At Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, we firmly believe that education is the key to empowerment, and every aspiring mind should have equal access to opportunities. Recognizing the significance of fostering an inclusive educational environment, we have diligently established Women Access Schemes tailored for school students aspiring to pursue higher studies at our institution. These schemes, comprising scholarships, mentoring programs, and various other initiatives, are not just initiatives; they are pathways to transformation, breaking down barriers and enabling young women to reach their fullest potential.
1.1.1 Rekha Eipe Memorial Scholarship
In 2022, we inaugurated the Rekha Eipe Memorial Scholarship for Women’s Empowerment and Education. This scholarship annually supports at least one female student enrolled in the Master in Social Work (MSW) Program at Amritapuri, with demonstrated financial need, enabling them to pursue full-time enrollment in the MSW program. It covers all the tuition fees for the student’s two-year residential degree. It recognizes and rewards exceptional civic engagement, academic accomplishments, and compassionate character in young women committed to community improvement and active participation in social service.
On December 30th, 2022, the second Rekha Eipe Memorial Scholarship Award for Women’s Empowerment and Education was given to scholarship recipient Geethu S. Gireesh, Master of Social Work student. The event took place at Shraddha Hall in the presence of several dignitaries and guests. Shri Prabhakaran Ramachandran, Chairman and Founding Partner, Pravda Law Associates for Litigation in India and Lincoln Global Law Chambers (LGLC) attended via video conference.
The Rekha Eipe Memorial Scholarship is an endowment fund providing financial aid to talented female students in the Master of Social Work Program at Amrita.
For further details on the Rekha Eipe Memorial Scholarship:
1.1.2 One-shot scholarship campaigns: 20% scholarships for all women enrolling in Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham online programmes in March 2023
On International Women’s Day 2023, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham announced that all women learners enrolling at any of the online programs at Amrita AHEAD, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham’s online programs division, would be offered a 20% scholarship on their first semester fees.
The initiative, which would run till March 31, 2023, aimed at providing opportunities for women learners across India to continue their education with Amrita AHEAD’s 100% online UGC-entitled programs and enhance their career prospects.
The campaign was communicated in numerous media including India Today, The Indian Express and different education online portals
For further details of the campaign:
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham is organizing a series of Virtual Career Counselling Workshops on ‘Career Counselling Entrance Coaching & Foundation Program’ exclusively for school students of class XI and XII current batch. Some of them are specifically designed for women school students to encourage them to embrace an engineering career path in areas like computer science engineering.
For further information:
In 2022 and 2023, The School of Social and Behavioural Sciences and its research centre Ammachilabs organized a series of workshops aimed at promoting STEM education among school children, encouraging girls to participate. These efforts saw the participation of 103 schoolgirls in 2022, representing 25% of the participants, and increased to 264 schoolgirls participating in 2023, making up 50% of the total participants. The workshops covered a variety of themes and initiatives to foster technical skills and innovation.
These initiatives collectively empowered girls and young women by providing them with the tools and confidence to excel in STEM fields, contributing to a more equitable future in technology and innovation.
2.2.1 The Second Foundation Workshops
The Second Foundation Workshops aimed to teach 21st-century skills, focusing on game development, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT). Conducted in schools across rural India, these workshops emphasized hands-on, practical learning in a peer-to-peer environment.
2.2.2 The Atal Tinkering Labs (ATL) Marathon
The Atal Tinkering Labs (ATL) Marathon is an annual innovation challenge by NITI Aayog, encouraged students to identify community problems and develop working prototypes as solutions. Organized in 2021, 2022, and 2023, the program helped students, including many girls, engage with real-world challenges and hone their problem-solving abilities.
2.2.3 The STEM Exhibition 2023 & Civic panel “Science Technology Engineering Mathematics (STEM) for Social Good”
Leveraging the ATAL Marathon, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham organized The STEM Exhibition 2023 & Civic panel “Science Technology Engineering Mathematics (STEM) for Social Good”, a Civil20 Gender Equality & Women’s Empowerment Working Group initiative, was hosted on April 1st 2023, by Amrita Vidyalayam Thalassery. This initiative was led by Dr Bhavani Rao, Dean of Amrita School of Social and Behavioural Sciences. The discussion was moderated by Dr Gayathri Manikutty, Assistant Professor, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham.
The purpose was to showcase the importance of gender equality and disability inclusion in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math fields, and inspire the student community to take action towards creating a more inclusive and equitable society.
The event was a big success, with the Atal Tinkering Lab (ATL) students attending and engaging in lively discussions about their ATL Marathon projects and gender equality and disability inclusion.
We had a diverse group of speakers including:
They shared their personal experiences and perspectives on the topics, and interacted with students during the exhibition. ATL Marathon is Atal Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog’s flagship innovation challenge, where school students identify community problems of their choice and develop innovative solutions in the form of working prototypes.
The impressive display of STEM projects and innovations showcased at the exhibition included the work of 74 children, 40 girls and 34 boys. Over the past three months, 27 teams from Amrita Vidyalayam Thalassery worked diligently on their ATL Marathon 2023 projects.
2.2.4 IEEE STEAM for Social Good Program
In collaboration with the IEEE Education Society Kerala Section, we conducted the IEEE STEAM for Social Good program in September 2022. This included a summer camp and a Makeathon focusing on IoT and app development. Over ten days, participants applied a design-thinking approach to create prototypes addressing societal issues aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, inspiring many girls to develop innovative solutions for real-world problems.
In 2023, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham came together with UNESCO New Delhi to launch a campaign called Spotlight Red, aimed at raising awareness about menstrual health and hygiene management, particularly among women, including young girls attending school. After a successful national launch hosted at Amrita Hospital, Faridabad on 8th June, 2023, the campaign was launched in the state of Telangana on 17th June, 2023 at B.M. Birla Science Museum in Hyderabad.
Over 220 attendees participated in the event, mostly students and faculty members of Amrita Vidyalayam schools and Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, parents of students, CSOs, Self Help Groups and media representatives of the Telangana State.
The event included the unveiling of five teaching-learning modules and a national survey and gap analysis report by UNESCO India. Their purpose is to enhance understanding and skills related to menstruation management while fostering awareness about its societal impact. The modules aim to empower adolescents from diverse backgrounds, including girls with disabilities, by providing them with access to period and puberty education. Moreover, they seek to create a supportive environment through interventions at the school, state, and national levels, enabling these adolescents to continue their education.
Through this campaign, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham demonstrated to the students and teachers of Amrita Vidyalayam (Amrita Secondary Schools), as well as other institutions, that it truly upholds gender equality and women’s empowerment through concrete action plans.
For further information:
In 2023 under the umbrella of Civil20 India, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham organized awareness campaigns on gender equality by inviting school students to take a pledge for gender equality and to create human formations of the C20 logo on gender equality and women’s empowerment. We also invited them to reflect and nominate role models who made a difference in their life for gender equality. We partnered with the Directorate of Education, Government of Delhi, and with the Ministry of Vocational Education & Skill Development, Uttar Pradesh, and deployed the campaign in 2,000 schools in Delhi and 4,000 schools in Uttar Pradesh.
The Grand Finale of the campaign in Delhi took place on July 25th, 2023 in the Tyagaraj Stadium, Delhi with 5,000 school students participating in person and 14,00,000 Live Stream.
Through these campaigns, we have been inspiring prospective students, especially young women, to join Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham and realize their full potential.
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham has consistently championed women’s empowerment and gender equality, putting these principles into practice with students and program beneficiaries. By fostering a culture of support and equality, we inspire prospective students and their families, showing the real impact of our commitment to meaningful change.
Since 2016, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham has been appointed as India’s UNESCO Chair on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment, reflecting our commitment to excellence in advancing gender equality and empowerment.
Within Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, the Centre for Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality hosts all the activities of the UNESCO Chair. This includes research, training, and program development in the field of gender equality and women’s empowerment. Our research and field projects mostly focus on empowering women and girls through vocational and life skills training, using the latest technologies. To this day, more than 300,000 women have benefited from these projects in both India and Africa.These projects have inspired numerous applicants and students to start or continue their education at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham.
More information about our activities: Click here
As a University program, the Amrita Gender Harmony workshop has been developed to help promote gender equality across the institution and to provide students, teachers, and administrators the tools and language they need to eliminate gender-based discrimination and promote equality both inside and outside the classroom. The workshop strives to help students and teachers recognize, acknowledge and then shift fundamental cultural perspectives, pre-dispositions and biases towards gender and gender roles. The proposed course is a semester-long program with multiple sessions that are participatory and focus on learning, personal reflection, group discussion and real world action as key approaches for effective understanding and sensitization.
The implementation started July 2022 with a 2-phase training for teachers on the topics of the workshop, giving them a detailed look into the content and training them how to deliver it to students.
In October 2023, the first batch of 29 students (mostly first-year undergraduate students in the Dental School of Kochi campus) participated in the first session of the workshop.
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham offers different mentoring schemes to uplift and accompany women students:
At Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, we are proud to announce that 83% of the women students are mentored.
These tools demonstrate to parents and future students that Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham is committed to advancing gender equality across all its campuses.
For further information on the existing mentoring schemes
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham has established multiple anti-discrimination committees in accordance with the UGC (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2012, and UGC (Grievance Redressal) Regulations, 2012. This indirectly assures potential female students that their rights will be protected.
These committees address issues related to the deprivation of access to education for students, faculty, and staff based on caste, creed, religion, language, ethnicity, gender, and disability.
For further info: Click here
4.5.1 Health
For further information on:
4.5.2 Safety and Security
4.5.3 Education
4.6.1 Walkathon
A walkathon was organized on March 9th 2023, to bring attention to International Women’s Day and to kickstart the C20 One Million Lights campaign, accompanied by a call for nominations. Its purpose was to foster awareness and advocacy for women’s rights and empowerment on a global scale.
The event provided a platform for students from different departments to come together to celebrate women and their achievements.
4.6.2 Other online communication
Online communications about Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham’s International Women’s Day events highlight its commitment to promoting gender equality on campus. By showcasing student initiatives, the institution nurtures aspirations and encourages more young women to pursue higher education at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham.
Examples of communication online of this event:
On the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, November 25, 2022, Social Work students from Amritapuri and Coimbatore campuses, researchers from AMMACHI Labs and the Center for Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality, and staff from various Amrita departments united to end violence against women and girls by proudly wearing orange ribbons. These ribbons, handmade by Social Work students from the Amrita School of Social and Behavioral Sciences in Amritapuri, symbolized a commitment to a world free of violence against women and girls, “dyeing the world in orange” as a sign of hope for a safer future.
