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by Louise Andre

Getting child brides back to school

May 17, 2013 in Educate Girls, iCat Fellowship 2013, India by Louise Andre

Our Child Bride CampaignLast week, young Sita from Kinwarli, Rajasthan, got beat up and thrown out of her husband’s house after she went against his wishes and took her 10th grade exam. Since her in-laws wouldn’t allow her to study, this young girl went back to her parents’ and decided to take the exam anyway. Not only was she abused for it, but after she reported the incident to the local police, the whole community fined her 12 lakh rupees (1,200,000 INR = 17,000 €) for her insolence! 11 lakhs were required for her acting against her in-laws’ instructions and one lakh for actually giving the exam. Her own family is now ostracized from the rest of the village, since they will never be able to afford such a tremendous amount.

This story, which was released in the Dainak Bhaskar Newspaper last Saturday, is unfortunately one of the many that occur every day in Rajasthan. Girls as young as two are married off (68% of them are married before the age of 18) and many of them have to take care of household chores as well as look after their young siblings instead of receiving a proper education. Even for those who have the chance to go to school, they still have to deal with poor teaching. Curricula are not followed, material and books are missing, and infrastructure in general is inadequate. Most of the children eat on the floor in the school veranda, while drinking water and female bathrooms are not always available. It is also common for some classes to be held in the shade of a tree as space is lacking. The girls’ parents are often illiterate themselves and are thus unable to help them do homework. Adults are busy working and earning a living for their family – sometimes even the children have to work and get money back home – so schooling is hardly a priority. And yet, it is the one thing we need to insure if we want to break the vicious circle and improve the standard of living of Rajasthani communities.

Sita’s village belongs to Sirohi district, a “gender-gap” district – meaning that the number of boys educated in this area is at least 25% higher than the number of girls educated. The overall situation in Sirohi is particularly worrying: literacy rate for instance is alarmingly low, reaching a mere 56.02%. Educate Girls has decided to start working in the district this year, signing up a MoU with the State of Rajasthan in April. After operating in Pali and Jalore districts, we will now also supervise 542 villages in Sirohi where we will reach out to 200,000 children – 90,000 of which are girls.

To succeed we need to get the community together and help the villagers take ownership of their local school. Villagers start by forming school committees. They then rate their own school by filling out assessments made out of easily-understandable pictures that do not require reading ability. This way, they can clearly see where the issues are and what changes need to be implemented. The core idea is to offer tools for our beneficiaries to take action and become self-sufficient in the long term. Once the program is running smoothly, meaning that school results have increased significantly and girls are correctly taught and enrolled, our mission is accomplished. It will take time though before all Rajasthani girls stand in front of a book instead of a stove, cooking their husband’s meal, but it is a goal that can be achieved once their parents realize how much impact female education has on the overall community.

Let us hope that our efforts and the change of mentality will soon make Sita’s experience history!

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Avatar of Alex Mette

by Alex Mette

Educating Girls in India: Why it’s so difficult and what one NGO is doing about it

April 12, 2013 in Educate Girls, iCat Fellowship 2013, India by Alex Mette

Quality, universal education is a fundamental right as well as a necessary component for achieving social and economic development in other spheres. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon noted that the persistence of high rates of global illiteracy “hobbles our efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals”.

On a global scale, increasing access to and quality of education and undoing illiteracy is essential to spurring development in other areas, from health to commerce. With the largest illiterate population in the world and more than the next eight countries combined  – including China, Bangladesh, and Pakistan – India is at the crux of this issue. The problem is particularly acute for women and girls with over 200 million illiterate women in India alone.

According to the World Bank, in 2010 India had the third highest number of out of school girls in the world with more than 3.7 million.

Getting these girls into school is crucial to India’s social and economic development and represents an opportunity with huge potential to yield positive impact in the world.

According to UNESCO, educating a girl dramatically reduces the chance that her child will die before age five. Furthermore, educated girls are likely to marry later and have fewer children, who in turn will be more likely to survive and be better nourished and educated. Educated girls are more productive at home and better paid in the workplace, and more able to participate in social, economic and political decision-making.

The World Bank has identified what it calls the “Girl Dividend”. It calculates that for each additional year of secondary school, a girl will increase her future income by 25 percent. On the other hand, lack of education, income disparities, and early pregnancy all translate into economic loss for countries such as India where adolescent pregnancy costs the country an estimated $383 billion in lifetime income. Eliminating the employment gap entirely has the potential to add $400 billion to India’s GDP.

The Indian government understands the challenge of universalizing education and raising the level of quality for all Indian children but the fact remains that there are substantial barriers to achieving higher levels of enrollment and improving learning outcomes, particularly for girls in rural areas. Educate Girls believes the problem is one of ownership. Communities do not feel that they own their schools and governments have no one pressuring them to make the needed improvements. While solving this will ultimately help solve the problems of education in India, cultural attitudes and the challenges of rural poverty represent the first barriers to getting more girls into school.

In Rajasthan, where Educate Girls works, girl’s education takes a backseat to family responsibilities and cultural norms. Lack of experience with the education system on the part of parents prevents many girls from finishing their studies. Only one in 100 girls in will reach grade 12. Many are married below the legal age and are forced to move to their husband’s homes once they reach puberty. Even for parents who would prefer to send their daughters to school, poverty and geography often get in the way.

In many cases, parents work as laborers or farmers and while girls may attend school for part of the year, their parents may take them out to watch siblings or help at harvest time. The problems of poverty are compounded by the fact that many parents have themselves not received an education and do not see the value of sending their daughters to school. In many cases, poor learning outcomes offer little incentive for doing so. Why send your daughter to school when she won’t learn anything anyway, or what she will learn will not help her in her future, or worse, make her less marriageable.

Cultural attitudes, traditions, and norms present a serious challenge that requires constant conversations and most powerfully, the example of community members who have received an education and are living its benefits. But problems of rural isolation, migratory lifestyles, and lack of infrastructure present additional challenges. In many cases, girls attend school until they reach puberty, but are then removed because of arranged marriage and fear for the girl’s safety. Many schools may not have separate toilets or clean drinking water, leading to concerns from parents about their daughter’s ability to maintain her dignity as well as her health.

Girls face kidnapping, sexual assault, wild animals, and a myriad of other challenges just to go to school yet they still want to go. With Educate Girl’s mentorship, they actively participate in coming up with solutions to these challenges and persuade their parents, and even parents of other girls, of the value of their education. Educate Girls is helping to give them a voice in their future and helping their families and communities to understand the value of education. But the real work is being done by the communities themselves where girls are becoming champions for their own futures and communities are learning to demand quality schools for all their children.

Educate Girls’ solution to the problem of girls education in this remote region rests on the backs of these communities. By mobilizing families and villages to take ownership of their schools and their children’s education, they are harnessing a powerful force for change and providing girls in Rajasthan with a chance to achieve their dreams.

Alex Mette is an LGT Venture Philanthropy iCats Fellow working with Educate Girls in Mumbai, India. To find out more about Educate Girls, visit http://educategirls.in/

 

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Avatar of Alex Mette

by Alex Mette

Scratching the Surface: First Impressions in Mumbai

April 2, 2013 in Educate Girls, iCat Fellowship 2013, India by Alex Mette

Between Rickshaws

Mumbai is on the surface a seething mass of people and vehicles crushed into an improbably small and hot space. The heat of everyone forcing their way through the crowds only makes it hotter and harder to move. In every crack of this collage of motion there is a lifetime being played out. In the alleys are people whose lives may be at a crossroads that is impossible to imagine to a casual passerby. In the tops of high rise buildings are people who pass through the heat and chaos in climate controlled cars and buildings, barely noticing the millions of stories unfolding each day here. In fact, probably most people here don’t notice each other. There is too much to notice.

The effect of all that motion and all those countless people is overwhelming. The alleys are too far stretched. There are too many slums and too many children wandering through cars backed up on the streets with outstretched hands. When people talk about the poverty that you will see in India, they talk about the absolute deprivation that people endure; the lack of housing, food, opportunities. For me, what is so far the most difficult to deal with is the sense that wherever you turn, you will see someone living in poverty, and to imagine that for every person you don’t see, there are a thousand more just around the corner, who I will never see.

But still amidst an overwhelming and admittedly intimidating first impression of this city there are still people who are committed to tackling the country’s problems head on. They see the city’s problems not as a source of intimidation but a reason to continue to press for change. For me, those children weaving their way through traffic are nameless but there are people setting up schools for them, improving sanitation, organizing workers, fighting for women’s rights, and helping to ensure that they have a future.

My work as an LGT Venture Philanthropy iCats Fellow will start with drawing inspiration from the people here who understand the country’s problems and their scale and are more committed than ever to helping solve them. From there I will have the chance to support these people as well as to help ensure that more young girls in one of the country’s most challenging regions for girl’s education have a chance to do great things. Working with Educate Girls, an NGO that tackles the gender gap in schools in Rajasthan, India through community-engagement and partnerships with the local government, I will have a chance to bring my skills and energy into an organization with huge potential and to help support a group of people who are committed to making a difference in the lives of young girls in India.

the Maidan

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Avatar of Alex Mette

by Alex Mette

Three Trips to Washington

March 28, 2013 in India by Alex Mette

And one to Mumbai

Three trips to Washington, DC, probably fifty phone calls, hold music ad nauseum, a letter to my congressman, and a snow storm and I am finally on my way to India. This move started out as so many modern day life events do, in a wholly unromantic email. But it was an email for a truly unique opportunity to spend a year working with a non-profit through the iCats Fellowship sponsored by LGT Venture Philanthropy, and a chance to live and work in Mumbai, India.

Since then I have gone from excited to scared at the thought of fulfilling a long-time personal dream to visit India and work with an organization that is doing hugely important work in the country, to paralyzed by the bureaucracy of the visa process, anxious at the prospect of the many challenges I will face, and back to excited, and everything in between.

But I have been excited above all else at the professional opportunity this Fellowship presents; The chance to spend a year working with a promising organization, investing knowledge and effort to help them build capacity in a needed area, in my case, fundraising at Educate Girls, an NGO that works to improve retention and enrollment rates for young girls in Rajasthan. With a contract and a mission, the Fellowship feels like a chance to be challenged to do something measurable and long-term but most importantly something that has the potential to make a real difference both for this organization and for the girls they seek to help.

Getting ready to fly to India feels surreal today, despite that fact that I’ve had months to think about it and years to imagine that I’d someday be headed to this country. It feels like vertigo. The feeling of being at the edge of so many possibilities and so much excitement that you feel a knot in your stomach. For the first time in a while I can let my mind wander thinking about the possibilities of where I will be in a week, in a month, in a year. Regardless of where that place is I’m going to be a different person when I get there.

I feel extremely fortunate to be a part of this cohort of Fellows and I can’t wait to hear about the work that gets done during this time and all of the stories that people have. I can only say that I think my biggest challenge is going to be to try to accomplish everything I’ve set out to. With any luck, I will throw that list away and write a new one. It certainly seems like India is a place where you yourself can only control so much.

Me and my Visa!

Me and my Visa!

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by Louise Andre

First Week In The Field

March 5, 2013 in iCat Fellowship 2013, India by Louise Andre

IMG_2831

My name is Louise and I am the newly appointed Communications Associate at Educate Girls. I will be spending 2013 working as an iCats Fellow in India, promoting EG in the media and online.

Starting my iCats assignment on Valentine’s Day was probably the sign that I was about to fall in love with my new job… And so far, it looks like I haven’t been mistakened! I spent my first days in the field two weeks ago, and it sure was love at first sight with beautiful Rajasthan.

North India is one of the most critical area regarding girls education. In Rajasthan, 68% of them are married before the legal age and 40% drop out of school before they reach 5th grade.

The NGO I work for, Educate Girls, operates in two “gender gap districts”: Pali and Jalore. Our main goal is to reform government schools and to enroll and retain girls into schools. We work hand in hand with the local communities, getting help from parents and teachers. We also rely on a large number of volunteers, our Team Balika members, who convince parents to send their daughters to school and assist teachers.

Every six weeks, the whole Mumbai office leaves the city to spend a week in the field. We get to meet our Rajasthani colleagues and our beneficiaries, visit the schools where our programs are implimented and discuss current issues. This was thus a great opportunity for me to get  good insight at how we work and who we actually help.

Every morning I would go with a couple of colleagues to visit several schools, take hundred of pictures and chat with the pupils (even if I don’t know a word of Hindi!). The kids were incredibly smiling – and quite fascinated by my European features. One boy even threw a fruit at me once to gain my attention! I have to admit that I sometimes felt like a monkey in a zoo… but what really mattered is that they truly wanted to share something with me and welcome me inside their lives.

At the end of the day, I would be exhausted, overfed (Rajasthani food is as delicious as it is spicy and oily) and totally thrilled! The reception they gave us was far from anything I had ever seen before. Rajasthani people are unbelievably welcoming: they would smile at me, try to communicate as best as possible and share whatever they had to offer. I have been asked to perform countless Boollywood routines in front of classrooms full of kids and teachers, and once my colleague and I even had to dance on stage at a fair. The picture ended up on the front page of their local newspaper! Never been so embarassed in my life, but how to refuse a thousand smiling kids offering you flower garlands and handshakes?

Every day I would be introduced to dedicated volunteers and teachers who would do all they could to improve the children’s lives and give them a chance to succeed. It is not an easy task but when a whole community is working towards a common goal, they can succeed. This is how one of our Team Balika members managed to eradicate child marriage in his village some years ago. We now hope that this success will scope to the rest of the region.

This first week on the field has really been an intense experience and even if there were rats inside our guest house, I cannot wait to go back next month!

Rajasthan février 2013 031

 

Rajasthan février 2013 048

 

Rajasthan février 2013 055

 

 

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Avatar of Avani Parekh-Bhatt

by Avani Parekh-Bhatt

Making An Impact When You Are One In A Billion

September 11, 2012 in iCat Fellow 2012, India, LGT VP, Operation Asha by Avani Parekh-Bhatt

The whole team at OpASHA

I have struggled for months to put into words how this time in India as an iCats fellow has made me feel, and today, I will try to express what seven months of living in India has felt like.

This is not my first time working in this country of wonder and chaos. When I was a little bit younger, a little bit “greener” and a lot more idealistic, I came to this place to start an initiative that ended up fizzling out, started way before the country, or even I was ready to commit to make sure that it panned out.

When I was that “fresh” and wide-eyed about social entrepreneurship, it was easy to see the beauty through all the chaos that defines this place as the norm. I even went so far as to normalize the chaos in my mind – the ups and downs and trials of living in a developing nation in flux became second nature. I navigated unnamed cow-filled streets, learned to drive a scooter, and bargained down to a “local” price, and blended in in a way that felt like I had accomplished learning enough about this culture to become a part of the community.

when I was younger

A different avatar, post tsunami in South India

This time around, living in Delhi had been a different. No longer wearing the rose-tinted glasses of my early 20s, I knew that this foray back to my “homeland” would be something I was not prepared for entirely.  As an iCats fellow, I expected an experience that was professionally enriching and that gave me the ability to grow into a more strategic role providing support to social enterprises, and even giving me the tools and the boost needed to start my own social venture. I definitely had all of those benefits after coming here, but with some additional life lessons that I’d like to share here.

Firstly, when you go to someplace to make a difference and you realize you are lucky to be able to get to and from work  alive when the following things happening to you, you feel blessed; 1. Getting so much dust in your eye that you look like you went on a 6-day whiskey bender, 2. Knowing that the “runs” does not mean some type of Olympic sport and, 3. Getting jostled and tossled so much in auto rickshaws, getting in and out of the metro, and walking on the roads that you feel like life is a constant earthquake.

Secondly, when you are doing strategy work, it’s not the same as taking to the villages wearing your home-spun cotton “khadi” that Gandhi extolled. This is a different type of service, and one that is not less needed that the on the ground activism. When I thought of all the “good work” going on in India before, my mind would automatically think of grassroots activism, hunger strikes, and rural schools in the middle of the Rann of Kutch desert in Gujarat. I thought of the hundreds of social activists I met and that made me their family the last time I spent time in India.

This time around, I am a cog in a larger operation, one that plans to revolutionize the way tuberculosis is treated around the world. The seed of that work started in India, but the scope and the dream is a far cry from a single village in a sleepy desert location in North India. The world is the stage for Operation Asha, the organization that I am proud to help get to the next level with my work. (www.opasha.org)

Undoubtedly though, the nature of this work, looking at development and changemaking from 30,000 feet, feels like I am out of touch with my former conception of doing good work. After all, I am a grassroots gal at heart, deriving energy from being with people and learning from them and their local wisdom.  In fact, it is easy to forget sometimes, sitting in my air conditioned office, sleeping in my nice fancy bed at night, ordering non-Indian food (aka anything with CHEESE), and having access to the nicer things in Delhi – that the country I am living in is in a state of incredible change and sometime turmoil.

I’ll give you an example: Since coming here in February, my eyes have been opened to exactly just how bad this place can be for women. As a young-ish woman myself, I will sometimes face mild harassment on the street, or have to take extra precautions when meeting friends or returning home at night to stay safe. A system of calling and texting friends when we leave home for the evening, and return home late is an unspoken rule enforced without much protest – it’s necessary for safety. I have dared to wear a dress only once, exposing my knee and my calves, and even in such a modern city such as Delhi, decided I will never do it again for all the ridiculous negative attention it garnered. My relationship with space – especially personal space, is tested every day. As a woman in this country I find that it is easy for every man to play a game of chicken with me when I walk. I am the one expected to move to the side if a man is approaching opposite me, or I am standing somewhere and he wants to be in that space. And often, I find myself making the accommodation, so I don’t have to deal with an argument, additional leers, or an unwanted grope. I come home exhausted from reorienting myself with the world, where I once thought I could walk with pride and felt safe, I now see that I am always trying to make myself smaller to avoid calling attention to myself in a way that puts me in danger. (sad, but true – as this is a far cry from my natural personality)

India ranks lowets for plight of women in all g20 countries

India ranks lowest among all the G 20 countries:
Child marriage, foeticide and infanticide, sexual trafficking, domestic slave labour, domestic violence and high maternal mortality all make India worst of the G20.

Women have been beaten, raped, killed, stalked, and groped since I came here with alarming frequency – some for no other offence than being a woman in a bar.  In the northern town of Guwahati (see the story here: http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_guwahati-molestation-what-really-happened_1714657) a particularly atrocious case was caught on film – a mob of men, pawing at, groping and pushing a young girl in the street with onlookers nearby and NOBODY STEPPING IN TO HELP HER.  And it seems like every day there is a story on the news of on Facebook, reminding me – in this place with its incredible growth story, in this land of a billion people, I am just another woman fighting to maintain my sense of strength and resiliency – just like all the other women in India – outraged by each news story that yet another one of us had succumbed to the callous treatment of women that is still so ingrained in this society.

The things that gave me hope as a young women in my 20s in India – I can no longer see through my airconditioned gaze – the joy of drinking water from a handpump, being followed by hundreds of children asking for me to take their picture during a visit to a small village, going to eye camps to screen people for cataracts – those experiences are not there for me now. Instead, I can only make the connection in my mind, back to the work of organizations here that are scaling solutions to improve the overall human condition, those like Operation Asha – that if they (we) are successful, that this place will be a lot better for people like me, those that feel like they are invisible among  the billions.

Social entrepreneurship is a tool that can give lives meaning and freedom from just existing. I think the biggest lesson that I take from this year in India, is that the world does not always give any of us space to live fulfilled lives; sometimes you have to create that space for yourself and for others. For me, that space was starting a social entrepreneurship meetup in Delhi. For Operation Asha, it was creating hundreds of low-cost centers in disadvantaged locations in India and Cambodia to help serve tuberculosis patients that are the poorest of the poor. Maybe for you, it’s deciding that your life can be lived differently – who knows?

some of the 2012 iCats fellows in Zurich ... brr

Some of the 2012 iCats cohort in Zurich. I miss you guys!

While all of these emotions swirl, it’s easy for me to forget that even being one in a billion is a lucky chance. My hope is that by the end of this experience, I will be able to reconcile my feelings for this country that simultaneously gives me hope, and also exposes the harsh realities of life. At the end of writing all this I came to this conclusion – the space that we have been given to live is a gift. Make it your own, and leave it even better than you found it. And this is exactly what I will spend my life doing.

Onwards and upwards, dosts (friends)!

Avani Parekh-Bhatt is an International Fundraising Strategy Consultant at Operation Asha. She loves to see baby cows in India, and hear the parrots outside her room in the morning. And she’s greatful to whoever invented air conditioning. Watch this, it will make you smile: making friends in the field

LinkedIn: in.linkedin.com/in/avaniparekhbhatt

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by Avani Parekh-Bhatt

Watch a 3 minute video, help Operation ASHA treat 300 people with tuberculosis

April 4, 2012 in Cambodia, iCat Fellow 2012, Operation Asha by Avani Parekh-Bhatt

 

fingerprint scanner and TB

An OpASHA counselor using biometric technology to track a patient's tuberculosis treatment

 

Namaste from New Delhi!  My name is Avani Parekh-Bhatt, I’m a 2012 iCats fellow from the United States, placed in New Delhi India in a wonderful organization called Operation ASHA. Operation ASHA (OpASHA)  brings tuberculosis treatment to the doorstep of the disadvantaged using an innovative model  providing treatment, counseling, education, and supportive services to tuberculosis patients in India and Cambodia. OpASHA’s work is so interesting because they’ve revolutionized the way this “poor people’s disease” is treated – by tracking patient’s adherence to the strict medicine protocol through the use of fingerprint scanners.

Tuberculosis is a CURABLE disease - but those that die from do so because they don’t receive treatment in a timely manner, OR they fail to adhere to the strict treatment schedule, they perish.  As an introduction to the work that OpASHA is doing, we have a short video we’d love to show you.

If you click on this link, you’ll see a three minure presentation that might just bring tears to your eyes, Learn more about what we do here: Operation ASHA: Ending Tuberculosis in Disadvantaged Communities

If we maintain first place, we can win $10,000, allowing us to treat 300 people suffering from this debilitating disease.

More on me and why I am here in another post. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Signing out from hot and dusty Delhi,

Avani

 

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