Mobile Business School in Karnataka
In September 2007, with the help of Deshpande Foundation, the Ashoka Foundation and Mann Deshi Bank, the business school began a five-year project to provide financial empowerment for rural communities in North Karnataka. This is to be achieved by offering financial services to women (formal and informal) and establishing a Business School for Rural Women. Over 4000 women have graduated from the Mobile Business School in Kanartaka.
The Mobile Business School for Rural Women is the Mann Deshi Foundation’s innovative solution to making it’s range of courses accessible to women who due to financial or cultural constraints would be unable to access training in a central location. A bus has been designed and converted to operate as a mobile classroom which will travel from village to village within Maharashtra and Karnataka.
The Mobile Business School will offer training in a range of technical and practical business skills which will enable women to expand or start new businesses, which will in turn be supported with start-up micro-loans through Mann Deshi’s financial services.Local NGOs provide advice to the business school on locations where there is the most demand for entrepreneurial training and where mobile classrooms can be held. The leaders of the SHGs from the respective villages are responsible for coordinating the local logistics in their respective villages.
The financial services offered include a diverse range of micro-finance products, including savings, loans, pensions and insurance which will be coupled with comprehensive and accessible financial literacy training. These services will be offered from both a central location in Hubli and Satara and from the Mobile Business School for Rural Women.
Mobile Business School
Mobile Business School in Maharashtra
The Mann Deshi Udyogini (Business School for Rural Women) and The Bonita Trust have launched the second custom-built Mobile Business School for Rural Women (MBSRW), in July 2009 which serves the remote villages of Maharashtra and Karnataka in India.
MBSRW offers vocational training covering a wide range of skills such as screen printing, tailoring, fast food preparation and agricultural courses, which provide training on dairy production and veterinary camps. In addition, it also offers business training which includes financial and marketing literacy, technology courses to teach basic computer literacy and mobile phone literacy. The level of courses varies from basic to advanced, in order to meet the diverse needs of women with different skill levels. Support of Bonita Trust for MBSRW has helped women in remote location to get an access to business training.
The
Bonita Trust is an independent philanthropic trust, founded in 2004.
Bonita’s endowment programs results from a personal commitment by its principals
to help communities address some of the important health and education
challenges facing them, leveraging new technologies and Internet-based
solutions. To learn more about the Bonita Trust and the programs they support
visit: http://www.bonitatrust.org/
Chairwoman of the Mann Deshi Business School – Chetna Gala Sinha – says “Thousands of young girls in India aspire to a technical and business education but have neither the means nor the opportunity. Mann Deshi is thankful to Bonita Trust for providing the opportunity to many of these rural young girls by enabling the Business School to acquire the business school on wheels”.
Courses
