Empower Young Women to be Leaders, India

PROGRAM REPORT EXCERPT

by AARTI FOR GIRLS - March, 2021

Aarti for Girls, a non profit organisation, was started in 1992 as a home for abandoned and underprivileged girls. Since inception, the goal of Aarti for Girls has been to identify the cause of social injustice towards a girl child. To address this issue Aarti discovered several paths to reach out to women to educate them, make them economically independent and empower them. Since then Aarti has worked on several women welfare, education and empowerment programmes, thus impacting numerous women in the district.

Since 2002, WEP has led a consortium of women NGOs for young women to become economically independent. WEP provides each partner its Leadership Academy, a framework curriculum, for which the NGO provides area resources and focuses the curriculum on local needs.

Aarti for Girls has been a part of this consortium since 2012. Together, Aarti and WEP provide the Leadership Academy to equip women with skills to discover their voice and thrive in rewarding careers.

Objectives 

At Aarti Home, the Academy's focus is to teach sustainable livelihood skills to young women so that they can achieve financial independence while staying on in their own homes. We hope this will reduce their need to migrate back to the cities.  In addition to the above mentioned objective, it was also perceived that these women, after becoming entrepreneurs, will provide employment to the local women and thereby impact the lives of her community.

In the early days of May/June 2020, a lot of brainstorming sessions were conducted with staff and subject experts. The curriculum was formed to teach the required skills to the participants so that the objective of the sessions could be achieved.  The Aarti team and students, both teaching and non-teaching, were selected with great care. For this first batch, 30 participants were selected for this batch. The Academy actually started functioning on the first of September and the classrooms were set up following all the precautions prescribed to deal with the Covid situation.  

SISTERHOOD : To inculcate the Sisterhood amongst the participants, they were split into batches of 7 to 8 members and each of the batch was kept under the mentorship of a mentor. These mentors were talking to the participants and were guiding them.

The Following Courses were taught : 

1. Life skills and mindfulness : The objective of the sessions was to practice Mindfulness to increase our ability to regulate emotions, decrease stress, anxiety and depression. 
2. English Language : The content of the course was selected to make the participants confident in communicating (both written and spoken communications). 
3. Telugu Language: The aim of teaching Telugu to the participants is to make them freely converse in their mother tongue. It was thought that, by teaching them basics of Telugu literature, a lost interest in their culture and mother tongue can be rekindled in their minds.
1. Poems by the famous saint poets in Telugu
2. Poems from Epics
3. Stories for Panchatantra
4. Biographies
4. IT Skills : The objective of teaching this course is to make the participants conversant with fundamentals of the computer so that they can use the computers to their fullest advantage. They learned: Basic of computer - Operating Systems - MS. Office - Presentation software - Spreadsheets - Email communication - G Suite
5. Learning Skills: The participants were taught about managing their banking operations, formulation of budget for a small family, various Government regulations, structures, rights, principles of GST, Basics of indian governance and basic arithmetic. 
6. Photography, videography and photoshop: The objective of including this topic in the course is to teach the participants important techniques in business/marketing photography to present them to their clients and upload them on the social media platforms. The participants were taught basics of videography and basic components of a DSLR camera.
7. Vocational skills in Garment Making and Terracotta Jewelry Making:  This topic’s prime objective is to teach the participants about basic garment designing, the basics of terracotta jewelry making and Beautician.  After the completion of the course, the participants are expected to design garments, design terracotta jewelry
8. My Explorations - students visited: 

• Virtual tour of Ganga: 

• Virtual tour of Ram Leela

• Industrial visit to Onipenta and other places of importance: 06/01/21

• Industrial Visit to Madhavaram and temple visit at Attirala

• Industrial visit to RTPP

• Environmental visit to Zoo and Talakona falls

Special Activities - Muggulu Videos for the Microsoft team, Talks with an OBGYN, Talks on Violence against women, Talk by the House Surgeons (HIV-AIDS ), Skill in Knitting

Mentoring : The participants were divided into seven different groups of six to seven members in each group and they were allotted  a mentor who is a reputed person in her field of operation. The mentors were talking to the participants as a group or on a one to one basis. The mentors were counselling their mentees on different topics like career guidance and how to present themselves in public. 

Challenges:

1. The sessions started in the month of August, during the peak of the Corona pandemic. Arranging the space for conducting the classes following all the designated safety norms was a real challenge. However, this problem was overcome by providing personal computers at 6 feet distance.
2. The campus is located outside the towns municipal limits and providing net connectivity was a real challenge. This issue was overcome by establishing a Internet Leased Line for Jio
3. As many of the classes were being conducted ONLINE, the class had to face regular issues with internet connectivity from the resource persons end also.
4. Getting the participants registered for the course was THE GREATEST challenge. The team formulated a procedure for recruiting the participants and interviewed them. Many of the participants expressed their concern of coming to the campus due to the CORONA pandemic.

Outcomes 

1. The participants were very excited to learn many new things and that too from people who have great experience in their subject.
2. It was very satisfying to see the active participation of the students and to notice the way they started communicating in English. This was possible due the sustained efforts of the teacher, who is a pioneer in the field. At the end of the course, the students were able to select Telugu poems and translate them into English.
3. The participants learnt a great deal in handling their day to day affairs relating to bank transactions, travelling using different modes etc.
4. The participants learnt the basics of computer skills and they were able to create documents using MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
5. They were able to plan their needs and formulate a budget needed to run their family.
6. They learnt about the functioning of the Indian Government and the functions of various departments and about the basics of Indian constitution.
7. They were comfortable with handling expensive cameras and were able to produce fantastic pictures.
8. Helped by the training they received in arithmetic three students were able to clear the admission tests conducted by a software training institute and will be reporting in the institute very shortly.

Links:

• WEP's Website