Empowering women: IKEA partners with the UNDP

Recently, on the WLP Facebook page, we posted some important news for the rural women of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populated and least developed state: An important partnership between IKEA and the United Nations Development Programme may bring new hope to the women of the region.

For other, more isolated rural areas of India such as Paddar, small-scale efforts like the Women's Literacy Project of Gulabgarh are also working to empower women, so that they become key proactive members of their community.

There is still so much to be done in this emerging economy to help build women's skills, confidence, self-reliance and yes, even their financial literacy, that every initiative counts. Our project has begun preparing the ground toward empowerment by teaching our students the basic skills of reading, writing and numeracy.

Below is the article we published in Technorati with more information regarding this recent development.

Article first published as Empowering Women: IKEA Joins Efforts With UNDP on Technorati.

"Empowered lives. Resilient nations." The heading on the homepage of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) website is inspiring a new effort designed to benefit the rural women of India. With a focus on empowering women, the UNDP has partnered with IKEA Foundation in a project that aims to help build the self-reliance and financial skills of over 50,000 women in 500 villages in three districts of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populated (almost 200 m) but least developed state.
The partnership programme, to which IKEA has pledged €30 million, aims to promote this target group's financial literacy, thereby "strengthening their technical, institutional, managerial and financial skills so that they are able to play a larger role in the social and economic development in the villages."
Including rural women in its undertakings is an apparent attempt to broaden IKEA Foundation’s mission, until now focused mainly on helping the children of developing countries.

Read more: http://technorati.com/business/article/empowering-women-ikea-joins-efforts-with/#ixzz1sljf5s2q

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