On International Women’s Day earlier this year, I had a conversation with some colleagues on the issue of women’s empowerment. One of the major focal points of our discussion was the need to train women for a variety of professions, putting them in a position to achieve greater economic and social empowerment.
As someone who has worked in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh (UP), and cultivated a deep personal and professional connect with the city of Lucknow, I knew we were overlooking one crucial point. I emphasized that in my experience, the marginalization of women actually starts long before adulthood, much before they become contenders for inclusion into the workforce. This marginalization strikes at the very core of their existence: their health.
I speak of UP in particular, because the figures here are particularly alarming. According to the State Nutrition Mission, nearly half of all adolescent girls in UP are anemic—a condition that causes chronic weakness or shortness of breath due to low red cell and hemoglobin counts in their blood.
Discrimination of the girl child, often in favor of her male siblings, leads to a low prioritization of her health and well being. She is thus deprived of adequate nourishment from an early age, condemned to the lifelong developmental impairments brought about by malnutrition. After all, undernourished girls grow into adult women with poor health and low immunity.
Undernourished women not only face severe health risks during pregnancy and early motherhood, but also risk passing on low immunity and poor health to their children.
It begins at conception: only three in 100 couples in Uttar Pradesh use contraceptives after childbirth, even though inadequate spacing between children puts the mother’s health at risk. If a woman does become pregnant, there is a one in three chance she won’t receive proper antenatal care, despite the fact that this care is essential towards tracking the health of women as they proceed towards delivery.
After childbirth, every second mother and newborn in the state spends less than 24 hours in the hospital post-delivery. However, staying at the hospital for 48 hours after childbirth is necessary to address emergencies and give the mother and child a healthy start to their life together. It is clear then, given the scale of health hazards girls and women in UP face from an early age, that becoming competitive members of the workforce remains an abstract dream rather than an attainable reality.
With reference to these statistics, I wish to reiterate an important point. While efforts are underway to provide women of the country the skills to become trained members of the workforce, we must also prioritize their survival, immunity and good health in order to ensure that every girl and woman achieves her full potential. There is a need to mobilize communities on the ground in order to raise the demand for essential health services and interventions. A community that is more aware of the services it is entitled to can also help ensure that field level workers such as the ASHAs, AWWs, and ANMs perform their duties more efficiently.
Some initiatives have also been kick-started to ensure quality training for health workers. The National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) has a healthcare component that seeks to train paramedical personnel, frontline health workers, technicians, telehealth coordinators, phlebotomy professionals and even ASHA workers. As of March 2016, our Healthcare Sector Skill Council’s efforts have led to almost 1,00,000 trainings for healthcare across the country
As India strides forward on the path to greater development, the needs of its emergent workforce are paramount. Women potentially form half of this workforce, and as I have mentioned earlier, they face a number of critical obstacles on the path to greater productivity. While the state does provide services and interventions to address the health and nutrition needs of the community, it is imperative that our society well and truly provides women with better health as well as greater social and economic empowerment. Only then can our mission to bring them onboard as equal and skilled members of the workforce truly succeed.
(By Jayant Krishna, CEO, National Skill Development Corporation)