Anita Dongre promotes career empowerment for women with UN Women at X-Billion Skills Lab talk

By

Isabelle Crossley

Published
Dec 2, 2020

Sustainable designer and entrepreneur Anita Dongre has helped launch a new initiative to train women from disadvantaged backgrounds across Maharashtra in workplace skills, linking with UN Women and X-Billion Skills Lab. 

 
Dongre, who has long worked with groups of rural women on skills development projects for her own clothing brands, spoke at the X-Billion Skills Lab talk on November 25, her brand announced in a press release. The talk launched a new initiative to help women gain skills to establish careers for themselves. 
 
The initiative will provide training to women from lower income communities across Maharashtra and aims to reach over 1,000 women in the coming year. Skills that the training will focus on will include emotional intelligence, creative thinking, entrepreneurship, and problem solving, which have been identified as '21st century power skills' by the World Economic Forum. Trainees will also be mentored and take part in remote internships.

“It is very important that you become economically empowered,” Dongre said to the women of Maharashtra at the event, according to a press release.

“Challenges will come, but don’t give up. We need to simply believe that we can do it. Find something you love, Put your mind to it and you will succeed.”
 
“The aim is to ensure that not only the women get access to jobs but also the required exposure to be able to build a successful long-lasting career- for which training one's mind to deal with various workplace scenarios in this dynamic and technology driven environment is equally as important,” said X-Billion Skills Lab founder, Samyak Chakrabarty.

“In-fact soft skills may become more important than technical skills, in the very near future.”