Aleyamma Vijayan

Founder

Founder of Sakhi Women's Resource Centre

Aleyamma Vijayan is the founder of Sakhi Women's Resource Centre [1], an Indian non-profit working on women & children and human rights from Thiruvananthapuram.

Aleyamma Vijayan is an Indian feminist and social worker based in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. She is the founder trustee of Sakhi Women's Resource Centre, established in 1996, which works on gender justice through research, documentation, training and advocacy. She had earlier spent some sixteen years organising among Kerala's fishing communities.

Early life and education

Vijayan holds a postgraduate degree in social work.

Career

In 1978 Vijayan joined the Programme for Community Organisation shortly after it was founded, and began working among fishing communities on the Kerala coast. She organised fisherwomen to press for transport to markets, which they had previously reached carrying heavy baskets of fish over long distances; after about two years of campaigning, including street theatre, the state government provided bus services for them. She also worked with the Self Employed Women's Association.

In 1990 she became a country coordinator with the Chennai-based International Collective in Support of Fishworkers, conducting studies on women in the fisheries sector in several states and organising public hearings on conditions in prawn peeling sheds.

In the mid-1990s she helped form Kerala Sthree Vedhi, a forum which took up a number of high-profile rape cases, and concluded that a more permanent structure was needed. Using a three-year fellowship awarded to her by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1996, she launched Sakhi Women's Resource Centre that year, assisted initially by Prema Nair; Mercy Alexander and Vanitha Nayak Mukherjee were the other founding trustees. Sakhi was registered as a trust in 1999 and its early work concentrated on information collection, documentation and dissemination, training, empowerment and networking.

Sakhi was among the organisations selected to implement relief work supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation after the Kerala floods of 2018. Vijayan's later work has included the gender dimensions of climate change.[2][3][4][5]

Sakhi Women's Resource Centre

Sakhi is a Thiruvananthapuram-based women's resource centre working on gender justice through research and documentation, direct support for women and girls facing domestic and public violence, and training on women's leadership and safety in cities. It has partnered with UN Women and national networks on gender-inclusive urban planning.

Sakhi Women's Resource Centre reports the following, on its own site:

In collaboration with two partner NGO's (Rastha in Wayand and Centre for Rural Management (CRM) in Kottayam) and four Gram Panchayat, livelihood programmes were implemented. 375 women who were affected by the deluge were supported in two of the worst affected districts to restart their livelihood in agro-related activities.
Sakhi also undertook to develop a manual, handbook and reading material on gender Planning, budgeting and auditing and trained 140 officials to utilise this materials.