edaube

Elizabeth Daube

Elizabeth Daube is Senior Communications Officer at American Jewish World Service, where she produces videos, publications and more. She currently focuses on using storytelling and blogging to educate donors and experts alike on the challenges facing low-income women and girls in India–and the most promising ways to confront those challenges.

Vaishali (center) joins in group activities for young women at Vikalp.

Raising Her Voice: Vaishali’s Story

When Vaishali Sen was 9 years old, she loved to watch “Indian Idol.” Like its American counterpart, the show featured amateur singers hoping to launch their careers. Secretly, Vaishali wanted to do the same. She’d always loved to sing.   But in her rural village in Rajasthan, India, good girls weren’t supposed to dream big. They …

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Playing to Win: Jyoti’s Story

Jyoti Gadari got married when she was just 17. Like many young women, she wanted to explore: go to college, try out different jobs, see what kind of opportunities might unfold. And according to local custom, she didn’t have to live with her husband yet. She thought she had time. But her husband’s family had …

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Collectives: What They Are & Why They’re Crucial for Social Change

At AJWS, we talk about “collectives” a lot. About 40 percent of our grantees around the globe use collectives to advance human rights, and we invested $5.7 million in this work in 2018. In India alone—where AJWS has launched a multi-year, $30 million initiative to increase gender equality—our grantees support more than 3,500 collectives with …

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Taking the Road Less Traveled: Khushi’s Story

Three years after AJWS made a film about Khushi’s life, she’s gone from driving cabs to training a new generation of girls just beginning their careers. When I first met Khushi Prajapati, her story was already unusual. As a teenager, she’d worked as a maid to try to help her family make ends meet. It …

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New World Development Report on Education: Top 3 Takeaways

The World Bank recently released the first-ever World Development Report devoted entirely to education, “Learning to Realize Education’s Promise.” It explains why countries across the globe have succeeded at rapidly increasing the number of children in school, but have not achieved the same level of success when it comes to helping those children learn. Because …

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Riding for their Rights

After months of planning, it wasn’t clear whether Awaaz-e-Niswaan’s bicycle rally was going to happen. More than 70 teenage girls waited near a busy Mumbai intersection, fanning themselves every so often in a vain attempt to stave off the afternoon heat.

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