The very first batch of 20 bright and energetic feminist community leaders trained under our Parvaz Feminist Leadership programme graduated at the convocation ceremony on Sunday 16 July in Delhi.

Parvaz programme empowers young women community leaders to provide information and support to other women to enable them to claim rights in all spheres of lives. The community leaders undergo four phases of in-depth training on a range of topics and inter-phase community work, done in collaboration with Azad’s outreach and mobilization teams. They also plan and implement their own community projects, which they identify based on the needs of the women living in their community. Their work, overall, contributes towards creating a more enabling environment for women to access non-traditional livelihoods and live with dignity.

The 20 leaders reached collaboratively over 22,000 people and helped over one thousand to get citizenship papers, access government social schemes and enroll for Azad’s Women on Wheels programme to access non-traditional livelihoods with dignity. At the ceremony, together with leaders’ families and representatives from partner organizations and other NGOs, we celebrated all their incredible achievements. The fellows also exhibited and talked to people about their community projects, such as crèche for children or an initiative to help women open bank accounts.

The new batch of the women to be trained in Delhi from August 2017 onwards has also been welcomed at the ceremony. The programme is launching in Jaipur from August 2017.