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The world’s leading drink company Diageo aims to empower two million women, including 27,000 in India, under its five-year socio-economic programme in the Asia-Pacific region.
“Plan W aims to reach women of all socio-economic profiles through training and skills development to empower two million women in 17 countries in Asia-Pacific over five years,” the company announced here yesterday.
The plan has supported 15,000 women in Asia-Pacific after it was launched last year.
Diageo’s initiatives
Diageo has also announced two initiatives. The ‘Women in Hospitality and Tourism in Asia’ Conference, which aims to provide a platform for engagement and sharing of best practices for an audience committed to the cause of women’s empowerment through learning. It would be held on March 7, 2014 in Singapore to celebrate International Women Day.
The second initiative would be the ‘Women’s Empowerment (WE) Journalism Awards’, which aims to recognise and honour the outstanding achievements in reporting on women’s issues across Asia-Pacific, said Diageo, which has taken Hilton Hotel as a partner in the programmes.
“To date, we have launched 32 initiatives, in 12 markets, working with 17 partners and created a positive ripple effect that has reached 75,000 beneficiaries of these women,” said Gilbert Ghostine, President, Asia-Pacific, Diageo.
Social entrepreneurship development
In India, Diageo is working with British Council Young Women Social Entrepreneurship Development Program which was launched in September this year.
The Social Enterprise training programme aims to build skills and capacity of 20 master trainers to train others, starting from Delhi.
Diageo’s second programme is Udygoni — a pilot project to build capacity NGOs to support women to develop micro-enterprises. It aims to build the capacity of 7 NGOs in Delhi, to help women develop micro-enterprises by sharing business skills and training on starting and growing micro-enterprises.
Diageo’s third programme is Samarthanam Trust, which aims to upscale an existing all-women call centre in Bangalore, to improve productivity and reach by training beneficiaries on technical skills and providing career counselling and placement support.
The first batch of 316 women has completed training. Most of these women are visually impaired or have physical disabilities. Enrolment for the second batch is in progress.
The six-month programme, which began in September, aims to train 1,050 women.
Diageo’s partner in Udyogini and Samarthanam is Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) India.
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