Nari Shakti
Bhil women already hold an empowered position in their own community — in every social and financial decision a family makes. The work here is not to grant them standing. It is to put a health movement behind the standing they have.
In the tribal community of Jhabua women hold an empowered position. They are involved in all the social and financial decisions of the family. Shivganga recognised that strength and began unfolding a health movement which, given where women already stand in the community, can be achieved in a short time.
It matters more than it sounds. Most of the borrowing that traps these families is borrowing for a medical urgency. A household that stays healthy is a household that does not have to go to a moneylender — which makes this one of the most direct routes out of the debt cycle there is.
Most of the borrowing is for a medical urgency.
Which is why a nutrition sapling in a backyard and a debt of several lakhs are the same subject in Jhabua.
Three strands that hold each other up — leadership, nutrition, and the connective work that keeps both from staying in one village.
Adolescent girls — where women’s leadership in Jhabua begins
This camp lays the foundation of women’s leadership development in Jhabua. In it, girls share their stories of pain — a first time for many of them. Health runs as a common thread through those stories, and out of that comes a collective vow to fight it and to lead their village. The programme is opening avenues for livelihood among tribal women as well.
Clean village, healthy family — grown in the backyard
The training imparts knowledge of nutritional plants and how they can meet the deficiencies in a family’s diet. Families then adopt a set of ten to fifteen fruiting saplings and grow them in their own backyard. It is deliberately small and deliberately domestic: nutrition that arrives without anyone having to buy it.
Young volunteers, walking village to village
The network of women leaders is still in its adolescence, which makes Gram Pravas all the more crucial. Young women volunteers travel across the villages and speak with girls, explaining why women leaders are needed and what the camps do. It lets the girls speak without hesitation and assert themselves boldly, and it builds a network of girls who know each other and work as a team.
Adolescent girls trained
Nutrition saplings distributed
Families adopting them
796 girls have been through the camps, and none of it happens without support.
DonateHealth is where the borrowing starts, and women are where the decisions are made. Putting those two facts together is the whole strategy.
