What do Alfred Nobel, Ikea, H and M have in common?

Ebba Littorin who is the Second Secretary, Political Affairs India, Sri Lanka and Maldives and who is also been working with the foreign affairs of Sweden is a women with plans. The 33-year-old mentions that building relations with India and staying connected is the objective and the quiz is a small part of this initiative. She also shines light on their development programmes that focus on women.

Excerpts:

How has been your experience in India?
I have been working with the foreign affairs Sweden and this is my first deployment in India. It has been a year since I am in India. This is the first time in the seven years of my work that I get to go abroad and also represent my country and conduct sessions. I am having fun here in India and this is one of my best experiences.

Tell us about the Sweden India Nobel Memorial quiz
This is a programme that we have been running for 12 years now and it is been including different things. One thing is to highlight Swedish companies’ innovation; we also New Delhi, where the Swedish get to meet with Indian counterparts. The quiz has been one of the most popular items where we have a larger outreach in the country. We have been in different cities all along.

The quiz is called the Nobel quiz and it is mostly based on Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor whose legacy created the funds for the Nobel Prize. The purpose is also to get young and talented students to learn about Sweden, and know what is attractive about it. For example, why are they so many innovation driven companies like IKEA, which opened recently in the city and also other brands like H&M. You have smaller startups which are innovation driven and based on the same principles which were the spirit of Alfred Nobel.

How many places in India is the quiz being conducted?
We are in seven cities. We started in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai; today we are at Hyderabad. We have been to Kolkata as well. We have the Delhi city round on the 1st of November where we’ll have the National finale. All the winning teams will go to Delhi to participate in the finale and the winners of the finale will get an all expenses paid trip to Sweden and during the trip they will meet the partner companies because we have them supporting us with this project.

Do you conduct programmes for women in specific?
Yes, we do. I mean, gender equality is a very big priority for us and has been for a couple of years. It is a task that all the embassies work with. When we had a bigger bilateral programme with India a lot of focus was given to health issues and women’s rights. There are some programmes that focus on women together with our companies. We have developed a programme in Pune which looks at scaling women in non-traditional sectors.

For example, the first batch has been educated in truck driving. So, we feel it is important to contribute to increase women in work force. Another programme we have done is to raise awareness and create publicity. For example, on the coming Thursday we will celebrate the international day of girl child which is an UN established day and celebrated across. The purpose of course is to highlight girls and women’s rights and make sure that they are benefitted equally. We have been doing this programme together with other embassies in Delhi. We have an NGO working in India which focuses on women’s issues and then created a takeover.

Plan India has invited us to be a part of this. Few of our embassies will have a girl take over our work and work the role of an ambassador. She will lead the meetings and discussions. Last year we had a girl from Delhi who led the discussions with the whole staff. We have 40 staff members who are both Indian and Swedish. She was talking and putting up both of their thoughts for example what it is being a girl today in India and some of course, could not relate because they were not girls but have girls in their families. I have invited her here and she is based in Hyderabad. We created wikigap, this was made after most articles on Wikipedia only featured and written by men.

We started this with an Indian organization of Feminism, who worked on it already, but we were the first embassy to sign up for it. We decided to look at women in science, we locked 30 people in one room during one day and the embassy provided them with wifi and food. We created articles on Indian women in Science. This initiative that was done was copied by the other embassies. And, this year for Women’s Day which was on the 8th of March, it became the Wikipedia hackathon, which became a hit.