Everyone deserves the opportunity to thrive — to be able to take care of themselves, participate in their communities, and work toward a better future, and Mamta Borgoyary, CEO, FXB India Suraksha is making this dream a possibility for thousands of underprivileged women & vulnerable children of India by securing their right to good health, quality education, and more. For over 27 years, she has been working with health, education, water and sanitation, rural livelihoods, and natural resource management. Besides India, she has worked in promoting rural enterprises in Vietnam, contributed to the poverty strategy of energy projects of ADB in Manila, and also coordinated an 11-country program on sharing knowledge on renewable energy across Asia and Europe.

Throughout her career, Mamta has mentored teams that have emerged as successful leaders. Most of her work engages in empowering women as she believes when women are elected to leadership positions, they can begin to remove the systemic barriers that prohibit other women from prospering. With such inspiring ideologies, Mamta has been able to grow FXB India Suraksha across 14 Indian states and promote the dignity of life. Let’s hear it from her.

What has been the underlying idea behind FXB India Suraksha?

FXB India Suraksha was established as an Indian NGO in 2007 with a focus on working with women and children to enable a life of dignity. We are now working across 14 Indian states with a multi-sectoral program approach with interventions across four domains- Access to Quality Education, Livelihood Promotion, Improved Health Status, and Protection & Safety. We co-create with communities and develop interventions that are sustainable and locally owned and managed. Our focus is also to create sustainable resilient ecosystems that can adapt to the challenges of climate, especially in flood-affected areas.

What are your primary focus areas as the CEO of the organization? In that respect, what are the most critical challenges that you encounter?

My focus is organizational growth and development to ensure that we move ahead diligently in achieving our mission of enabling women and children to lead productive, healthy, and protective life of dignity and hope. My primary responsibility is to ensure systemic due diligence and create effective systems within the organization ensuring relevancy and efficiency in our delivery. Mostly we focus on developing partnerships with government, non-government and corporate bodies. We do not believe in creating parallel interventions but rather build upon each other’s strengths to achieve maximum impact.

In the course, we face several challenges. The primary challenge from day one till now remains sustainable funding that can support us in continuing to change lives. As the competition is extremely high, we have a very limited window of funding which becomes a major area of concern. Most of the time, we work in remote areas like regions of Northeast and Jharkhand where tribal communities remain marginalized either due to geographic location or lack of education and access to other service delivery like health. In these areas, the biggest challenge is to establish rapport and trust with the communities. Over a period of time, this has become our biggest strength as our approach is of partnership rather than of being only a changemaker.

"We as women, have a duty to provide an environment that allows women to grow & execute their talents"

Through your approaches, how are you breaking the chain of occupational gender stereotypes?

The entire breadth of occupation is extremely imbalanced in respective of gender, especially the livelihood sector. Two of the main occupations that have forever been seen as male-oriented workspaces are farming & painting. Women have always been working on the farm but were never recognized as farmers; most of the training by the agriculture extension officers for example would be for male farmers. We have changed those stereotypical notions and organized women farmers who are professionally trained and recognized. We are also working on creating a batch of entrepreneurs who are trained painters and currently have more than 250 women painters in the Northeast region of India developed by our program who are being hired instead of only men. Similarly, in our training program with law enforcement agencies, we focus on engaging with male officers on the importance of sensitivity, compassion, and care while dealing with women and child sexual abuse victims. These conversations are sometimes not easy as they challenge patriarchal mindsets that are often unconsciously deeply embedded in our society.

What are some of the most significant milestones that you have achieved throughout your professional journey?

The biggest achievement within the last 10 years has been to build an organization from scratch and to be one of the known organizations that work on different issues concerning livelihood, education, health, and protection & safety. It is indeed very satisfying to know that there are more than 5000 women entrepreneurs who are successfully running businesses. Through our training and capacity building program, we have sensitised more than 12000 officers last year on human trafficking and child sexual abuse. Through our programs in the slum areas, we have created a safe space for children to learn, nurture, and grow. Every year, we enable more than 500 children who have either dropped out of school to go back to school.

What would your advice be to young women who aspire to become business leaders in the future?

Throughout my life, I have believed in the principle of demonstrating work based on ethics & values. Therefore, in my opinion, one must not worry about building a successful venture; if any work is done with commitment and passion with a strong belief in values, everything else falls into the right place. A good balance of the heart and mind is required-never to let one go over the other. Also, women must be supportive, especially of other women in their team because we as women, have a duty to provide an environment that allows women to grow and execute their talents.

Mamta Borgoyary, CEO, Fxb India Suraksha

Mamta has a Master’s degree in Development Economics from BHU and before FXB India Suraksha, she has been associated with some of the reputed organizations in the sector including TERI, Development Alternatives, and the Institute of Economic Growth.