Women form a significant proportion of work force in India. The key strategy for women's empowerment and gender equality is to combine policy and institutions at the local level.Empowerment of women is necessary for socio-economic development of any country. Women helps in better development of children and hence an increase in their literacy rate among them is the need of the hour. Women if given the opportunities and the right exposure can excel themselves in any field. Since girls and women represent 50% of the world population, enabling them to participate in their local economics help broaden the employment pool. The aim of skill development, particularly in case of women, is not only to prepare them for jobs, but also to improve the performance of women workers by enhancing the quality of work in which they are engaged. There are few major challenges, which need to be addressed for building a conducive ecosystem, of skill development for the women workforce. It has become very important to ensure women empowerment through skill development in the development programmes and thereby strive to have a conducing atmosphere for their effective participation.
Ashaa Foundation has been working continuously for women and believes in empowering women by providing them a proper platform where they can learn, earn, grow and expand. Keeping this objective intact we started a Rural Project on Skill Development for Women Empowerment at state and 23 Village in india and providing exposure to the downtrodden youth and underprivileged women by imparting soft skills training and vocational training to enrich their capabilities for an independent and bright future.
We have 10 sewing machines in each center for the course and women are taught from the basics of stitching to dress making in both theory and practical classes extensively with one of the best experts from the fashion designing fraternity. The course is for four months as of now. Alongside these two courses we cater to an important subject i.e. soft skill training. The training is conducted simultaneously with the regular course classes as that is very important for the rural population and empowering women.
Our rural centre has been able to make a positive mark in the entire area because of its objective. Women have started coming forward to learn and enhance their skills in order to become financially independent in near future.
We aim to empower these rural women by providing them in their skills and motivating them in doing better in their lives. The objective of setting up our centre in the rural area is to assess the status of rural women on selected domains of empowerment, to identify skills available with women in the target group, to upgrade the textile related skills of the targeted rural women, to spread the impact of entrepreneurial efforts on women empowerment, to give them the opportunity that they are generally refrained from because of the prevailing patriarchal society.