GIVING WOMEN WINGS
APARAJITAGOGOI, 51 Head, Centre for Catalyzing Change, DELHI
In 2001, on a bright sunny day, around 5,000 social activists marched towards Taj Mahal, India’s most celebrated tourist destination, to bring one very disturbing statistic to the attention of the policymakers—that a woman dies every five minutes during child birth in India. Why Taj Mahal? The monument was built in memory of the empress Mumtaz, who too had died during child birth. Leading the march was Aparajita Gogoi, a 33-year-old woman from Assam. “The situation hasn’t changed in the 1,400 years since. When it comes to women’s health, we are still in medieval times,” says Gogoi, who heads the Centre for Catalyzing Change (C3), an NGO which she joined as an executive more than a decade ago. It aims to “equip, mobilise, educate and empower women to achieve gender equality”.
Daughter of a civil servant father, Gogoi ventured into social work while doing her PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Coming from a protected environment in Assam, where women did not face the kind of discrimination she witnessed in north India, Gogoi met women struggling to live a life of dignity. Initially, she felt the cure was in economic empowerment. “In my first six years as a social worker, I tried to act as a catalyst to create livelihood for women, but for real empowerment, it was important to change the society’s mindset which has nothing to do with education or economic condition,” she says.
C3 identifies the concerns of the disadvantaged communities and devises strategies to provide sustainable solutions. “We try to ensure that women have access to information and the services and rights that they are entitled to,” says Gogoi. To widen its scope, C3 has chosen to work with governments. An example of their work is Udaan, an in-school adolescent education programme, being implemented in government schools in Jharkhand. C3 trains teachers with the primary aim to deliver skills and opportunities to girls to help them realise their full potential. There are several projects— Pahel, a programme for empowering women politically; Youth Life, a digital education programme for adolescents; and Do Kadam, for preventing domestic violence.
In the past three decades, C3 has touched two million lives and reaches 200,000 people every year. “In the next five years, we plan to cover 1.4 million women,” says Gogoi, who puts her trust in transparency instead of big numbers. C3 regularly does audits of its work through independent auditing firms. In 2011, Gogoi was selected by The Guardian of UK as one of the world’s 100 most inspiring women. ■
“WE TRY TO ENSURE THAT WOMEN HAVE ACCESS TO THE RIGHTS THEY ARE ENTITLED TO”