Astitva

One cannot emphasize enough on the importance of women empowerment through skill development. While corporate India is focusing on upskilling and reskilling with the increasing use of technology, majority of the workforce in India is in the informal sector. Navratan’s flagship programme ‘’Astitva’’was designed with a vision that skill development as a vehicle for women’s empowerment can prove most powerful. The objective was to help the underprivileged women who have been marginalized and have no access to any skill for their livelihood.

Navratan in 2009 created a programme called ‘Astitva’ which provides vocational and skill development to the underprivilege women helping them to achieve financial independence. As of today, more than 9000 women beneficiaries have taken advantage of the programme.

Navratan has opened 32 vocational centers in and around Delhi / NCR till date and a six month’s training course of basic tailoring and stitching is designed for the needy women in villages and slums. A certificate is given at end of each session which enables them to get job work from factories and tailors enabling them can earn a decent living from their homes.

The long-term goal is to create a project that supports sustainable community development through a skilling programme and therefore we also introduced counselling and awareness sessions. The idea was to help these women learn to communicate, gain confidence and transform themselves into agents of change. It is these transformed women that show the way to other people in their community and sow the seeds of social harmony.

Many of the skilling centers have been opened through partnership with other social organizations and individuals who believed in Navratan’s cause of women empowerment.