Providing Education & Training to Women in India

Dear Supporters, 

It has been an amazing start to the year,  for all our participants and project partners, and an exciting and inspiring first quarter full of project achievements and learnings for everyone involved. One of our main focuses this quarter has been on ensuring Healthy lives, well-being and promoting equal opportunities for people in Kerala.

We’ve engaged with eight different project partners this quarter, including multiple women’s groups, primary and secondary schools, both governmental and non-governmental organisations, as well as an english language academy. Our projects have had a variety of different focuses around the themes of Women’s Empowerment, Education, Sports and Health. Our core focus this quarter has been on ensuring Healthy lives, well-being and promoting equal opportunities for people in Kerala.

We’ve worked towards this objective by preparing students for their exams, delivering sessions on stress management, study tips, time management and motivation techniques. These workshops are designed to help the students and their families in the run up to the exam season which starts at the end of March each year.

In addition to running these sessions in schools through our education programme, we’ve also been conducting health and wellness sessions with our local women’s groups through our women’s empowerment programme, on topics such as self care and nutrition, which have been running alongside the classes we conduct to improve their conversational english.

Through our sports programme we’ve been engaging in sports and sensory activities to help develop the fine and gross motor skills of students with special educational needs through two of our project partners.

We’re also excited to announce that we’ve started two new programmes this quarter, which we are already getting great results from:

In January, we started a new vocational training programme at one of our special needs schools, with the aim of helping the students there to earn an income whilst developing their own skill sets. The students have been learning how to make paper bags, which the school can then sell on to local hotel chains. We’ve now seen two students graduate our paper bag training programme, and several others get to the stage where they can make paper bags independently without assistance. These students will now be able to join the vocational unit and start getting an income for the bags that they make.

In March we started a new Computer Literacy Programme with one of our local women’s groups. These classes aim to provide better opportunities to women by equipping them with the IT skills required by some employers to enter the workforce. The skills they learn are also cross transferable to other parts of their life. The sessions have started off by focusing on basic computer literacy, helping the women to learn how to use the basic functions on a computer. The sessions will then develop by building on this knowledge, enabling the women to learn how they can use computers to make CVs, budgets and account sheets, apply for jobs, and search the internet.

Overall we’ve had a really strong start to 2019, we’ve enjoyed re-establishing some of existing projects, whilst also starting some fantastic new ones. We hope you are as excited as we are to see how all of these projects develop over the coming year.

With Gratitude, 

GVI India