An initiative to empower women by educating them on their rights as Indian citizens, sexual and reproductive health issues launched in Bangalore.
Empower women and the society will improve. Adopting this dictum, Swabhiman, an initiative to empower women by educating them on their rights as Indian citizens, sexual and reproductive health matters, and the importance of educating girl children was launched in Hegganahalli and Ramanna Badavane settlements in Peenya on Friday.
One of the ongoing projects of Smile Foundation — a developmental organisation started by six IIM-A graduates in 2002 to work with grassroots initiatives for effecting positive changes in the lives of underprivileged children, their families and communities — Swabhiman is already running in several Indian towns. Introduced for the first time in Karnataka, this programme will initially cover a population of 10,000 adolescent girls and young women. They have tied up with a grassroots organisation called Dani Development and Social Action, active in the Peenya area for some time now.
Modus Operandi
Three social workers, Sujatha, Jeevitha and Gayathri, who has been working in the area for a few years, would go to every houses in the area, strike a rapport with the women, collect important information on their health and other issues, document their problems and educate them on health issues. “Based on the information gathered, we will take up focused projects besides the current one on sexual and reproductive health, an issue we know many women are facing here,” said Christopher MS, secretary of Dani. Regular health camps, family counselling facilities and interventionist programmes to prevent domestic abuse and workplace harassment are also in the Swabhiman agenda.
Sujatha V, one of the health educators, said that some of the main health issues affecting women in the are uterus-related illnesses, piles, reproductive tract infections and sexually transmitted diseases.
“Nearest government hospital is three kilometres away and therefore, many suffer in silence for a long time. We go to their homes armed with pamphlets and other informational resources and educate them about family planning and menstrual hygiene which could prevent many diseases. Besides health, other main problems are alcoholic husbands, domestic abuse, kids who do not go to school and harassment at the factories,” Sujatha said.
Fight for self esteem
This is Smile Foundation’s twelfth project for women’s empowerment, resource mobilisation official Rajalakshmi H said. She elaborated that the Swabhiman programme is specifically aimed at running innovative community practices so that it would build individual and collective self-esteem within marginalised and women and adolescent girls.
“We will identify adolescent girls and women from the community and empower them to actively contribute to the community development process,” she said.
According to project manager Radhakrishna Pradeep, the programme has so far benefitted over 1,50,000 girls and young women in other parts of India.
Women from Hegganahalli and Ramanna Badavane, many of them factory workers, who had gathered to know more about how the scheme would benefit them and their family seemed optimistic about this. “We trust them to help us,” a young mother told us. The hope on her face erased all traces of fatigue this journalist carried after manoeuvring a two-wheeler through choking roads peppered with potholes for over two hours to reach this far-away spot in Peenya.
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