Women in India have to endure many ordeals in their day-to-day lives. For centuries women of all generations have had to struggle to be treated as equals. Gender inequality is reflected in India’s low ranking on the Gender Inequality Index released by the UNDP, in 2016 India ranked 130 out of 146. Furthermore, UNDP’s Human Development Index (HDI) 2015 highlighted that with respect to gender inequality, only Afghanistan fares worse than India among South Asian countries.
Project Shakti was initiated in 2019 to address these challenges through a simple yet effective approach. The programme is specifically aimed at realization of both individual and collective self-esteem and inner strength for marginalised and socially excluded women and adolescent girls through innovative community practices.
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Entrepreneurship
Project Shakti aims to build thriving entrepreneurs and markets, thus creating an ecosystem for accessible and affordable healthcare in last-mile & disadvantaged communities. The Community Health Entrepreneur program provides a group of trained health facilitators with entrepreneurship training and a basket of health and hygiene products to sell for individual profit.
Through their role as a Community Health Facilitator our women create awareness and demand for necessary health products like sanitary napkins, soap and simple medications but often these products are difficult to access due to price, availability or the stigma of purchasing them from a public storefront. The current basket of goods contains the following items that are both in high demand and easy to distribute.
Awareness Building
SRDF interacts with rural women to build awareness on various issues which they are facing and ways and means by which they can overcome them. It leads to introduction of SHG where women inculcate a habit of saving, have availability of finances in an emergency as well as for need — based requirements.
Facilitating Formation
SRDF facilitates the formation of women SHGs — ensuring that groups represent homogeneity in terms of socioeconomic status. SRDF supports each SHG for regular meetings, opening of bank accounts, record keeping as well as to kick-start internal lending.
Training, Capacity Building & Exposure Visits
SRDF provides step-by-step training and handholding support to SHGs for building their capacity in the areas of credit planning, regular recovery, record keeping and maintaining transparency in group operations.
Encourage Regular Saving and Credit
SRDF regularly highlights the importance of regular savings and how saving a small amount by each person every month becomes large capital at group level. SRDF also provides regular inputs for initiating internal lending as well as importance of making regular payments. SRDF facilitates grading of SHGs on their performance for accessing loans from banks and for fulfilling their members' credit requirements.
Support Income Generation Activities
SRDF provides support for the identification of income generation activities for SHG by helping them to understand and realise what skills they have and what the market needs. Based on that, income generating activities are identified and SRDF provides need-based training and handholding support to women engaged in them.
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What We Did Last Year
- Over 50 women and adolescent girls were trained to be “change agents” to further serve as Community Health Educators, Health Volunteers and Peer Educators in their communities
- More than 1000 girls and women received health care support at their doorstep. Many more were provided with adequate knowledge of reproductive and health Menstrual issues.
- Educational support was provided to 50 underprivileged girls for secondary and senior secondary education through full scholarships