Rubina Nafees Fatima

Founder

Rubina Nafees Fatima is the founder of SAFA Society (2006)[1], an Indian non-profit working on women & children, livelihood and education from Hyderabad.

Rubina Nafees Fatima is an Indian social entrepreneur and the founder and president of SAFA, a non-profit organisation based in Hyderabad that works on the socio-economic empowerment of women and young people in the city's low-income neighbourhoods.

SAFA was registered in 2006 and works through skills training, micro-enterprise, self-help groups and help in accessing government entitlements, rather than through direct relief.

Career

Before founding SAFA, Fatima worked as a travel professional in the Middle East between 1988 and 1999, and from 2000 to 2007 ran the Explorer Travel School in Andhra Pradesh, a professional training institute for the travel trade.

She founded SAFA in Hyderabad in June 2006 and has led it since. The organisation runs skills training centres in the city and supports women's self-help groups and micro-entrepreneurs, alongside programmes on community wellbeing and on helping households claim government schemes and entitlements. A separate strand, Girls on Ground, works with adolescent girls.

SAFA has established two social enterprise brands to create sustained income for the women it trains: Artizania, which sells handmade craft products, and Luqma, a food business. The organisation reports having worked with more than 80,000 women and young people.

Recognition

Fatima has received the Sadguru Gnanananda Fellowship, a Digital Women Award, the Samvidha Award, the FICCI FLO Woman Achiever Award, the Pride of Telangana Award and an Australia Award. She has spoken at a TEDx event.[2][3][4]

SAFA Society

SAFA Society is a Hyderabad-based non-profit founded in 2006 by Rubina Nafees Fatima. It empowers women from low-income, largely minority neighbourhoods through skill training, education support and women-led micro-enterprises, and ran community kitchens during the COVID-19 lockdown.

SAFA Society reports the following, on its own site:

Its SMART Centre, established in 2014 with the Tech Mahindra Foundation, has provided job-oriented skill training to 1700 direct beneficiaries in Hyderabad.
Its Aqriti projects with United Way of Hyderabad and Qualcomm reached 15000 kids in 88 schools of Hyderabad during 2018-2020.
Its Skill and Livelihood Development Centre at Vattepally, started in 2017 with Islamic Relief Canada, has 500 single women as direct beneficiaries.