Helping Assamese Women Go Back to School

Learning to read and write, says Anami Bawri, makes life more interesting. Photo: Mercy Corps

Anami Bawri's greatest regret is leaving school at age nine because her parents wanted her to look after her younger siblings. Today, she is a daily-wage worker at Moran Tea Estate in Assam, India. And she is illiterate.

With funding from the Western Union Foundation, Mercy Corps is helping Anami and more than 300 other Assamese women learn to read and write.

Under a program called Women's Empowerment for Literacy (WEL), Mercy Corps worked with the Indian Government’s Department of Adult Education to design a special curriculum for the women, most of whom work in tea estates. In groups of about 20, the students attend two-hour classes six days a week. Trainers also make house visits to motivate the women to keep studying.

When Anami heard about the WEL program in a meeting of her self-help group, she was excited to join. Now she's a regular member of the class and is progressing fast. Her husband promises to let her handle the family expenses if she learns to read and write and do basic calculations. As the president of her self-help group, she now has the ability to keep the minutes of their meetings.

Anami proudly recalls a recent success: she and a group of co-workers were having lunch when their tea estate supervisor pointed to a signboard and asked, "Who can tell what's written here?"

Everybody became quiet. Anami then read out the words: khowa pani, or drinking water.

Western Union and Mercy Corps have been working together since 2007 to bring Western Union's "Our World, Our Family" program to life. Since the start of Mercy Corps' participation in "Our World, Our Family," we have helped more than 200,000 people through programs in China, Ethiopia, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States.