While India is set to join the club of developed economies, there is a significant number of informal workers who do not have access to skill development training that will pave the way for them towards more sustainable and better-paying employment. In this regard, 82% of women globally happen to be employed in the informal sectors—waste picking, scavenging, domestic labor, craftwork, and the like—with little means to make their ends meet. The situation is made worse by existing social walls that hinder many women, especially in developing economies like India, from gaining access to better training and educational opportunities for them to be able to upskill themselves. The textile industry, one of the largest sources of employment generation in India, with over 45 million people employed directly, has a large number of women who face social, financial, and institutional challenges in gaining skill development and job placements for their growth.

Project SAKHI (Skilling Advocacy and Knowledge for Hope Initiative), founded in August 2024, aims to create sustainable employment for these women from underserved communities by working in the domain of crafts and weaving industries of India. The first step towards this end was to raise awareness through the Women at Work article series about the challenges that the targeted group faces in an otherwise modernizing economy, contrasting it with the significant role that they continue to play for the national economy. In addition to this, we have launched a podcast series that further explores the issues barring these women from accessing large-scale skilling programs, featuring insights from industry experts, entrepreneurs, and policymakers. The centerpiece of Project SAKHI is the ‘Skills for Success Skilling Certification,’ a comprehensive training program designed to bolster the skillset of our women and equip them with the tools to create market-ready products. This will include sessions led by experts, culminating in a final project and certification showing their readiness for formal employment or entrepreneurship ventures. We also envision setting up a dedicated marketplace, the SAKHI Store, for the trained women to showcase and sell their handcrafted products and also form an informal collective for them to support each other in their entrepreneurial journeys.

The NetWORK Fundraiser is one of the preliminary steps towards putting together SAKHI’s certification program, for which we have partnered with the esteemed Dreams Foundation in Ahmedabad. The proceeds from the fundraiser will be used to meet the costs of the professional experts joining the program and to collate all the necessary materials for the workshops, wherein the targeted beneficiaries will have direct interaction and training from the experts. We hope you will donate generously to this cause!