Azad Foundation

Azad Foundation works towards professions with dignity for women, focusing on women from underprivileged contexts. It states its vision as a world where all women enjoy full citizenship, exercise control over their lives and bodies, pursue a profession with dignity, and generate wealth and value for all. Its core method is economic empowerment through non-traditional livelihoods, work that women are usually excluded from, supported by a gender-just skill education framework. That framework covers transformative skill training for cisgender and transgender women alongside work on the gender barriers those women face inside families, communities, markets and policy. Azad also treats gender-based violence as a livelihoods problem, on the reasoning that violence directly limits women's access to education, to work and to public space. It describes its own values as inclusion, respect, secularism, accountability and transparency, applied through a feminist lens.

Head Quarters: New Delhi

Major Areas of Work

• Non-traditional livelihoods: Training and placing women from resource-poor households in occupations that are conventionally closed to them, most visibly professional driving.

• Gender-just skill education: A holistic training framework that combines technical skill with rights, self-worth and negotiation, rather than vocational instruction on its own.

• Gender-based violence: Community engagement and prevention work aimed at the violence that keeps women out of the workforce and out of public space.

• Men, boys and masculinities: Working directly with young men and boys to challenge toxic masculinity and build support for gender justice at home and in the community.

• Research, policy engagement and communications: Building evidence and taking it to government and stakeholders in India, South Asia and globally, including work on gender-inclusive transport and public sanitation infrastructure.

Major Initiatives and Programmes

• Women with Wheels: The flagship programme that trains women from low-income communities as professional drivers and supports them into paid driving work.

• Feminist Leadership: Leadership development for women, building the confidence, voice and decision-making power to lead in their own households, workplaces and communities.

• Men for Gender Justice: Engages men and boys as allies and agents of change, addressing masculinity as a cause of gender inequality rather than treating women as the only audience for gender work.

• Azad Kishori: Works with adolescent girls, reaching them before the point where family and community expectations narrow their choices about education and work.

• Centre for Gender and Masculinities: A dedicated unit of Azad Foundation set up as a hub for knowledge, innovation and collaboration on gender-just work with young men and boys.

Women with Wheels is the programme Azad is best known for. It puts women from marginalised backgrounds into commercial driving, an occupation almost entirely held by men, and pairs the driving licence and technical training with English language skills, rights education and support against the harassment women face in that job. The programme has also become the basis for Azad's policy work: its engagement with the Delhi Transport Corporation pushes for gender-inclusive infrastructure and sensitisation so that women drivers can actually stay in public transport work.

Impact

Azad Foundation works with underprivileged women in New Delhi, Jaipur, Kolkata and Chennai, and states that it collaborates with policymakers and stakeholders across South Asia and globally to widen access to non-traditional livelihoods. It maintains partnerships with the National Foundation for India and iPartner India, with whom it instituted the Kamla Bhasin Award recognising work on women's rights and on challenging toxic masculinity across South Asia, with the Sabar Institute on inclusive public sanitation for women, trans and queer persons in Kolkata, and with the Delhi Transport Corporation on gender-inclusive transport policy. Donations to the organisation are exempt under Section 80G of the Income Tax Act.

Working at Azad Foundation suits people who want the training and the politics in the same job. The work runs from direct skill training and community engagement with women and adolescent girls, through work with men and boys on masculinity, up to research and negotiation with state bodies such as a city transport corporation. That range gives exposure to how a livelihood intervention becomes a policy argument, which is unusual for a mid-sized organisation. It fits people committed to feminist practice who are comfortable working in low-income urban communities across four cities, and who want their work measured by whether women hold and keep a job that was previously closed to them.