Women Empowerment

The Hans Foundation’s mandate to identify and fund grass root organizations working for healthcare, education and the disabled, requires a lot of travel from our teams for the pre-funding and post funding visits. During these visits, we identified certain regions where women still lead a life of second class citizens and their rights and well being are completely dependent on that of the males of their family. We realized that we could initiate some work, which along with our funding would make tangible and much needed inroads to support women empowerment. After reviewing the team inputs after the visits to these areas, a strategy was put up to the trustees for a pilot project to support and highlight Women’s Empowerment.

The first step was to identify a local organization that was working with a similar mindset in one of the highlighted sensitive areas. Second, that they would be willing to partner with us in this unique venture. Fortunately this was not very difficult after Nari Utthan Sansthan (NUS) in Alwar district of Rajasthan came to the fore. The Hans Foundation and Nari Utthan Sansthan took up the challenge and made an elaborate plan to create a sustainable source of income for the poor marginalized families. We decided to provide the families decentralized mini dairies, which become self sustaining in quick time, as neighboring Alwar is famous for its milk products and has a ready market for milk.

Five very poor families were chosen from ten surrounding villages. Each family is being provided with two buffaloes each, and with adequate infrastructure to house the buffaloes. A milk chilling plant has been set up to collect the daily output of milk and transport it to Alwar. To monitor the sale, self help groups (SHGs) have been set up who will deposit the daily sale proceeds in individual bank accounts opened for the 50 families. Most importantly, it is the women who are running this venture. With this initiative of The Hans Foundation and Nari Utthan Sansthan each family will make a reasonable amount of money empowering the women of these households. Also, with this initiative every month an additional family will be inducted in this scheme, which would eventually encompass the whole area.

The scheme has room to grow and develop with the changing needs of the target beneficiaries. These fifty families are just the start, we hope to see many other lives benefiting from these ventures.