Empower 5000 drop out Adolescent Girls in Lucknow

The quarter (Oct-Dec 2016) was marked with providing platforms like Adolescent girl’s festival, participatory learning sessions, health & counselling camps, community volunteers networking meetings, feedback on changes being experienced by through project interventions. 630 adolescent girls, 86 community volunteers and community members participated in these impact driven processes especially related to empowerment of adolescent girls and their issues like early marriage, domestic violence, social security, education, health, nutrition, water hygiene in 80 slums of project area in Lucknow district.

It is encouraging to note that participation, communication and self advocacy skills developed among adolescent girls are giving them a new recognition as community change agent at family, schools and community levels. Adolescent girls together with community volunteers developed under the project reached out around 800 families in 80 slums during this quarter to communicate and track the behavioural changes in areas of appropriate age of marriage for girls & boys, encouraging girls for going to schools, hand wash with soap, toilet use, food & drinking water handling, menstruation hygiene management. Project interventions during this quarter also facilitated transition and continued education of 43 adolescent girls  in upper primary & secondary schools, anaemia check-up of 40 and immunisation of 370  adolescent girls, prevention of  10 early girls marriages, use of sanitary pads started by 270 girls during this quarter.  300 adolescent girls are engaged in regular savings that their levels to meet their education and personal expenses.

While developing path for social empowerment, project is contributing in creating foundation form economic empowerment among adolescent girls. Project facilitated linkages of 60 drop out adolescent girls with vocational training agencies. They have received training on fashion designing & tailoring, beautician course, computer education. These trained adolescent girls sharing their vocational skills with other girls also in their slums.

Sarathi has also taken an innovative step to engage adolescent girls and community volunteers to  support delivery of public service  in  their slums. Integrated slum planning, household contacts, community meetings conducted under the project provide platform to identify and analyse service delivery issues and provide feedback to elected local representatives and government service providers.  

This is a story of Ambedkar Nagar, one of the slums in Lucknow covered under Saloni Project. During updation of Slum Action Plan, a participatory tool implemented to identify the issues arising in the slum, it was identified that from last 20 years the community has no Identity Card and Ration Card issued due to which they failed to avail government services allotted for them. The issue was broadly discussed in Adolescent girls and women group meetings by Madhuri Mishra, Saloni Mitra. Madhuri, took the lead and visited local governance body Municipal Corporation and provided feedback on this issue. She constantly visited the office and raised the issued until she was heard. After 2 months of her continuous approaches a camp was held in Ambedkar Nagar for the registrations and formation of identity cards. 150 people were registered for Ration card and Identity cards. After this within a month they received  Identity cards and were registered online for Ration card.