Soon-To-Be Graduate, How Kalpana Sahoo, 43, Mustered Courage To Get Back To Education

How often have we heard that someone had to drop out of school owing to a lack of resources and worsening financial conditions? How often have we heard that it’s usually women who form a huge percentage of these school dropouts? Well, almost always.

Kalpana Sahoo’s story is no different from hundreds of thousands of women who have had to leave their studies midway. However, her story also stands like rock that did not fade away because she took the first opportunity she came across to beat the odds and change her life, which was either dedicated by the circumstances or the men in her life.

Kalpana Sahoo, who once had to overlook the route to education, talks to us proudly in her language Odia today and tells us why she chose to pick up the books she had to once sell after dropping out of school.

Women Return To School: Kalpana Sahoo's Journey

43-year-old Kalpana Sahoo was in high school when her family suffered a huge financial setback. Just like the women in her family and her neighbourhood, she, too, had to leave her studies midway because her family could no longer afford her school fee. “My family was in a deep financial crunch and, as a girl, taking me out of school was the first option because women were not supposed to anyway consider working back then, at least not where I belonged to.”

Married off early, she started working as a homemaker but the thought of completing her education subconsciously stayed at the back of her mind, especially in the age of smartphones where learning became easy and information could be passed around without a hassle.

With the help of the United Nations’ Second Chance Education and vocational learning Project (SCE), she got an opportunity to get back to education and pick up the books she once had to sell off due to fewer resources. “I remember how I had to give away my books, whatever little I had collected, in exchange for money because that was the need of the time. With this project’s help, I studied again and I am now a proud secondary educated person,” says Kalpana Sahoo who is currently pursuing her graduation at Kamakhyanagar general college in Dhenkanal, Odisha.

With gaining a formal education, and studying at a college, Kalpana is now learning the ABCs of business as well and working hard to one day run her own enterprise from her home itself.

I ask her what her learning has been all these years, especially as a woman in her 40s studying alongside students half her age, and she leaves me with a response that conveys a larger story of thousands of women like Kalpana, who dared to start again: “I had never imagined that I would ever study further even in my 20s, leave alone pursue anything in 40s. That’s the thing about the place I grew up in, around the mentality I was fostered with - that women were supposed to lead a life that did not have any more beginnings to which they could look forward to. Now that I’m pursuing something I hadn’t ever thought of, I realise how baseless those set standards were. I would tell women my age to never back down, and to especially dream new dreams because they do come true if your heart, mind and effort are in the right place.”

This story is part of the #KisiSeKumNahi series. UN Women India and SheThePeopleTV come together to celebrate women’s leadership with #KisiSeKumNahi, tales of women’s empowerment.

Suggested reading: How Odisha’s Sangita Majhi Turned Challenge Into Opportunity And Became An Entrepreneur