Health and Women’s Empowerment

All of the programs in this category are direct village level health interventions. Even when we work with PHCs it is again mainly to organize community support to ensure better utilization of government health services.

Child and Women’s Health Program:  About half the children in every village in the 0-5 year age group are malnourished.  These kids tend to fall sick more often and become even more malnourished.  Almost all the women in these villages have serious anemia and malnutrition problems – which worsens during pregnancy. Lots of kids are born with low birth weight. Over the years, we have found that the best way to address these related problems is through a community health approach – by providing a lot of focused health education and house to house counseling on nutrition, anemia, childhood illness, pregnancy care and women’s health.  In each village we identify a motivated village health volunteer – always a woman.  She is trained on the basics of preventive and curative health – the amount of training is substantial and focused and mostly on the field training.   She maintains a health register, visits house to house, diagnoses health problems in children and women and provides preventive and curative services.  She also works closely with the government Village Health Nurse, ICDS workers and the PHC to improve the quality and utilization of government health services. The health volunteer is also provided with a village level drug depot and is linked up through referral systems with the PHC network.  We find that such an intensive intervention is able to bring about a lot of changes in the overall health status of the village in 2-3 years time.

Health and Empowerment Classes:  There is a lot of confusion amongst adolescent girls about their own bodies and this leads to a loss of confidence and self esteem. We have found that a series of classes with them that explains their body changes makes a great difference in confidence levels.  This series of 8 classes also focuses on the health problems they face, equality and empowerment issues and life skills.  Each class is done with a set of flip charts and discussions with the girls.  Our fulltime block resource persons go to schools and villages and organize adolescent girl groups and conduct these sessions. The impact has to be really seen to be believed.  The health class program also has a similar set of classes for mothers and pregnant women, and overall classes on gender equality and women’s empowerment.