A tech revolution in rural India: Training poor women in STEM

Kandabari, India – On a sunny morning in Kandabari village in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, a group of students is learning to code in a classroom.
Kriti Kumari, 19, is one of 31 women at the Sapna Center, which trains rural women from marginalised backgrounds and requires them to live on campus. The centre offers a yearlong training programme in which women are taught to code and design websites and learn project management and primary-school-level maths for aspiring teachers. The organisation helps others find jobs in India’s information technology sector.
“If not for the Sapna Center, I would have been married by now and doing household chores,” Kumari, a native of the central Indian state of Jharkhand who has been at the centre for four months, told Al Jazeera.
“My brother was against the idea of my studies, and we had financial problems at home. However, my father supported me and dropped me here,” Kumari told Al Jazeera.
The centre is run by Sajhe Sapne, a nonprofit that was started in 2020 by Surabhi Yadav, 34, an alumnus of the country’s premier engineering school, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Delhi. It has graduated 90 students so far.
For young women like Kumari, coding and programming skills help gain access to India’s $250bn IT industry, which employs more than five million people and where 36 percent of the workforce is women.
An IT job is Kumari’s goal at the end of her course, she said, even though it’s not been an easy journey so far. She had never heard the term coding and initially had a hard time understanding the concept.
Yadav said language barriers are one of the reasons why women from rural areas might not excel in STEM courses.
“If you wouldn’t understand what the word coding means, how will you learn it?” she pointed out.
At Sajhe Sapne, teachers don’t care if the students, known as Sapnewaalis, are high school graduates, especially because the education standards across rural India can be highly uneven. Instead, interested students have to clear an entrance exam that checks for knowledge of the English language and reasoning.
Teachers use local languages from the different regions where the students come from, including Bundelkhandi, Maghi, Bhojpuri or Hindi, to teach coding languages like HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Muskaan, a programme manager at Sajhe who uses only one name, has been working with the organisation for the past two years and believes language is the most important aspect of pedagogy.
“We use words like abracadabra, rat and gili gili chu to make the students understand the basic concepts of coding,” Muskaan said, rattling off terms and phrases common in childhood stories and cartoons popular in many Indian villages.
“Abracadabra and gili gili chu is used to depict magic. Rat is a common character in many childhood stories. The reason is simple. If we use heavy words like function, data and result to teach coding, the students will not understand anything and will end up losing interest in the subject,” she told Al Jazeera.
Even the training session in which students are taught tools like LinkedIn, Microsoft Excel and Word is called “pehelwaani” and not “career intelligence”. “Pehel” means initiative, and “wani” means being determined, implying an attitude and capacity to take the initiative and stick to resolving problems.
That in turn has helped the women come up with solutions to the problems they face in their villages.
Yadav narrated the example of former student Anjani Kumari from Baghmara village in Uttar Pradesh, who last year taught her brother how to use Google Sheets to log irrigation services and manage payments for their farm. Similarly, she introduced a digital system at her village government-run creche to log data on children using the service and their families.
Preeti Kumari, a native of Bihar, one of the poorest states in India, and a student at the centre who is training to be a web developer, recalled her struggle to get there. She heard about the opportunity from a relative, but her parents refused to send her, she told Al Jazeera.
“Joining Sapna Center meant breaking out in revolt in my family,” Kumari said as she recalled it was her brother who booked her train ticket, helped her pack and escorted her to the centre. Her parents refused to speak with her for a month before eventually coming around.
The dropout rate after grade 10 in Bihar is a whopping 42 percent, one of the worst in the country. Teen marriages across the country are still quite common with 41 percent of women married before 19, and many never go to a college or a university.
Most women at the Sapna Center have had to navigate social boundaries, resist their parents’ objections and in some cases escape early marriages – like Kriti Kumari, who was under pressure from her parents to get married and got relief only after the groom’s family, unhappy with the dowry offered, called off the wedding, she told Al Jazeera. 
“The day my marriage broke, I asked my friend to fill out my [application] form to join Sajhe Sapne,” she said. She had heard about the centre from another nonprofit that had funded her school fees.
Although Kriti cleared the entrance test to join Sajhe, it took her three months to convince her parents to let her join.
Yadav added that most of the girls who come to study at Sajhe often face some sort of resistance from home.
“Either their parents want to get them married, or they are scared of their safety and don’t want them to venture out for any study or job,” Yadav said.
Kajal Ufhade, 18, is studying project management. Ufhade comes from an unprivileged caste community in Punjab and often faced discrimination at her school growing up.
“Our teachers would never correct our [notebooks]. They would also maintain some distance from us, and we were forced to sit on the floor,” she said, referring to the social practice of untouchability still in place against some caste groups in many places in India.
Because of the ostracisation, Ufhade dropped out after seventh grade in 2020. However, the organisation that had paid her school fees helped convince her parents to let her join Sapna Center.
“We are among the first girls in our community who have come out to study,” Ufhade told Al Jazeera, referring to herself and three others from her community in her village who are at the centre with her. “We are role models now. When I left my house to join Sajhe, my father told me, ‘Ab aaogi to angrezi seekh kar aana,’” or “When you come back, make sure you know how to speak English.”
Yadav’s first cohort in 2020 was 25 students, including women from the Musahar community in Bihar, among India’s poorest and most socially ostracised castes.
She got her early investments through crowdfunding. Her initial goal was to raise 1.5 million rupees ($18,000), but within three days of launching the campaign, she had raised 2.6 million rupees ($31,000). It wasn’t just family and friends who contributed. Celebrities also noticed and retweeted her initiative, helping her surpass her target.
Since then, she has received multiple grants from social enterprises including one by the Nudge and Meta, Social Alpha, CINI, Change Engines and Wingify, among others.
Yadav’s goal is to train at least 20,000 women in the next five years. She wants to focus on one or two geographical areas so there is a strong social shift on what is expected of rural women, she told Al Jazeera. That would require significant investment – funds she doesn’t have, she admitted. The yearlong residential programme at Sapna Center costs $1,146 per trainee. She’s toying with the idea of setting up nonresidential centres where 20 to 25 women from a village can be trained at a time.
That thought is still in an early stage, and for now, Yadav is turning to the students themselves with the idea of “Each One, Teach One” and requests her graduates pay the fee for an incoming student, just as someone paid for them. Her goal is to strengthen the alumni network to become the primary investors, influencers and inspirations for future students.
She has also asked families of current students to pay a monthly fee of $24 if they have the financial means to do so, as an experiment to see how successful it will be in supporting the centre’s funding needs.
However, in the long run, none of this may be enough if she wants a bigger impact, Yadav admitted. The only way to do that would be to become part of existing government programmes and schemes.
“Government will play a very important role in making funding sustainable at Sajhe,” she said.
Sapna Center currently has an employment rate of 75 percent, and its graduates have found jobs in project management, technical fields and as primary school maths teachers. But graduates have not always had the easiest road to finding jobs. Some have faced rejections. Simran, who goes by one name, was rejected multiple times in her search for a job as a web developer while studying at the centre.
That has raised the question of the employability of the Sapna Center graduates. Bhavna Arora, deputy manager of employee development at an IT company in Delhi, told Al Jazeera that educational background does matter.
“No organisation would entertain [job seekers who are only 10th or 12th grade graduates]. The big and middle-sized companies want their candidates to be at least [college] graduates. If it is an IT industry, then the education should be something related to IT,” she said.
Yadav doesn’t agree. A lack of degree does not also mean a lack of skills, Yadav told Al Jazeera, pointing out that graduates of engineering schools that are not top tier have trouble finding jobs and that the real problem is in the quality of education and the overall lack of jobs.
For Sapne Center students, the bigger problem is that “The current hiring processes are not designed for diversity and inclusion,” Yadav said. When Sajhe reaches out to organisations for placements, they ask them to test on skills and not to be rigid with their paperwork. “If you believe that our Sapnewaalis have skills, then hire them,” she tells them.
Instead of discouraging Simran, the rejections pushed the 23-year-old, and a handful of other women who were also turned down by prospective employers, to start their own business offering web and app development services. Udyami Technologies is currently building websites for a consulting firm and a nonprofit organisation and an app to teach the English alphabet to rural students.
“While the earnings might be small, this month we have been able to bag five projects worth $2,500. Our next plan includes getting our company registered and our mission is to motivate more rural girls to come out and work in the tech field,” Simran told Al Jazeera.