DEF Approves $130,000 in Scholarships for Educational Access in India and Africa

(IDEX Online News) – The Diamond Empowerment Fund has approved two separate grants worth a total of $130,000, to improve educational access in India and Africa.

The first grant was a $100,000 grant to Veerayatan, the first educational institution in India to receive funding from the DEF. The fund supports students attending the Colleges of Pharmacy, Engineering and Business Administration – fields of study underrepresented by women.

The second grant was a $30,000 awarded to the Diamond Development Initiative (DDI) to help fund the DEF mobile school for students in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Like Veerayatan, this is the second year that DEF has supported the DDI mobile school, which consists of traveling teachers and portable materials that are brought to the Kankala mining community of the Kasaï Occidentale province in the DRC.

“Our main objective is to transform the artisanal mining sector into a viable economic activity and to upgrade the way artisanal miners mine,” said Diamond Development Initiative executive director and co-founder Dorothée Gizenga.

“It’s important to tell the story of how diamonds can be an agent for development. We cannot change everything overnight, but be part of that solution with us and we’ll make the journey together.”