Impacting Lives

Towards Women Empowerment

The principle of gender equality is brilliantly spelt out in the Indian Constitution in its Preamble, Fundamental Rights, Fundamental Duties and Directive Principles. The Constitution of India not only grants equality to women, but also empowers the State to adopt measures of positive discrimination in favor of women. Status and position of women in the society mirrors development of a state & the country. Despite all, the reality is far from this vision – consistent efforts need to be pitched by various forums to achieve self-reliance for self respectability of women in families and in society at large.

Lok Bharti has taken concrete steps towards addressing the empowerment of women and girls, which shall have ripple effect in bringing about a long-lasting social change in Indian communities. However, empowering women cannot be a one-time action or agenda, but demands a united approach with continued attention and stewardship by one and all.

History has documented the potential and dynamism of women through the ages – with their attributes of perseverance, devotion and diligence.They have the capacity to emerge as strong anchors who can weather through all storms. Their emotional intelligence cautions them with strong intuition or gut feeling as well as connects them with varied people & situations appropriately.

In view of the above facts, Lok Bharti set out to hone skills of women & girls in sub-urban,urban, rural and marginalized communities with single-minded objective to address twin critical areas – the high level of unemployment and gender inequality, both being pronounced factors of impoverished communities, hampering inclusive growth of our nation.

The major challenge on-the-ground which obstructed & threatened to dampen our spirits was to win trust & support of village/community /family to accept & join hands in our efforts to bring forth and surface the hidden potential of women; to understand that attending skill development programs was not a revolt or aggressive “women’s lib” which would “turn their women’s head” against them, but a value addition and credit worthy program for their families and communities to transform them into self-reliant units.

Lok Bharti had its community awareness and mobilization teams addressing the above area. We achieved success by receiving encouragement and positive response from families and communities at large. We activated our learning & training centers in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh to offer skill based programs for women.

Lok Bharti determined to face the reality and came out with truly contextualized contents and transaction approach for programs which were identified, by Skill Gap Analysis, for women & girls. Our most popular programs for women include:

• Bed Side Assistant
• Tailoring & Cutting
• Beautician
• Functional Communication Skills (Spoken English)
• Personality Development
• Basic Computer Literacy

Story Credit: Nidhi Khullar