Project Execution

Women’s Synergy’s director Vaidehi believes that computer education is a very important need for women of all backgrounds and education. During her years of helping women she has been noticing that women are not computer literate and this challenges them also psychologically, as they are comforting some difficult issues. Coming out from a challenging environment, they have to come out of the self-limiting beliefs. Computer education is a wonderful tool to start with.

Malini and Lakshmi have both very good grip on computers and were looking at an opportunity to transfer their knowledge and skills to women so that they also get to learn something new which may help them in their personal/career space. Malini confesses: “Being it my first project, I was really excited and hesitant of any glitches that will happen, thinking whether there will be anyone handholding me. But when I got to know there is a co-volunteer, and NGO coordinator, that gave me confidence to kick start it.”

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Malini, Lakshmi and Vaidehi were all working very closely and helped each other in all possible ways. Through a WhatsApp group they were able to coordinate everything around the workshops. Vaidehi’s role was to mobilise women to participate in the workshops. “First we have to call for participants, we use social media, WhatsApp group - to spread the word and that brings the interest.” 

“After the first few classes it went very smooth,” states Malini. They have conducted one class every week for 3 months, 12 sessions in total. At the beginning of the project they planned all the aspects of the project - syllabus, work distribution, session timings and details of each session. “We planned each session timing and who will deliver what, every session we planned out we knew what we wanted to cover and this exact plan really helped,” adds Malini. 

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Challenges faced

As Malini recollects: “The only challenge was that every time there was a new set of participants. We didn't know whether the participants would understand the topic, that was a little worrying. Continuity would definitely help, few of the participants would come for all the sessions and that was very motivating for us.”

Lakshmi also mentions: “Getting participants to be punctual for the online training on Sundays was a challenge.  We had delays in the first 2 sessions but post that we told them we will wait only 5 min post which the class would begin even if there were only 2 participants and topics will not be repeated. We started seeing improvements in session 4 and beyond; participants were on time and sessions concluded on time as well.”

NGO director Vaidehi shed more light on the attendance challenges: “First, women need to know how to get online, if they for example change their password they didn’t know how to come back, so all these small things cause some of them to lose interest. Some of them were unsettled because of the covid situation and we couldn't change the timing, so the number of participants went down a bit. However, after every session we got very good testimonials from the participants.”