New Zealand charity, Daya Trust, brought together more than seventy Wellington business women and men last week to celebrate International Women’s Day, with support from ANZ Bank and Grant Thornton New Zealand.

Daya Trust Founder, Rochelle Stewart-Allen, said “International Women’s Day is a prime opportunity to celebrate how far women have come in New Zealand and overseas, but also to recognise how far women still have to go to overcome the inequalities they continue to face.”

Daya Trust believes that education is an empowerment tool for women and girls because it enables them to make choices and become changemakers in their lives. An education gives girls’ opportunities to improve their job prospects and significantly increases their earnings when they leave school by up to 25%. Access to education for girls’ means economic growth. Investing in girls’ education benefits everyone: their families, their communities, governments, businesses, and entire nations.

Over the last six years Daya Trust has worked in India and New Zealand building young women leaders and supporting its Indian charity partner in empowering women and girls through a sustainable development model for Mumbai slum-communities.

Across the world, International Women’s Day was celebrated at scale. Increasingly at International Women’s Day events, we hear stories of women who are making real changes to their communities at a grass roots level.

These women are true role models that women in Aotearoa can relate to. Real women making a real difference make a more powerful impact, and one such woman is social entrepreneur Ranjna Patel. Ranjna is Chair of the New Zealand Central Indian Association (NZCIA) Women’s Group, amongst many other professional and voluntary roles she holds.

At the Daya Trust event, she spoke about her own personal journey as a woman. She told the audience about the challenges she faced as a young third-generation Kiwi Indian woman who, as part of her culture, was married at eighteen. However Ranjna went on to build one of New Zealand’s largest primary health organisations, East Tamaki Healthcare – Nirvana Group in Auckland.

Ranjna shared statistics on women in leadership positions locally and globally and talked about the key barriers she believes women face worldwide: lack of access to education, violence, and stigmatised cultural norms.

Ranjna believes targeting perpetrators of violence against women plays a key role in solutions to end it. She is currently involved in launching New Zealand’s first early intervention accommodation for South Asian men who have been issued protection orders. This provides a place where professionals can work one-on-one with the men to tackle the core issues. The first house has been officially launched in March with its fundamental goal to prevent future offending and further violence against women.

Sourced directly from: http://dayatrust.com/new-zealand-charity-highlights-role-of-women-for-international-womens-day