Milk Ladies Collaborated with Yamaha Children Safety Program in Kashipur
- H.Ogawa @ COATA LLP
- May 19, 2017
- 2 min read
The milk ladies joined in the road safety awareness program for school kids in Kashipur organized by Yamaha Motor India Sales Pvt. Ltd. The program, called YCSP (Yamaha Children Safety Program), has been executed all over India as one of the CSR activities of Yamaha, and targeted 4 schools in Kashipur on May 5-6, 2017.
The most active and young milk ladies who usually ride the scooter to deliver the milk, were assigned to the program by the project. The objectives to have the ladies try to attend the program, was to see the feasibility for village ladies to take part in an income generation activity outside village. At the same time, from economic viewpoint as a social business, the project needs to find out a way to fully use a scooter, which is one of the costliest assets of the project, by combination of any types business activities with milk delivery.
Working outside village may sounds not an issue for the people who grow up other than rural area. However, it is quite challenging particularly for young ladies, because most of villagers including their parents have the knee-jerk views such as ‘City is a dangerous place for villagers’, ‘Village lady doesn’t know anything, and is not capable of working outside’. Even young ladies, who have completed inter college and/or higher level education, sometimes are overwhelmed with the thought that staying home and living in village is the only option.
Therefore, the project staff had to persuade their parents as similar as when the project had got permission for the young ladies to ride scooter for milk delivery, which was the first hurdle to overcome for this event. That was, however, a little bit easier than before because the ladies themselves explained the event and insisted to do together to/against their own parents as well as their friend parents. The second hurdle was the travel by scooter to Kashipur which is the city, 15 Km far from their village, because all of the ladies haven’t ridden scooter to and in the city. One of their fathers kindly supported the ladies, and led them to the targeted schools.
YCSP is the program composed with lectures, safety video and music sessions in order for kids to aware importance of road safety. The project staff were not sure that the ladies could contribute properly to something in the program. Therefore, during the program at the first school, they attended just to observe and understand how it proceeded. At the second schools, then, they tried to play their roles distributing things to the kids between the sessions in the program. Finally, they got familiar with and enjoyed their tasks at the third and fourth school. They were asked to present themselves on the stage during the last program however, they were too shay to do so.
Ladies’ attending the program was small step, but also substantial progress for them to get confident of themselves as well as for the project to develop social business model aiming empowerment of rural women through income generating activities outside village. The project staff believes that such a series of small steps will enhance the empowerment of rural ladies leading rural development thought social business.
