Asmita Resource Centre For Women - Cultural Context

Cultural Context

Asmita plays an important role in a wider social context: with other NGOs, the center seeks to redress social issues that have a great impact on India’s female and youth populations. Issues of particular interest include addressing the disparity between illiteracy rates of young men and women, the drop-out trend in urban areas that particularly affects young women, and the lack of economic opportunity faced by many Indian women and urban residents. Indian women have the lowest literacy rates in Asia. In a 1991 survey, less than 40 percent of the 330 million women aged 7 and older were literate. Literacy plays a much bigger role than simply being able to read or not. Literacy has been correlated with high levels of fertility, mortality poor nutritional status, low earning potential and little autonomy.

This work is plagued by a cultural, economic, and educational tradition that reinforces patriarchal attitudes. Women’s roles are traditionally inferior. As women gain increasing access to education and economic opportunities, however, centers like Asmita gain important local support that creates a haven within a society that, facing significant social difficulties, is ill-equipped to deal with social change. Difficulties include the engrained structural makeup of the Indian workforce and the design of the educational system. Youth make up 22% of India’s population (World’s Youth 106) and between 10 and 33% of the Indian workforce in certain industries (WY 120). Centers like Asmita give children opportunities for education and growth while also providing supportive atmospheres that hope to keep children from being exploited in the child labor market.

Read more about this topic:  Asmita Resource Centre For Women

Other articles related to "cultural context":

The League Of Gentlemen (album) - Cultural Context
... So the 'League of Gentlemen' was released at a cultural cusp ... The band had been positioned by Fripp himself as a "new wave instrumental dance band" which would suggest that he considered the music produced by the band to be 'New wave' in character ...
Scipio (cognomen) - The Family - Cultural Context
... Scipio Aemilianus was famous for his Scipionic Circle, a group of scholars and philosophers that he gathered around him in his house in Rome ... He was a patron and friend of the historian Polybius, the grammarian Lucilius, the playwright Terence, and others ...

Famous quotes containing the words context and/or cultural:

    Among the most valuable but least appreciated experiences parenthood can provide are the opportunities it offers for exploring, reliving, and resolving one’s own childhood problems in the context of one’s relation to one’s child.
    Bruno Bettelheim (20th century)

    The personal appropriation of clichés is a condition for the spread of cultural tourism.
    Serge Daney (1944–1992)