Annual Report 2025-26

Cultivating the Future

This year was a year of dreaming, questioning, and finding pathways into an uncertain future. Together, we completed Azad’s Strategic Plan for 2026–31—a process of reflection, learning, and collective visioning. As we looked ahead, we were reminded of a metaphor shared by one of our colleagues—for eighteen years, we have climbed mountains that seemed impossible to scale and found roads through dense forests where sunlight barely reached the ground. Today, we stand in a valley. Parts of it are lush and blooming, nurtured by women from marginalized communities who have transformed their own lives and surroundings. Yet, much of the valley still awaits to be cultivated. Our work, therefore, is far from complete.

At the same time, we know this is not an era for comfortable dreams. We live amid deepening geopolitical conflicts, economic uncertainty, and widening inequalities, where wealth and power continue to concentrate in the hands of a few, pushing marginalized communities further to the margins. These realities remind us that gender justice caannot be separated from the struggle against structural inequality and exclusion. Yet even amid these crises, we remain hopeful that the world can change for the better. We choose hope as a responsibility to continue imagining, building, and acting towards a more just and equitable future.

This year, we have consciously initiated articulating our work through the intersections of caste, gender, and labour. This has strengthened our analysis on how enabling women to enter non-traditional professions challenges patriarchy and caste-based occupational hierarchies. We also advanced our commitment to transgender persons’ inclusion in programs and started responding to the lived experiences of transgender communities through our interventions…

Read the Annual Report 2025-26