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India Organizes Call to Action Summit

UNICEF India 2_opt
India has organized a national summit on Call to Action for Child Survival and Development from February 7th to 9th. Held in Mahabalipuram, the summit brought together both national and international experts, policymakers, as well as representatives of developmental agencies including the U.N., to assess challenges and work toward achieving India’s development goals.

India is the regional front-runner when it comes to social entrepreneurship and its rapid advances in the health sector, specifically in dealing with maternal and child mortality rates. The summit additionally presents the need to build upon this great momentum both locally and globally. Since the 1990s, India’s maternal mortality rate has dropped by more than 50 percent, while its child mortality rate has reduced by 45 percent.

The United States government has pledged its support for India’s Call to Action initiative. USAID has been actively working with the government of India in its development undertakings, especially eradicating preventable child deaths. USAID is now initiating the Country Development Cooperation Strategy, which will focus on fostering partnerships locally and work towards co-funding rather than fully funding agreements in support of the efforts for finding solutions for child survival.

USAID expressed its commitment to this effort voicing, “An investment in India’s children is an investment in India’s future.”

– Pimrapee Thungkasemvathana

Source: USAID
Photo: UNICEF India

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Education Over Marriage


Nobel laureate and anti-apartheid icon Archbishop, Desmond Tutu; former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson; former Prime Minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland; and social activist Ela Bhatt will work together to eradicate the high rates of child marriage in Bihar, India.

Their initiative, Girls Not Bridges, has connected 80 civil society organizations based throughout the world.

Bhatt drew several conclusions after speaking with local people about child marriage. “We have discussed with all including women, children and youths about child marriage, all of them described it a bad practice,” Bhatt said.

Robinson said the local opposition to child marriage was beneficial for the development of their campaign against child marriage. “It is a positive development to encourage people to join the campaign,” Robinson said.

Internationally, approximately 10 million girls are married before turning 18 each year. If this rate does not slow, 100 million girls under 18 will be married by 2020.

In Bihar, girls are typically married off at a young age. Most are unable, as well as unprepared, to have children of their own. Early marriages result in early childbearing, resulting in frequently premature and underweight infants. Complications during pregnancy and childbirth are also common.

Moreover, girls who marry young often don’t receive an education. This is a detriment to the Millennium Development Goal of attaining universal education.

In Bihar, UNICEF works to ensure that girls are educated. For instance, Nari Gunjan, one of UNICEF’s partners in education, with the help of Sister Sudha Varghese, started a learning center in India. This learning center provided many girls with access to education that they were previously denied.

Several of these girls were able to write their own autobiographical essays from the education they had received at the centre. Rinku Kumari wrote about her early marriages and lack of education. Her father married her to a boy from a neighboring village when she was only 15 years old.

“I was keen to study right from my childhood but there was no opportunity.  It was only when a Nari Gunjan centre opened in my village that I joined it with the permission of my father,” Rinku wrote.

However, Kumari’s husband did not allow her to attend school for long. “Though my mother-in-law allowed me to attend classes at the centre, my husband stopped me from going there.  He threatened to break my legs if I disobeyed him,” Rinku wrote.

Buna Devi was 13 years old when she was married off. “When I went to the Centre, my neighbors would comment, “Look at this old woman with two children.  She is going to study now, at this age!”  I never replied to them but silently pursued my goal,” she wrote.

Hopefully, Girls Not Bridges will help UNICEF ensure that girls like Rinku and Buna aren’t married off so young, but instead are able to receive an education.

– Kasey Beduhn

Source: UNICEF, rediff News
Photo: Thoughtful India

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Cabs for Women by Women

Cabs for Women by Women

As the recent rape and death of a young medical student in India have highlighted, the state of the safety and public health of women in the country are tenuous at best.  While there are a minority of women who can afford to have their own cars, usually with chauffeurs to drive them, most Indian women who live in the nation’s capital of New Delhi are subject to the public transportation system of the city, which is comprised of an army of rickshaws, taxis, buses, and trains, none of which can protect them from the harassment from or assaults by disrespectful men.

However, a local non-profit called Sakha Consulting Wing is trying to counter this particular hardship that Indian women face by creating a taxi service that is completely catered to and serviced by women called Cabs for Women by Women. The program has existed since before the December rape but following the event, the service’s business has greatly increased as more women fear for their safety in public.

“Women who used other cab services are also turning to us,” driver Shanti Sharma tells Rhitu Chatterjee of PRI’s The World.

Composed of eight women drivers and seven taxis, the service acts not only as protection for its customers but as empowerment for its drivers.

“Ever since I started doing this job, I feel like I’ve reached my destination. I don’t want to change jobs anymore,” says Shanti.

Well-paid, this is the first time that Shanti, a single parent, has enough regular income to support her three children, and she is proud of that.

Life for female cabbies in New Delhi is still not a walk in the park though. Ridiculously outnumbered by male counterparts and mostly male drivers on the road in general, Shanti has experienced harassment while doing her job in the form of feeling alienated by other cab drivers in the city and having strangers dangerously cut her off and honk at her.

According to Shanti, “The only way to change the attitude of the men…is to have more women driving.”

While this is not untrue, the harassment of Indian women throughout the country is a systemic issue that will take broad strokes against the patriarchy, so firmly entrenched in much of Indian society, to end. This is the situation that women face not only in India but in much of the world today.

As the 2015 deadline to the UN’s Millennium Development Goals looms closer, with less than 1000 days to go, notes United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon at the African Union Summit, one can only hope that the goal of achieving global gender equality will one day be met.

As they say: the sooner, the better.

– Nina Narang

Sources: The World , UN
Photo: The Huffington Post

Dalit Women Fight Discrimination—Will the Parliament Help?

Dalit Women Fight Discrimination—Will the Parliament Help?On January 31, the March for the Eradication of Manual Scavenging ended in New Delhi. Starting in November, approximately 1,000 Dalit women began marching as a form of a peaceful protest against manual scavenging.

Manual scavenging refers to the process of physically removing human excrement from the dry latrines and sewers. Dalit women have traditionally been manual scavengers as it is understood to align with their lower status as members of the Dalit caste, also known as ‘untouchables,’ and as women.

The march began in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, on November 30 and continued for 63 days, crossing 200 districts and 18 states. The marchers spoke to manual scavengers in the areas they passed through and liberated around 3,000 people.

Kala bai Lavre, a Sajapur resident who had participated in the Malia Mukti Yatra of 2009, fully supported the start of the march in November 2012. The Malia Mukti Yatra in 2009 similarly fought for the freedom of Dalit women from manual scavenging and freed more than 500 women in 34 districts.

Lavre said, “Post marriage when my family told me I had to do this job, I used to cry for days and fell ill several times. But then I reconciled to the situation and did this work for 20 years. Only when my children started to go to school and other children discriminated against them, did I realize that we had to stop doing this work for the sake of our dignity.”

Several legislations in the Constitution have outlawed manual scavenging, but the practice has continued to exist throughout India. The 1993 Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrine Act has been re-written various times. Yet, it has never been effectively implemented and the middle class or lawmakers have remained unaffected.

A new bill called The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Bill was submitted to the Indian Parliament by the Minister of Social Justice and Empowerment. This currently pending bill may finally eradicate manual scavenging.

The bill requires the district magistrate to survey his jurisdiction and guarantee that no person is working as a manual scavenger and that former manual scavengers have been rehabilitated, or are in the process of being rehabilitated. Municipalities, cantonment boards and railway authorities are also obligated to build the appropriate number of sanitary public latrines within three years of the bill being passed and enacted. Finally, anyone who employs a manual scavenger or who builds an insanitary latrine will be imprisoned for up to a year and/or fined up to Rs 50,000 ($937.74).

The bill reinforces the already instated prohibition of untouchability and bonded labor by clearly defining and isolating manual scavenging as a practice that discriminates against, and reinforces the concept of untouchability.

High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay agrees that manual scavenging should be banned. “This is the only way these grossly exploited people will be able to successfully reintegrate into a healthier and much more dignified work environment, and finally have a real opportunity to improve the quality of their own lives and those of their children and subsequent generations,” said Ms. Pillay.

– Kasey Beduhn

Source: UN News Centre, ZEENEWS.com, The Hindu
Photo: The Hindu