About the Organisation
For the past 16 years, Akshara has worked toward a gender just society, where women can live with dignity, free from violence. Akshara empowers women to know their rights through gender trainings; live without threats of violence through its Safe City Project; and encourages young men to prevent violence.
Organisation Activities
For the last sixteen years, Akshara has worked toward a gender just society, empowering women to know their rights and build necessary skills to ensure their wellbeing. Our focus lies in empowering young women and men to become standard bearers for gender justice. Our activities aim at achieving this goal.
- Educational activities for young women in interactive ways such as self defense trainings, learning games, exposure trips, and participatory trainings encouraging them to become engaged citizens.
- Innovative public awareness strategies such as videos, theatre workshops, and community level discussions to expose unjust gender norms.
- Advocacy for women’s rights through research, documenting injustice, developing policy for institutional and legal changes to create safe homes, colleges, workplaces and streets.
- Serving as a resource for women’s organizations in the national and global women’s movements by partnering with other national and international social movements.
Beneficiary Groups
• Adolescents
• Slum Dwellers
• Urban poor
• Women
• Youth
History of the Organisation
Akshara was founded in 1995 as a women’s resource centre based in Mumbai, with the intent of enabling the documentation of the women’s movement in India.
In the last sixteen years, it has created a precedent in setting up the gender-oriented reference library outside of academic institutions, followed by creating a unique ‘Akshara Classification System’ that is currently used in eighteen national and international women’s resource centres. As part of this effort, Akshara has also pioneered the first online course on gender issues called ‘Streenet’ which is currently used to train activists, academicians and administrators. It has also designed an interactive game series aimed at engaging young women and men on issues of gender justice. This has been translated into three languages and has reached tens of thousands of young people across the country.
Akshara has played a key role in the development of the ‘Gender Friendly City’ with the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM). As part of this effort, Akshara has supported the police to set up a GPRS based emergency helpline for women (103) for women in Mumbai and Thane. As part of this effort, Akshara has worked closely with other stakeholders and ‘pro bono’ contributors to this initiative – including leading ad agencies and celebrity management agencies. The agency Leo Burnett for instance, has been an active collaborator on our campaign on street sexual harassment and Violence against Women across the past five years.
On the ground, Akshara has been involved in training barefoot women counselors in urban poor communities to take action against violence and support survivors. It has also been at the forefront of the development of international feminist alliances, including being in the lead up to the World Social Forum 2004. More information about our efforts is available on www.aksharacentre.org
Akshara’s work is rooted in the involvement of its founders with the women’s movement in India – as also documented in the book ‘The Issues at Stake: Theory and Practice in the contemporary women’s movement in India’ [Gandhi N and Shah N; Kali or Women, 1992]. Its programs have been supported by long-term, strategic partners such as Bread for The World, HIVOS and the Global Fund for Women.Projects such as Partners for Justice, Youth for Change have allowed Akshara to operate at multiple but mutually reinforcing levels of intervention.
It is legally set up as a project of the FREA India, which was founded in 1968 by a group of students dedicated to making technology accessible to the marginalized communities. It is registered as a Trust and Society with 80 G certification and FCRA registration.
Vision
Establishing A Gender Just and Violence Free Society.
For Akshara, a gender just society means one which has accepted and implements equality between men and women and does not tolerate violence on them. Our present society is far from this ideal. Indian society has a horrific record of killing, harming, violating and discriminating against women and girls. The sex ratio has been consistently falling as son preference uses modern technology to kill girls. Indicators like education, health, political participation and employment are low. Akshara’s goal is to tilt this balance against one half of the population. The changes it hopes to achieve are:
- A change or revision within society in the mindset from deep rooted prejudices and bias against women to equality
- A change in young women to realize their self worth, negotiating abilities and skills to be productive citizens
- A change in young men to support women and actively work against violence.
- A change in state bodies like the police, ministries and departments to implement laws and policies
Awards / Recognition
Edelwise award for social innovation, Runner up for 2012
