Girls in rural India are given little information about the physical, emotional, and social changes that go along with puberty and adolescence. Proper education and guidance during this developmental phase has critical implications that affect individuals, families and entire communities. About 50% of girls in India get married before 18 years and have to prove their fertility soon after marriage. Among married adolescent girls, 40.2% of all deaths are due to maternal causes. Mothers under 15 years old are 5 times more likely to experience maternal deaths and have higher neonatal and infant mortality rates than their 20-29 year old counterparts. Implementing an integrated intervention to change these social norms is the challenge. Providing adolescent girls with a safe place to ask questions, find their voice, and understand their feelings empowers them to reach their full potential and become strong leaders and contributors to their families and communities.
1. We empower unmarried adolescent girls through life skills education. - Adolsences are soft target for trafficking, so we try to protect from different hazzards specially on child marriage.
2. We promote and support formal education of adolescent girls. - We support adolsence mental health counselling and dance therapy.
3. We promote attitudinal change in unmarried and young married men, thereby demonstrating a measurable change in the prevalence of gender based violence and gender inequitable behaviours.
4. We protect young married women from the adverse consequences of early marriage, from sexual and domestic violence and avert maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality.
5. We empower adolescent girls through Life Skills Education resulting in a measurable improvement in their knowledge, skills, self esteem and self efficacy, and delay in age at marriage.
6. We improve the education of adolescent girls and amongst married adolescent girls we will reduce pre-term and low birth weight babies, sexual and domestic violence and maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality.
Over the past year, BAPU has developed a successful format for implementing an adolescent education programme through a close working partnership with community leaders. BAPU is working in the the district of Murshidabad in West Bengal , achieving remarkable success combating malnutrition by empowering local women as educators and leaders.
This project helps empower adolescent girls in rural India through an interactive workshop that reinforces the normalcy of puberty and helps create a positive cycle of education from generation to generation, helping transform young women into community health leaders.
Self Help Group and Microfinance
BAPU started SHG project in selective blocks of the district of Murshidabad viz. Berhampore, Kandi. Jiaganj, Bhagawangola and Lalgola block. The objective was to use micro-finance as a mean to empower the local women to set up micro-enterprises, thereby making them independent and respectable members of their communities.