JAMMU: The only project from India among the six projects from all over the world under the Information for All Programme (IFAP), UNESCO has been awarded to an all-women team of faculty of Central University of Jammu.
The project sanctioned is on ‘Accelerating Women Entrepreneurship in Rural India: Towards Digital Empowerment for Self Reliance and Gender Equality’.
The project gels well with the theme DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality of the year 2023 for World Women’s Day as announced by the United Nations.
The faculty team comprises of Dr. Ritu Bakshi from the Department of Education, Dr. Bharti Gupta from the Department of Tourism and Travel Management, Dr. Archana Kumari from the Department of Mass Communication and New Media and Dr. Nancy Mengi from the Department of Social Work. All four women are experts in their respective fields and have collaborated to actualize the spirit of an interdisciplinary approach as recommended and appreciated by the National Education Policy 2020 of Government of India.
The project aims to digitally empower rural women to make them self-reliant in their entrepreneurial endeavours. Under this project, rural women will be imparted digital training covering financial literacy, digital marketing, and e-commerce to promote their entrepreneurial skills and linkages. Master Trainers will be developed to further continue the training process among other rural women from each block of Jammu division, Kashmir division, Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh.
The project contributes towards the Digital India mission as well by imparting digital knowledge to those who comprise a significant part of the human resource of India. Rural women of India hold many talents related to indigenous knowledge that remains either underutilized or unutilized.
This project aims to raise the participation of this latent resource by realising its economic value to its full potential through digital empowerment. The project also makes a contribution to academia by developing a training-based modules structure which can be used in future training programmes for similar endeavours by others. The project team is enthusiastic to be a change-maker in society.
