Education doesn’t begin and end in the schools. Many of the problems with community welfare can be addressed by providing basic facilities, teaching new skills and giving basic healthcare information.
The idea for midday meals was sparked by one of our teams three years ago and since then we have provided school lunches to the students in SNEHA and Kaplani. This might be the one time in the day that children eat fresh vegetables, alongside rice and dal, giving an extra incentive to send their children to school.
We have funded a number of toilet blocks in schools to meet basic sanitation needs. Without these, adolescent girls struggle to stay in school during their periods, with up to 25% of them dropping out of school entirely.
Without a basic health education it can be hard to address community wide problems like healthy diets and disease awareness. Saphara runs a number of programmes to educate the community, ranging from basic demonstrations to adult learning classes. A recent team of health professionals from Northern Ireland carried out workshops and health checks comparing the nutritional levels of boys and girls.
Working with Disabilities
Children with disabilities living in poverty are too often undervalued. Through our programmes, we support a number of children living with various difficulties in order to give them the confidence to learn, and to address the stigma that so often blights their lives.
It is vital that women are able to generate their own income for themselves and their families. Our work includes the Christmas Gift Scheme – buying goats and sheep for families to farm, sewing and knitting workshops and making communities aware of potential business opportunities.
“We found out that in one particular village three children had died from diarrhoea. So, during a meeting, we asked them to draw a map of their village and with a yellow sketch pen to mark on the areas where open defecation was occurring. In the end, they found that everywhere on the map was marked with yellow and were astonished at how unhygienic their village was. But the biggest issue was finding a way to relate to them the link between this problem and the children dying. Still we are struggling to do that.”
Surender Singh, MGVS coordinator
According to UNICEF 42.5% of children in India are either moderately or severely malnourished. In the areas where we work, boys and men traditionally eat first at meal times, and therefore many of those undernourished are girls.