Knowledge gain by farm women through training programmes in Home Science conducted by Krishi Vigyan Kendra, Nizamabad

Women play a catalytic role in sustainable development bringing required transformational, economic, environmental and social changes. The majority of rural women suffer not only from economic poverty but also from information poverty especially related to household technologies and abilities to perform better as home managers. With utmost attention addressing the challenges, thewomen arefacing in the present scenario like their disadvantaged and discriminated position with poor infrastructure, meageraccess to knowledge and information source, scanty livelihood promotion opportunities,inadequate mobility and communication facilities and sufficienthealth facilities the need of the hour.Technological innovations and their reach to rural women through training programmescan result in enhancing women’s welfare leading to empowerment.Training is one of the important functions of Krishi Vigyan Kendra.The main purpose of organizing training programmes is to impart knowledge and develop new skills required for the adoption of the latest technology and buildup attitude among farmers, farm women, rural youth, school dropouts and other grass root level workers. In this direction, the present study was undertaken to find out the Knowledge gained by farm women through aseries of training programmes in Home science conducted by Krishi Vigyan Kendra, Nizamabadto find out livelihood changes brought at individual and field levels through future impact studies.On-campus training programmes were conducted at the KVK training hall and the off-campus training programmes were conducted at KVK adopted villages by SMS (Home Science) working at KVK Nizamabad from 2015-16 to 2018-19(4 years) under the guidance of the Programme Coordinator. A total of 56 training programmes fewer than eleven (11) thematic / training areas were conducted training 2589 women trainees during the study period. Pre-evaluation and post-evaluation tests were conducted in every training programme and scores were obtained respectively to calculate the gain in knowledge. An average knowledge gain of four years found was 68.75 percent. Women were trained mostly on the thematic areas viz. Women empowerment, Location-specific drudgery reduction technologies, Value addition, Women and child care and Design and development of low/minimum cost diet.