UPSKILLING LIVES
“REFORMS TAKE TIME, BUT WE NEED TO INITIATE THE MOMENTUM. THERE IS NO ROOM FOR NOT SPARKING A MOVEMENT”
Eleven years ago, Rubina Mazhar courageously shut down her successful travel industry training facility to start a social enterprise. She describes the move as a call of conscience—to use her education and privileges to give something back to her community.
From a small room with two old sewing machines in the Bhola Nagar slums of Hyderabad’s tony Banjara Hills, Mazhar has scaled up to 11 community-based centres for women and youth, running 14 skilling and education projects that benefit some 3,000 people every year. “Bhola Nagar had high crime and illiteracy, and is still considered a challenging area to work in,” says Mazhar. “I am an educated Muslim woman, and I feel that is the right of poor Muslim women too. If provided opportunities, they, too, will lead movements.” Apart from livelihood-linked trainings for women, Mazhar’s NGO SAFA conducts camps on entitlements and medical issues, adult literacy and micro-savings. It markets eco-friendly handcrafted lifestyle and ethnic products made by women. The NGO has also set up a sustainable handicrafts and apparel business and established a vocational training centre where women are trained in English-speaking and information and communication technologies, with a job guarantee in the end.
For the past eight years, SAFA has been training over 1,500 women annually and connecting them to jobs that fetch a base salary of Rs 9,000 a month. About 150 women connected to its own manufacturing unit earn Rs 500-11,000 a month. “Our model on women’s livelihoods is unique. Like, we have an incubator kitchen and commercial kitchen for single women. Our affordable beauty salons are coming up in 2020. These will be owned by women trained and mentored by us,” says Mazhar. ■