Women's economic independence

Training is the cheap part. A three-week tailoring course costs a few thousand rupees a head and produces a certificate. What it does not produce is income, because the distance between knowing a trade and earning from it is made of things a course does not touch: a machine, working capital, a first buyer, a bank account in her own name, and the confidence to walk into a branch.

So we treat the whole chain as the programme, and we only count the end of it.

What we actually do

• Skills training in trades local employers and local markets are asking for
• Enterprise setup support: costing, sourcing, pricing, registration
• Financial literacy that ends in an account and a credit application, not a workshop
• Self-help group formation and federation linkage where the block structure supports it
• Market and buyer linkage, including institutional buyers
• Digital access, because a woman who cannot use a phone cannot use a scheme portal

What we measure

• Enrolment, attendance and completion
• Whether she is earning independently at six months and at twelve
• How much that income changed, against a baseline taken at enrolment
• Whether the bank account and any credit are in her name
• Drop-out, and the reason, recorded honestly

What we don't claim

We do not claim to have changed household decision-making, or confidence, or status. Those things may well change. We have no instrument that measures them credibly at our scale, so we do not put them in a report.