Publication Category: Strategic Plan

As our planet goes through turbulent times, shaping and planning our work for the next five years amid such uncertainty is undoubtedly challenging. It is a moment that calls for deep concern, reflection, and responsibility. Yet, as with all difficult endeavours, it also demands hope and clarity of purpose. We therefore embarked on the development of Azad’s Strategic Plan for 2026–31 at this critical juncture with mindful resilience and care. It also requires courage and commitment. At Azad, we draw our courage from knowledge and our commitment both from and to the communities we work with. Together, this courage and commitment strengthen our collective competence and enable us to grow as an agile institution.

Working with women and gender-diverse people from resource-poor backgrounds is always accompanied by unseen barriers. To continue and deepen our work, supporting resource-poor women to choose non-traditional professions (NTPs) and communities and build gender-just ecosystems, we must together uphold the light of hope and love. A Strategic Plan serves as a ray of light – illuminating the path ahead, marking milestones, and helping us discover ground-breaking alleys alongside women.

As the poet Ada Limón reminds us, “…we are not unspectacular things, we’ve come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?” For Azad, this means being strategic yet supple, deepening relationships, nourishing the ecosystem, and igniting progressive aspirations among the women, men and gender-diverse people we work with.

To prepare for the next five years, we invoked our spirit of collaboration and initiated an open dialogue for strategic planning. Recognizing the need for both structure and process, Azad undertook a consultative exercise with all stakeholders, beginning with a session called Blue-Sky Thinking. The Strategic Plan has been shaped with care by the keen perspectives and grounded voices of our team members, community members, Board members, co-travellers, and sector leaders.

This generative process enabled a cross-section of participants to reflect on our established and emerging understandings, and to reimagine our vision in relation to national and global contexts. What has emerged is an outline of the guiding path we hope to pursue in the coming years, one that bridges the realities of today with the possibilities of tomorrow.

As we look ahead along this path, we are also excited about a significant milestone, marking twenty years of Azad and Sakha in 2028. We look forward to celebrating two decades of our journey with our drivers, community leaders, team members, Board members, donors, and fellow travellers.

You are warmly invited to join this caravan in the pages that follow.

Read the Strategic Plan 2026-31

Dear Friends,

We are glad to share our Strategic Plan of 2021-2026 with you all. This strategic plan has been developed in a period of extreme turbulence and unrest—nationally and globally. Even as the external context becomes more volatile and unpredictable, there is an inherent irony at best in developing strategic plans that predict exactly what an organisation will do in the next five years. Balancing the comfort of predictability in times that are uncertain is an art. We decided to let our creative juices flow. We are fully cognizant of the fact that this strategic plan indicates a direction, an expression of organisational intent and a framework that explains us to the external world. For the team, it provides required clarity on why, what, and when we want to achieve under each strategic focus.

In the next five years of our strategy, we will focus on consolidation of our existing programme and scaling up in terms of engaging with more cis/trans women and men from marginalised communities, working with them within a gender-just skill education approach. Keeping in mind the reality of Covid and its impact on the poor, we realized the need to dig deeper and build better.

We also plan to explore new areas by establishing partnerships that will help scale up the Gender Just Skill Education approach in the context of new non-traditional livelihoods. We will do this by exploring industries that are enthusiastic to include more women workers and provide them with a gender-inclusive work environment.

Accordingly, we will be revising our curriculum and pedagogy that is blended and that lends itself to scaling up. In partnership with Sakha—our strategic employment partner—we will increase the pace of transitioning to e-vehicles to promote a greener economy.

Institutionally, we foresee that in the next five years a culture of collective leadership is established at all levels in Azad. By deepening our leadership abilities, we will ensure that Azad builds itself further as a caring workspace that nurtures talent and potential while taking care of the well-being of its team. We understand that engaging with social change processes is difficult and challenging work. We will continue to build partnerships with civil society organisations and movements to strengthen solidarity within and across.

We remain grateful for all the support from our various donor partners—individual, national, and international. We will be calling on this support as we move ahead with our plans and we hope that we will be able to build new courageous and visionary partnerships as well. We are confident of deepening further our solidarity and partnership with the communities we work with.

With a strong and dedicated team and the leadership of a visionary Board, we are confident of navigating the future as it comes and delivering on the mission of enabling women disadvantaged by gender, caste, class, ethnicity, religion, race, colour, and sexuality to empower themselves with knowledge and skills to build a gender-just society and earn a livelihood with dignity in jobs and markets that have traditionally been closed to them.

Let us work together to move this world towards greater equality, peace, and harmony.

With gratitude, love, and respect to all,
Anita, Dolon, and Shrinivas

Read the Strategic Plan 2021-26

In 2015, Azad Foundation in collaboration with a range of stakeholders developed a 5-year strategic plan to set the path for its work in non-traditional livelihood development for resource-poor women. Azad Foundation’s mission is to equip resource-poor women so that they excel as professionals and/or entrepreneurs, and earn a “livelihood with dignity” in jobs and markets that had traditionally been closed to them.

Agenda for next 5 years
In order to translate our theory of change into reality, and based on the learning harvested, an understanding of the context and a careful consideration of possible risks, Azad has identified four key Strategic Focus Areas and goals to be achieved under each of these. In the next 5 years, through a range of strategies Azad aims to generate the following outcomes:

Programmatically

• A cadre of 3600 young women community change leaders who take control over their own lives and encourage and support women to adopt non-traditional remunerative livelihoods with dignity
• 350,000 resource-poor women aware of alternative livelihood options and opportunities in professional driving, their rights and where to seek support if facing gender violence
• 8000 young girls aware of their right to control their bodies and consider various livelihood options
• A cadre of 900 young men promoting and facilitating an enabling environment in their homes and communities
• 3955 women employable and at least 2620 earning remunerative employment as chauffeurs and exercising control over their earnings and lives
• At least 4 civil society partner organisations having the capacity to implement WoW
• Availability of robust knowledge on NTL trades, especially women transport workers, and pathways of empowerment
• Improved policy environment for women’s employment in public transport and strengthened gender-sensitive culture in the driving profession
• Increased investment of resources by multiple stakeholders for women’s participation in NTL
• Improved attitudes of urban public to female NTL practitioners enabling greater participation, visibility and voice of the resource-poor women in NTL professions

Institutionally

• Increased commitment and competency by Azad’s team to deliver across all strategic focus areas identified in this Strategic Plan 2016–2020
• Effective governance ensuring internal and external accountability
• Effective, efficient and innovative systems of fundraising and management in Azad

Read the Strategic Plan 2016-20