Association For Women With Disabilities

Close your eyes and imagine you are a woman in a society where you are considered to be much less important than the men in your family. Now imagine you are also very poor, in a country where there is no educational, health or monetary support from the government. Add to that; imagine you are disabled and living in a distant village where even the fully able find it difficult to fulfill their basic needs.

Can you survive a day, a week or even a month that way? How about your WHOLE life?.....

The founder of the Association of Women with Disabilities (AWWD), Kuhu Das was afflicted with polio when she was young and has lived the life of a disabled woman in Kolkatta. Instead of this creating limits for her, it created a passion to help other women with disabilities live a rich fulfilling life.

Since its start in 2002, AWWD has educated around 850 disabled women about their rights under India’s Disabilities Law. It has also encouraged these women to get educated and learn skills to enable them to be financially independent.

When our team visited Kuru at the AWWD office, we were struck by her fierce passion as she recounted stories of the barriers faced by disabled women in Kolkatta and how they have been helped by her team. “We don’t want your sympathy” she said; “Just treat us as equal members of society”.

After showing us around the office, she took us to visit two groups of disabled women who are supported by AWWD. The majority of these women were orthopedically challenged. The first group had learned sewing and embroidery skills which helped them generate income. The second was performing street theater which educates the public on why they should treat the disabled as equals.

We introduced ourselves to both groups and had great translated conversations (with a lot of giggling by the girls) with them.

Some of the things that struck me during this visit were:

1) A social enterprise founder who has faced the same problems as those of their beneficiaries, is often more passionate and driven than a founder who has never personally experienced similar issues. This passion is a great advantage in getting others to join your cause or provide resources.

2) However, this passion can also hinder the growth of the social enterprise, as the founder is too emotionally attached to let go and allow other, more skilled people to take over senior management responsibilities. I’ve seen this problem in many NGOs which have failed to scale up because of the dominance of the founder.

3) Often as visitors to a project, we tend to mainly speak to the social enterprise founders and keep to ourselves when we meet the beneficiaries. We often do not introduce ourselves and do not interact on a one to one level with them. At the AWWD visits, we broke our self imposed barriers and interacted with the beneficiaries. I personally found it to be one of the richest experiences of the trip. Sometimes it’s the people the most unlike you, who can teach you the most.

4) Both sets of the girls we met agreed that our leader, Richard would make a fine Bollywood film hero. There was great competition among them to be chosen as his heroine. Richard’s ears turned a deeper shade of red than usual :-).

To learn more about the AWWD, check out their website at http://www.awwdindia.org