Feminist Approach to Technology Society (FAT) is a non-profit organization in India working to build the collective leadership of marginalized girls. Its vision is for every girl to reclaim her right to STEM and use it to drive collective leadership to build sustainable communities. FAT’s theory of change involves building girls’ personal agency, developing critical thinking and STEM competence, and providing training for girls to lead future programming. Since 2008, FAT has worked with close to 2,000 girls in long-term engagements across multiple states in India.
In India’s marginalized communities, adolescent girls face layered, intersecting barriers including poverty, caste, gender, and geography that constrain their education, mobility, safety, and voice. Girls from these communities are disproportionately pushed out of school by early marriage, financial barriers, cultural norms, and poor schooling environments. Many existing collective feminist interventions that do exist in India do not provide economic support, and almost none of the initiatives offer long-term, structured support for an individual girl from early adolescence through to adulthood leadership.
With support from the Girls Opportunity Alliance Fund, FAT will expand its Bridge Course, a structured five-month journey with local residential training, feminist awareness building, online learning and community field assignments, and a final evaluation to graduate to the next level of programming. The expansion project will allow FAT to reach girls in more communities across four states by mobilizing community-based partners and making the online learning program more structured, trackable, and scalable across more geographies. By building their pipeline, FAT will be ready to enroll more participants as part of the organization’s most significant expansion.
This project will directly reach 80 adolescent girls and expects to engage 500 additional community members. Upon completing the full program, each of the girls will form a Community Collective in their own neighbourhood, which involves establishing a learning centre, running programmes for adolescent girls, and becoming the local leader for the next generation of girls. With close to 2,000 girls engaged in long-term programs since the organization’s founding, FAT has demonstrated the impact of its programming – this project will allow for far more girls to be part of that journey.
To learn more about , please visit the organization’s website and social media page:
See more projects: Asia