Women Empowerment - Lovedale Foundation

EDUCATION FOR WOMEN'S EQUALITY

An overview

The National Policy for Education recognized that the educational structure had not been able to address traditional gender imbalances in educational achievement and that women and girls continued to have low levels of literacy and be marginalized from develop- ment. The NPE made a strong commitment to "a well conceived edge in favor of women" as "an act of faith and social engineering". These commitments have been translated into concrete guidelines, and have resulted in a number of interventions which focus on the empowerment of women as the critical precondition for their participation in the educational process.

The impact of these programmes is reflected in the decennial growth rate in female literacy of 9.54% (Census 1991), which is sig- nificantly higher than the corresponding figure for males (7.76%). However much remains to be done to reach the goals of gender equality in education, Social, economic and cultural factors which keep women and girls out of the educational system, still persist in many states where the rate of female literacy is below the National average.

A majority of poor women live in situations which make them unable to have access to education. These factors include:

poverty, survival issues, and daily struggles for wage, fuel and fodder;
rigidly defined social roles and norms which prevent interactions with others and lack of opportunity to come together and use collective strength;
lack of access to information and alienation from decision making process;
low self-image and lack of confidence, and
lack of adequate and gender-sensitive education infrastructure.

Over the years, working with destitute children brought us in close contact with women – helpless women abandoning a female child due to family pressures, destitute women who have no status in the society and deserting her child at the birth, unhealthy women lacking the means to support her children leaving them as servants or worse, open to abuse.
Lovedale Women's Support centre aims to provide access to information, infrastructure, health care and training to women in order to provide opportunities for empowerment and independence

Lovedale Vocational Training Centre - vocational training to women paving way for their financial independence. So far, 35 women have been trained in various skills and have greater financial independence. Our upcoming computer center provides free computer training to girls who are from the deprived background. A spoken English class helps them to achieve job placements, in shopping malls, departmental stores etc.

Lovedale Health Service Provides health check ups, camps and HIV awareness programs for women who do not have time and money to care for their health. Lovedale Health Services have conducted various health camps ranging from cancer detection to post menopausal health care. We have partnered with reputed local hospitals and health centers.