When I was in India, I saw something I couldn't unsee.

Women on roadsides, children in their arms, asking for money. You see it, you feel something, maybe you drop some coins, and you move on.

But what stayed with me wasn't the poverty itself. It was what sat underneath it.

Some of those women don't want charity. They want to work. They want to provide for their families. They have skills and determination. But the system isn't designed for them.

A €40 sewing machine can be the difference between dependence and earning a living. But when you have no access to credit, no collateral, and no safety net, €40 might as well be €4,000.

I grew up in Norway. I didn't earn that — it was given to me by circumstance. And at some point, that privilege stopped being something I just acknowledged and became something I had to act on.

Not out of guilt. Out of frustration.

Because the gap between what these women are capable of and what the world lets them do — that's not a charity problem. That's a systems problem. And systems can be changed.

Dharma didn't start big. It started with a question: what if we could support women who want to help themselves? Not with handouts, but with the materials and tools they actually need?

I didn't have a team, a plan, or funding. I had the question and the stubbornness to keep going.

Slowly, a small group of people joined — volunteers across Norway, Ireland, and India who shared the same frustration and the same belief that something small and honest could make a real difference.

We found AIM Foundation in Kolkata, an organisation already doing the work on the ground — running vocational training programmes for women who had never had access to formal education. They didn't need us to tell them what to do. They needed someone to fund the materials that made their training possible.

That's where we fit.

Today, Dharma is still small. We're funding our first course — 20 women learning tailoring over five months in Kolkata. It's not a global operation. It's a beginning.

And I'd rather have a small beginning that's real than a big vision that's empty.

If this resonates with you — if you've ever felt that same frustration, that same sense that privilege should go somewhere useful — then maybe Dharma is your duty too.