Technology for the People - Wherever the Need

Technology for the People

News stories from the Middle East often describe the social and religious resistance Muslim girls face when they want to get an education. Frequently it is the father who denies his daughters the opportunity to attend school and instead seeks an early marriage for them. In India, a country with the second highest population of Muslims in the world, a non-Muslim man named Rajen Varada has devised an ingenious plan that is ensuring the education of Muslim girls from slum areas with their fathers’ approval. What is the secret behind his plan? It’s simply this: when Muslim girls graduate from one of his schools – which teach computer animation – they are hired by information technology companies in Hyderabad at salaries their families never dreamed they could earn.

Girls from poor Muslim families probably have the hardest life of any Indian children. Muslim girls from poor, manual laboring families almost never attend school, must work throughout the day at some menial job in addition to doing work at home, and are generally married two or three years after they reach puberty. Usually they are married to a man who may be anywhere from 20 to 40 years older than themselves and often they become his second or third wife. It is not an easy life and there are no choices for them to make about the most important passages of their own life.

Information technology opens the door for Muslim girls

Costs for the project

The cost of the program works out to about $75 per month per student and TFTP raises this money from grants and donations so none of the students must pay fees to attend. Rajen described what a typical home was like for the girls enrolled in TFTP. He said there would be around ten people (grandparents, parents and children) living in a ten by twelve foot room. The main source of income would come from the father who might be a bicycle rickshaw driver, a sidewalk vendor or a construction laborer. The mother might sell fruit or flowers out of a basket on the street. In the worst of situations, he said, girls are married to old men from Persian Gulf countries who seek young girls as wives, or they are kidnapped or sold to sex traffickers who spirit them away to another city where they are sold as sex slaves. Wherever the Need has partnered with Technology for the People and seeks donations to purchase new computers and pay teachers’ salaries and other operational expenses.

Back to Women and Children

The population of Hyderabad, India is about 40 percent Muslim. Many of the poorest Muslim families supplement the husband’s income by having their daughters paint wealthy women’s hands with the mehindi or henna designs that have recently gained popularity in the U.S. At other times the girls will draw intricate designs on the hems of women’s silk sarees. They are paid a pittance for this kind of piece work. Rajen recognized that this work required some artistic talent and a steady hand. He reasoned that if they could do this kind of menial art work why, with a bit of training, couldn’t they do high end art, even computer art, and command a real salary.

If the girls became an income generator for the family, Rajen surmised, then the father was not likely to be in such a hurry to get them married at puberty. Education for the sake of education is not a concept that most impoverished Muslim men can appreciate, but education for the sake of income for the family is easily understood. Hyderabad is one of two Indian cities that have attracted numerous high technology industries. Some of these companies produce computer-generated animation for advertising, movies, and videogames. Other companies warehouse stock art images for sale to publishers and web designers. Rajen approached some of these companies and convinced them to accept Muslim girls as interns after they had graduated from his six-month course. Rajen started Technology for the People (TFTP) as a non-profit organization to implement his idea. He hired college-educated Muslim teachers to teach standard school subjects in the morning and studio animation artists to come in the afternoon and teach the girls computer art. He also brought in traditional art teachers to teach still drawing.

Currently there are around 100 students attending the five art training centers. Rajen explains that technology generally goes to the educated urban Indians and not to the people at the bottom of the economic ladder. TFTP was created to try and turn that around. He said most of the people who are hired by the art and computer animation studios in Hyderabad have completed an expensive two-year college program, well beyond the reach of the poorer classes. But Rajen has streamlined his course into a six-month-long program that is free to girls who have either dropped out or never attended public schools.