A tech revolution in rural India: Training poor women in STEM

The training at Sapna Center has helped the women to come up with solutions for problems in their villages.

Kandabari, India – On a sunny morning in Kandabari village in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, a group of students is learning to code in a classroom.

Kriti Kumari, 19, is one of 31 women at the Sapna Center, which trains rural women from marginalised backgrounds and requires them to live on campus. The centre offers a yearlong training programme in which women are taught to code and design websites and learn project management and primary-school-level maths for aspiring teachers. The organisation helps others find jobs in India’s information technology sector.

“If not for the Sapna Center, I would have been married by now and doing household chores,” Kumari, a native of the central Indian state of Jharkhand who has been at the centre for four months, told Al Jazeera.

“My brother was against the idea of my studies, and we had financial problems at home. However, my father supported me and dropped me here,” Kumari told Al Jazeera.

The centre is run by Sajhe Sapne, a nonprofit that was started in 2020 by Surabhi Yadav, 32, an alumnus of the country’s premier engineering school, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Delhi. It has graduated 90 students so far.

For young women like Kumari, coding and programming skills help gain access to India’s $250bn IT industry, which employs more than five million people and where 36 percent of the workforce is women.

An IT job is Kumari’s goal at the end of her course, she said, even though it’s not been an easy journey so far. She had never heard the term coding and initially had a hard time understanding the concept.

Yadav said language barriers are one of