INRODUCTION

GAMANA (means ‘The Way’ in English) initiated in 2007 is closely working with the vulnerable children, women and communities, empowering the socially marginalized by providing them livelihood linkages, imparting skills leading to employment, health and education facilities. GAMANA is a collective effort of transformers, visionaries and the benefactors is now brimming with endless energy and working in 18 Panchayat villages with different ways and means in APCRDA area of Thullur Mandal in Guntur District of Andhra Pradesh State in INDIA.

OVERALL OBJECTIVES

• To promote Society efforts for human resource development.
• To raise the socio economic status of the poor by empowering them through education, self-employment and by social support services and undertaking the capacity building and capability development activities.
• To bring up a new generation of children, young women youthfully equipped with education potential to generate employment with quality and constructive imagination.

PHILOSOPHY

Having understood that marginalization is the root cause for a certain sections of society to live in inhumane living conditions and undignified existence, GAMANA was setup to bring them into mainstream of development. Thus, the context-based principle for its work is ‘the self-development of marginalized communities by different means and approaches.’ To realize its mission, GAMANA:

• Provides relief and welfare services, as an external agent to meet localized community needs and supplement the delivery system:
• As a partner/catalyst, like in the current project, facilitates empowerment and strengthening of linkages between the acquisition and the delivery systems by education and training of both such that community can meet its needs itself while the deliverer caters to the felt needs of the former and
• For future, it seeks to play a ‘Background role’ enabling marginalised sections to set directions for improvements in their lives, without depending upon others to do it for them.

VISION

GAMANA envisages a healthy society, which is self-reliant, equitable and sustainable environmentally sound and social justice with equal human rights and opportunities for all.

MISSION

GAMANA mission is to enable the under privileged and disadvantaged people to live independent and dignified life by creating a productive equitable and sustainable environment through the involvement of concerned stakeholders.

• GAMANA using its resources in an efficient,  accountable and transparent manner and can be held   accountable for their effectiveness,  organizational reliability, and legitimacy.    
• Accountability is primarily enforced through self-regulatory mechanisms,  internal rules  and procedures, in terms of their effectiveness  in managing corruption risks.   
• All documents of GAMANA are available such as; Bi-laws, rules and regulations, financial reporting, legal representatives, quality of managing and accounting systems, past performance and institutional   capacity for financial management and corruption prevention.  
• GAMANA had a definite governance structure and standards,     integrity policies/codes of conduct,     transparency standards, human resource management policies, and financial management standards.
• Sexual harassment and child protection policies are yet to be developed.

We constantly tried to remove the social and economic barriers faced by girls in the intervention villages of GAMANA for fulfilling their livelihood ambitions. There is a dire need to reach out to educate the school-going girls and empower school dropout girls to combat the numerous costs, social stigma and the safety concerns of rural parents sending their girls to distant places for employment.

GAMANA have flexible strategies, which are especially appropriate for enabling access to training and improved life prospects when working with disabled and disadvantaged girls. However, there is clarity about the distinguishing characteristics of vocational training overall and where exactly measures like improved basic education, occupational orientation, life-skills training or job-entry coaching fit into vocational training.

GAMANA has therefore decided to create an orientation framework describing the vocational training with its specific characteristics and the orientation towards the ‘promotion of competences for the labour market’. This vocational training strategy should explicitly incorporate the flexibility that has made the partners’ work so successful until now.

With regard to improving our concrete approaches to vocational training, we are seeking more dialogue with the Corporate Sector and its vocational training partners in concrete terms; a presentation of these results would be planned for 2020-2022.