanda has been married of early, her father forcefully married her when she was just 14. The day she got married, she passed class 8 in her school, but because of the marriage, she could not get admitted for class 9. After three years of being married, she gave birth to her daughter.

Sunanda faced severe physical and mental violence by her husband. She believed that as a married woman she must accept tortures by her husband. But when her daughter was 2 years old, she decided not to continue tolerating such torture and told her mother about it. Her mother brought her back home.

Sunanda’s mother is a domestic worker and the only earning member in their family, as their father left them. Sunanda’s brother is still in school and they all live in a rented house in a slum. After Sunanda returned to her mother’s place, she wanted to start working, but did not want to work as domestic worker like her mother. She wanted to do a beautician course, but they required the class 10th pass certificate to enter the course. Then, one day, she learnt about WoW programme and thinking about the future of her daughter, she decided to join.

She says: ‘I have found a light in my life after joining Azad.’

‘Despite other job opportunities coming my way, I am determined to become professional driver. Since starting the Women on Wheels training, I have lost my fear of going to new places and talking to strangers.’

Sunanda’s mother supports her a lot, though sometimes she worries about her daughter choosing such non-traditional profession. But Sunanda is determined to become professional driver and make a bright future of her daughter.

Thank YOU for standing by women like Sunanda. Thank YOU for helping us to enable more women to embark on a journey of transformation and towards a more dignified life.

We couldn’t do it without you. They couldn’t do it without you.

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