Annual Report 2017-18

Dear Friends,

It is with great pleasure that we present the Annual Report for 2017-18 to you. Breaking boundaries that are drawn up for individuals by unequal social structures and power relations has been the core part of our work. We complete 10 years of our being. It has been an incredible journey for us, with all that we have been able to break together, build together, and learn together.

When we had started out, “women chauffeur” was not even an idea in the minds of people. There were almost no professional women chauffeurs in Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida. There were no discussions around this idea – neither in the industry, nor state, media, or civil society. We have been able to pioneer an innovative and “disruptive” concept and establish its viability irrefutably. Of course, a lot more needs to be done to make this a more popular choice for women – both as a career and as an option for safe transport.

Women chauffeurs have now become a familiar sight thanks to the media coverage like articles in local, regional, and international newspapers, films, and interviews conducted with them over the years. Key players in the transport industry have now started offering employment to women drivers, even launching special verticals for them. State Governments have started thinking that hiring women drivers is one way of making public transport safer. Of course, it takes more than a statement of intent to make this employment a reality, thereby making workplaces gender-sensitive.

Azad and its strategic partner, Sakha, alone have contributed to more than 1500 women today professionally empowered as chauffeurs. Of these, Sakha has been able to offer or facilitate employment for 650+ women chauffeurs. These include one who has just joined UNICEF as a driver, or others working with five-star hotels, Embassies, Delhi Commission for Women, Municipal Corporation of Indore, as valets with hospitals and hotels, with Sakha and other cab agencies, and Delhi’s first woman bus driver. More markets need to be created and nurtured, as we know from our experience that it is not just a matter of finding ‘jobs’ but of creating spaces in the current market as well. Ten women drivers could not make it to the job of a bus driver because they could not match the criteria of ‘height’ mentioned for this position. The driving seat of even the “low floor buses,” we are told is not adjustable and is of course built to suit the average height of a male driver. This is just one example, but an entire supportive infrastructure needs to be made available – safe and hygienic washrooms, safe and well-lit roads, creches that operate through the day, working women hostels, and shelter homes for women.

The women drivers, however, have sustained despite all these deficits of the ecosystem, buoyed together by their spirit to be free and independent. They have been able to provide more than a million safe rides to women users of their service and in doing that, earned remunerative incomes, becoming principal breadwinners of their families and taking decisions about their lives.

With support from Azad and Sakha, they have built a solidarity network that helps them to sustain not just their profession but also challenges they might face in their personal lives. We are inspired daily by stories of how the women have stood up against violence, have invested in their homes, ensured better quality education for their children, siblings, and themselves. This and much more we have been able to co-build.

The understanding of the challenges that women face in participating in the mainstream workforce led us to also deepen our presence in the communities. In 2016, we started the Feminist Leadership Programme that helps selected young women from the bastis we work in to develop themselves into informed, aware, and empowered leaders who can identify and support struggles of women in the communities. We have been able to prepare 55 feminist leaders who have together reached out to over 2100 women to support them in their various struggles – from getting basic citizenship documents to supporting them to handle violence, health-related matters, and many others. They have worked intensively in the communities and with the families of the young women to build a web of solidarity that can support any woman who decides to challenge patriarchal norms in any aspect of her life.

Alongside working with young women, we had also initiated a programme – Men for Gender Justice in 2015, for working with young men in the communities. We have been struck with the lack of opportunities that these young men have had to even question the cultural and social norms they have grown up with. At the same time, it has been heartening to see them reflect over their own lives, even be shocked with how they have lived, perpetuating what they now see as deep injustices. More than 490 young men have gone through our trainings and have committed themselves to a journey of questioning patriarchal norms at home and outside.

In Jaipur, we were also able to initiate and build a programme of working with adolescent girls in schools from classes IX to XII through our Azad Kishori 9 se 12 programme. We have been able to reach out to more than 2700 adolescent girls, providing them with opportunities to learn about livelihoods with dignity, non-traditional domains, and life skills required to be able to take their own decisions and build their own lives.

We have carefully documented our work and undertaken studies over the year to build new knowledge about working with resource-poor women in enabling them to empower themselves to gain livelihoods with dignity. We have built partnerships to help other civil society organisations initiate a “Women on Wheels” programme in Indore, Ahmedabad, and Bangalore. In 2016, we seeded a network of organisations working in non-traditional livelihood domains. Today, it’s a healthy sapling of 22 members, a charter, logo, and a substantive discourse beginning to build up. Together, we hope to engage with and influence policymaking and implementation around non-traditional livelihoods.

We realise that the challenge is huge. More than 19 million women have fallen out of the labour force over the last decade. Many economists and theorists are attempting to explain this. We understand the tight edge of the rope women have to walk on. On one hand are the shackles of social and cultural norms that govern the lives of women in India, restricting their mobility and forcing them to undertake endless hours of unpaid care work at home. On the other hand, markets are increasingly becoming liberalised and contractualisation of labour is the norm, making it difficult for women to put in the number of hours required to make any occupation viable. Men’s contribution to unpaid work at home is not equal anywhere in the world as per a recent report by ILO. However, in India, it’s an extreme experience where men put in only about half an hour per day into their share of work at home with women contributing close to five hours of work on a daily basis, on average.

The world over, less and less jobs are getting created. As per some projections, 40% of the jobs that exist today will be lost due to the emerging artificial intelligence. The SDG goal 8 aspires to provide full and productive employment to all men and women, which is nearly 470 million jobs worldwide. The challenge is huge globally and more so in India with its deep fissures of inequality. At Azad, we therefore understand our work as an action laboratory. As we support hundreds of women to gain livelihoods with dignity, we also contribute to building knowledge based on women’s lived experiences and help them amplify their own voices to build a deeper realisation of the barriers resource-poor women face in accessing livelihoods with dignity; what it takes to help them break these barriers and build sustaining and transforming change in their lives.

We remain grateful for the support of all our donor partners – national and international – who have stood by us, supported us, critiqued us, and nurtured us. We thank you for keeping faith in us. We have been humbled this year by an increasing number of individuals who have donated through global giving and our website. We have had several people volunteer their time and expertise as interns and volunteers, making our work a little easier. Last but not least, the Board of Azad – we cannot thank you enough for your leadership over these ten years, standing by us, supporting us, you are our best ‘est’ secret sauce!

With Gratitude,

Meenu

Read the 2017-18 Azad Foundation Annual Report