Leadership and Capacity Building for Wom

LEADERSHIP AND CAPACITY BUILDING FOR WOMEN'S EMPOWERMENT

As mentioned in the Livelihood Skills Development section NANAK runs several women’s empowerment centre that provide skills training and act as a space for community mobilization. All of NANAK’s centres, projects, and campaigns have a component on strengthening gender equality- for instance, at all centres there are sessions and workshops on gender sensitivity. NANAK has also initiated multiple advocacy and information-generation campaigns in rural and urban areas on women’s empowerment, research and published knowledge products, as well as anchored knowledge sharing and dissemination events on the same.

The aspect related to the capacity development of women has been given a name called Sandarshikawhich literally means a women who can navigate and a detailed illustration of this component is given below.

1. Sandarshika

NANAK’s programmee encourages women participation in skills development leading to livelihood generation but also inculcates leadership qualities and life skills in them. One of the first trainings undertaken under this programme was to guide women belonging to low socio-economic backgrounds to realize their dreams of self-reliance and financial independence by helping them benefit from skills development initiatives, which would ultimately brighten their chances of getting connected to income generating opportunities. Under the aegis of this project NANAK and Bird Academy (a premier training institute dealing in courses related to tourism and hospitality industry) entered into an understanding to customize a short duration course for carefully initiating a batch of raw youth into an untrodden arena. In the first phase of this programme, NANAK nominated 26 candidates from economically weaker sections and girls were drawn from LWE affected areas of Rohtas District and its adjacent areas in Bihar and also from vulnerable areas of Uttar Pradesh and Delhi. The first phase was spread over 17 days with intensive training sessions of 85 hours involving theory, practical, interactive sessions and exposure visits. The candidate selection was based on their willingness to learn special skills and knowledge associated with the trade, as well as education till Higher Secondary. The objective was to sharpen the skills of these beginners and to encourage them to move ahead by equipping them with skills to become industry- ready and get gainfully employed. The Delhi Police also organized special self-defense classes for the candidates which lent wholesomeness to the entire curriculum.

Well known resource persons were invited to brief the candidates on issues varying from self-helf-group formations to social media strategies to basics of camera handling.

Highlights:

A major breakthrough in sanitation has been convincing community members in and around Majhui to participate in the government programme of building toilets under the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyaan.
NANAK Celebrated International Women’s Day on 8th March 2015 at Majhui village. On that day, the Member of Parliament from the area, MrCheddiPaswan was thethe chief guest. More than 2000 people from the community, including over 50% women and girls participated actively in the programme which saw demos of self-defense as also kabbaddi match of girls from Majhui village with girls who were invited to play from village Dawath.
Promoting Higher Education of Girls- The Director of SITYOG Institute of Techonology Aurangabad announced that with NANAK, they would sponsor 8 girls for engineering degrees at their university with complete/partial sponsorship.