When Vaishali Sen was 9 years old, she loved to watch “Indian Idol.” Like its American counterpart, the show featured amateur singers hoping to launch their careers. Secretly, Vaishali wanted to do the same. She’d always loved to sing. But in her rural village in Rajasthan, India, good girls weren’t supposed to dream big. They …
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Jyoti Gadari got married when she was just 17. Like many young women, she wanted to explore: go to college, try out different jobs, see what kind of opportunities might unfold. And according to local custom, she didn’t have to live with her husband yet. She thought she had time. But her husband’s family had …
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Sexual violence survivors and their friends and family have been making headlines across India since December, when about 5,000 of them began a 6,000-mile journey across 24 states. The “Dignity March,” which concludes this Friday in Delhi, aims to raise public awareness of the sexual violence that affects an untold number of women and children …
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Kausar Ansari has come a long way since her first job. Today, she is a leader at Awaaz-e-Niswaan, an AJWS grantee that supports Muslim women and girls in Mumbai to stay in school and pursue careers. But at age 14, she worked in a garment factory, where she earned only 700 rupees a month—about $10 …
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At AJWS, we talk about “collectives” a lot. About 40 percent of our grantees around the globe use collectives to advance human rights, and we invested $5.7 million in this work in 2018. In India alone—where AJWS has launched a multi-year, $30 million initiative to increase gender equality—our grantees support more than 3,500 collectives with …
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Three years after AJWS made a film about Khushi’s life, she’s gone from driving cabs to training a new generation of girls just beginning their careers. When I first met Khushi Prajapati, her story was already unusual. As a teenager, she’d worked as a maid to try to help her family make ends meet. It …
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In 2015, Aldo Alexander Peña was on his way to a pride parade in the capital of El Salvador. He was excited. It was his first time joining the parade since he began hormone replacement therapy, which helped his appearance align with his identity as a transgender man. But what should have been a day …
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The World Bank recently released the first-ever World Development Report devoted entirely to education, “Learning to Realize Education’s Promise.” It explains why countries across the globe have succeeded at rapidly increasing the number of children in school, but have not achieved the same level of success when it comes to helping those children learn. Because …
Read More In August, the Supreme Court of India struck down “triple talaq,” a practice that had allowed Muslim men to divorce their wives merely by saying or writing the word “talaq” (divorce) three times.
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After months of planning, it wasn’t clear whether Awaaz-e-Niswaan’s bicycle rally was going to happen. More than 70 teenage girls waited near a busy Mumbai intersection, fanning themselves every so often in a vain attempt to stave off the afternoon heat.
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