Ms. Savitri Sharma
Member Credibility Alliance, Director of Find Your Feet India
Ms. Savitri Sharma, is the Country Director, Find Your Feet (a British Charity) in India and Nepal and Secretary to Saksham India Trust. But then those are just dry designations that do no justice to someone who is a passionate changemaker in the lives of those who need it the most- especially tribals, adolescents and women from deprived communities.
As a young girl though, when she had to write that mandatory school essay on life’s ambitions, she had little idea about the development sector. Yet even in those growing up years in Kalimpong, when life’s goals were decided more by circumstances than choice, she was an enthusiastic member of a group that worked for the rights of Primitive Tribal communities living in the hills of West Bengal and Sikkim.
After a brief stint in teaching, Ms Sharma moved to Allahabad where she coordinated an integrated programme that worked to better the health, education and economic status of deprived communities. Life’s calling had finally found her. She then moved to CARE, India where from field officer who had to walk her way to some of UP’s most remote villages and teach women the importance of thrift and entrepreneurship, she rose to the position of Project Officer. Next came a two year stint as Director of Prerana Population Resource Center, Lucknow, an organisation which catered to the training and capacity building need of hundreds of NGOs engaged in implementing a mammoth USAID funded programme on Population and Reproductive Health.
25 years after she first knocked on a door to talk about how women mattered if change had to be real and long lasting, she heads the Find Your Feet India and Nepal offices she established solely and nurses the eight year old Saksham India Trust to implement projects that empower, among others, brick kiln workers and traditional weavers. Her list of expertise is long- Strategic Planning, Program Management, Liaison & Networking, research and analyses, establishing linkages, handling interstate partnerships- being just some of them.
The position closest to her heart though is being a certified coach for the Centre for Development & Population Activities, Washington – DC (CEDPA/PlanUSA) – a role that calls upon her to mentor women to develop the skills to find success in every area of life. This is a role she has played for women across the world- from Manju-a Raji tribal toiling in the mountains of Pithoragarh to Tina, who heads Youth First, an NGO in Madagascar. She is also one of the select few in the world to be trained, certified and sponsored by USAID as a master coach on “Women in management” and sponsored for certification and training by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as coach on “Women in Leadership”.
Ms Sharma holds degrees in Commerce, Education, and Social Work in addition to certification on NGO management from Bond Institute, UK in NGO management, and has multiple language proficiencies. She is, most definitely one of the finest embodiments of the belief that if the world is to change, women have to be that change.
