3,800 km. 260 days. Nearly a 100 workshops. Meeting with countless citizens across the country. This is the journey Hong Kong-based marketing professional Srishti Bakshi embarked upon on September 15 from Kanyakumari.
Ms. Bakshi, UN’s Empower Woman Champion for Change 2016-2017, said she was shaken after the Gurgaon rape incident and decided to do something to empower women in the country. “I went to my whiteboard and decided that I wanted to walk and conduct workshops. I was selected for the Empower Women initiative and that gave me the focus. That’s when I decided to focus on digital and financial security for women,” she said.
The UN Women’s Empower Women Initiative is dedicated to empowering women to achieve their economic potential by inspiring both men and women to become to become advocates, change makers and leaders in their community.
An avid hiker, Ms. Bakshi, who has so far covered 710 km, has already met over 5,000 people from all walks of life and conducted 25 workshops. “We have different workshop modules for rural and urban women. The modules have been designed by Deepak Ramola, UN Young Champion,” she said.
She has also collaborated with various organisations for this campaign.
Through her journey across the country, she is collecting stories of women who have been able to bring about big changes in their lives through the Internet. “During the workshops for rural women, we take them through a voice-enabled search, teach them to use smartphones using visual cues, including teaching them to take selfies and shoot videos.”
The workshops in urban areas are different. The focus of these workshops is that anyone can be a change maker and how to make the country a safer place for women.
Ms. Bakshi said she has an application — Cross Bow Miles — to make her journey more participative. Through the app, available on both Android and IOS, she is collecting ‘1 Billion Steps’. “We have collaborated with 20 different organisations and non-profit groups. Anyone can use the app and each step on it unlocks some resource on the ground, such as notebooks for girls in rural areas, skill training for acid attack survivors, etc,” she said.
In Bengaluru, she has decided to go on a night walk to ‘reclaim the night’. Ms. Bakshi will be walking from Manekshaw Parade Grounds to the War Memorial on Saturday at 8.30 p.m.
On October 30, she will be part of a panel discussion on ‘From birth to career peak: Why does the gender divide keep increasing? What can be done to reverse that’ at the Chopra Hall, ASC Centre and College. Both events are open to public.
