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Economic Development
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Objectives
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To provide opportunities for under-privileged women in entrepreneurship and community businesses.
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To encourage self-employment among poor and needy women.
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To train interested and needy people of the marginalized community to build, operate and own businesses.
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Programs
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Fair Trade Centers
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Exports
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Domestic Sales
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Project Asli foods
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Training Centre
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1. Training Centre
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The first station that woman lands at in her journey towards economic empowerment is the training center of Creative handicrafts. Women, who are unskilled and disadvantaged, approach the social workers of CH asking for assistance in continuing their lives. The social workers put them through a motivational test and visit their house hold to verify whether this woman could form a beneficiary of the programs of CH. If found a beneficiary then the woman is sent to the training center to train herself in skills and personality. It is an informal training center where the woman learns the basic skills in embroidery and stitching. On successful completion of the same they are graduated to a Fair trade center and become a member of CH.
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2. Fair Trade Centers
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The women are organized in groups (like a cooperative) to produce handicrafts and soft toys to earn a living. There are 12 groups of women with each group having 20 members. The management of the groups is taken care of by the women themselves. Every chain in the production process is completely managed by the women. These fair trade centers independently manage all their affairs and the head office of CH assists them in fulfilling orders, managing the finance, maintaining discipline, etc. The members are entitled to a profits that is generated by each fair trade centers.
The fair trade centers have their own bank accounts. They elect their leader who is the link between the head office and the fair trade centers. These leaders are elected for a period of three years.
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3. Exposure Program
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Creative Handicrafts earns 80% of its income from exports of its products to fair trade organizations in Spain, France, Italy, United States, etc. These organizations possess all the necessary status for imports. Today it exports both apparels and textile based handicrafts.
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4. Domestic Sales
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CH began its effort to sell the products firstly in the domestic market. It has been finding novel and creative ways of selling its products in the domestic market. One of the novel ways of selling was its ability to establish a shop on wheels (SHOW), a mobile shop, which goes around selling its products in the city of Mumbai. It has been participating in exhibitions and sales organized by both government and non-government organizations. CH has been successful in creating a niche for itself in the domestic market. However, it has not been able to reap all its potential in reaching out to the big main stream market.
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5. Project Asli foods
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Over the last 25 years we derived our satisfaction from the fact that we have been able to generate employment opportunities for many disadvantaged and unskilled women as part of our continued effort to mitigate the sprawling poverty in many families. However, we realized that this too requires certain skills, which could be acquired during the six months one-year training that we impart. Unfortunately not all women were able to acquire these skills and hence we needed to work with them to identify alternative opportunities. Thus Asli foods was born which undertakes lunch and catering orders. It employs 20 women and supplies 400 packed lunches every day. This is a viable alternative selfemployment opportunity for women.
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