- Yearbooks
Year Book 2020-21
This yearbook consists of the success stories of our trainees who have achieved a Permanent driving license (PL) in the year 2020-21, both for 2 wheeler and 4 wheeler.
Azad Foundation is a professional Feminist organization working with urban resource-poor women across social and religious divides. Azad believes that when women are socially and economically empowered, they become the catalyst of change – not just in their own lives, but also in their families and communities. The purpose is to create a platform for disadvantaged women by providing them nontraditional livelihoods options that enhance their economic status, dignity, and decisionmaking within their families. The objective of the organization is to establish a cadre of empowered professional chauffeurs who can take charge of their own lives as well as create safe transport solutions for other women. Azad’s goal is to enable underprivileged women to empower themselves as professionals, to earn “livelihoods with dignity” in a non-traditional sector like transport and creation of a gender-just ecosystem within communities, gender-sensitive markets and supportive infrastructure, which help women negotiate, enter and sustain their workforce participation.
There is a great need to provide women with adequate skills and equip them with the means to, make informed choices and negotiate financial decisions thus making them independent and overall equal contributors. Azad Foundation challenges the long-standing gender norms that limit women’s economic choices through its idea of non-traditional remunerative livelihoods. Azad’s flagship programme WWW trains and prepares women who are from low economic and social capital to become professional and commercial drivers, while enhancing their awareness of rights, and providing them with opportunities for self-development and self-empowerment; thus challenging the notion that professional driving is considered a man’s domain, as a means of livelihood for resource-poor women.
Azad Foundation currently operates through its offices in Delhi, Jaipur, and Kolkata and through like-minded partners in Indore, Ahmedabad, Bhubaneshwar and Lucknow. In 2020-21, Azad Foundation also expanded its Women with Wheels programme to the city of Chennai. In order to celebrate the hard work of our teams and the never-ending dedication of our trainees, every year we record the inspiring stories of our trainees who were able to acquire their permanent license (PL) in the current year.
This Year Book records the stories of Azad trainees who have successfully attained their permanent driving license (PL) through the Women with Wheels programme. The stories attempt to provide an insight into each of these trainees’ lives which is a blend of struggles and achievements. In the year 2020-21, a total of 91 Women with Wheels trainees across Azad’s six training centres (East Delhi, North Delhi, South Delhi, Jaipur, and North Kolkata & South Kolkata) successfully obtained their permanent license (PL) for both 4 wheeler & 2 wheeler. This yearbook consists of the success stories of our trainees who have achieved a Permanent driving license (PL) in the year 2020-21, both for 2 wheeler and 4 wheeler. Out of 91 trainees who achieved the PL, 19 achieved it for 2 wheeler and 72 for 4 wheeler across the centres. 91 women attained Permanent License (3 trainess in south Kolkata having attained both 2 wheeler and four wheeler license). We took consent of all the trainees mentioned in the yearbook for sharing their stories, photographs and names, some of the photographs are missing because either the trainees did not give consent for sharing their photograph or the team was not able to reach out to some trainees due to onset of Covid and lockdown. This yearbook is an endeavour to document and provide an insight into each of these trainees’ lives and struggles. Azad hopes that each of these outstanding women will in the future become an inspiration for their communities and other women, urging them to take control of their lives, and thereby building an ecosystem of change.
Although 2020-21 was a very tough year for everyone because of the onset of the Covid 19 pandemic, yet at Azad foundation, we had enough reasons to celebrate, one of those are these 92 PL stories, which talks not only about the experiences of our trainees in the process of getting there PL but also their success in these challenging times. Since the very beginning of 2020-21, we saw a lot of challenges in terms of the implementation of our programs. Due to lockdown, we had to shift the whole training program to a virtual & digital platform which required a lot of efforts and resources. We took these challenges as an opportunity and looked at the positive side of them. We started to train our trainees on Zoom, through which they also became technologically equipped.
