Bengaluru, 12 March, 2019 – Amazon Cares, the CSR initiative of Amazon India, recognizes women as a significant community of individuals and works towards creating opportunities for their growth and empowerment. The primary tenets are to make a difference to women across the country and help achieve sustainable development through various initiatives.

“Keeping our vision in mind, we have created opportunities for close to 130,000 women to realize their potential and in turn support the transformation of the local communities. We are committed to using our resources and infrastructure of innovation and technology to enable women in diverse communities succeed. We believe that through our sustained efforts, centered on vocational training and micro-entrepreneurship, we can help support India’s development” said Karuna Pande, Director, Customer Fulfilment, Amazon India.

Women Empowerment: To promote women empowerment, the Amazon Cares Community Centres have assisted more than 12,000 women to support their families financially by training them on vocational skills. One of them is a three-month tailoring course for women, where they are certified on completion of the course, enabling them with a skill that they can now use to gain employment.

Besides this, around 150 women were also introduced to micro-entrepreneurship and given exposure visits for practical learning. Several local banks, in partnership with the Community Centre have provided these women training on Financial Planning, Enterprise Management and Business Communication to help them learn and further develop their knowledge and skills.

To further strengthen the women, the centre also assists women from the surrounding villages with the formation of Self Help Groups (SHG). They are provided support in the form of facilitation for financial access from nationalized banks to undertake business initiatives too. More than 250 SHGs of 8,000 women across India have been formed through the support of Amazon Cares.

Education: Aligned with the National Digital Literacy Mission (NDLM), the education support initiative enables access to quality education through digital literacy, and has positively affected the lives of about 750 women so far. The centres impart basic training sessions on computer skills, reading and writing workshops and career counselling sessions to women that enables them to secure better job opportunities. 

There are also Community Libraries with more than 1000 books ranging from novels and biographies of various leaders, encyclopedias, English grammar and competitive examination reference books, religious books and so on. 10,000 women use this regularly to excel in competitive exams or improve their general knowledge for job opportunities and entrance tests. 

Across government schools in India, Amazon has partnered with organisations like India STEM Foundation and Learning Links Foundation to introduce and promote STEM education to girl students. This has empowered more than 500 girls to dabble in science experiments at a young age and consider engineering as a course for their future.

Health and Hygiene:  Amazon India promotes preventive health care through partnerships with the local medical institution and government organizations. Some of the initiatives rolled out at the centres include awareness programs on cleanliness and household waste management, maternity care and menstrual hygiene. Besides this, cancer screening camps were held across India where more than 2,000 women participated to gain awareness about cancer, types of cancers including breast, cervical and ovarian cancer, their symptoms and need for early diagnosis for proper treatment and cure.