COVID-19 Rural Relief Distribution in India

COVID-19 has increased the vulnerability of people to being trafficked or engaging in child marriage due to economic hardships. To combat the rise of child marriage and sex trafficking in villages, we are actively engaged in training and enlisting grassroots volunteers after conducting our awareness program – Safe Village Program. Our grassroots volunteers – Rakshaks, Nodal Teachers and Gram Mitras – are trained and equipped with tools and resources to report child marriage and sex trafficking and get the right support to prevent these crimes. 

We also adopted Radio programmes to educate the communities on sex trafficking. These programs proved beneficial when we started receiving calls from people to report instances of trafficking after listening to our awareness programs via radio. 

My Choices Foundation (MCF) is working on the prevention of sex trafficking across India. We have conducted over 5000 Safe Village Programs, spreading information about the prevention and management of sex trafficking. This had led to significant behaviour change amongst the community members. Taking another leap towards the prevention of sex trafficking, we plan to empower vulnerable women of these communities by providing support, training and exposure in turn, decreasing the probability of them being trafficked. Our network of 100 implementing partners and 2000 Gram Mitras, Nodal Teachers and Rakshaks and strong connections with the communities and village leadership is vital to achieving the desired impact. The same network of implementing partners and grassroots stakeholders are also helping in spreading the awareness and support for COVID-19 relief across these villages. 

The GlobalGiving Funds have been helpful and are being utilised for the COVID-19 relief and awareness activities and distribution of essentials like masks across all the intervention villages of My Choices Foundation.