Providing Life Skills to 300 Girls living in Slums

Dear Friends, We are hoping all of you are in good health and taking the needed precautions for battling Covid 19! The impact of Covid 19 has reported disastrous effect on each and every sector of human civilization. It has affected almost every section of the human population but it is needless to say that the people most adversely affected are the intersectionally deprived and disadvantaged. Most of our programme participants and their families belong to this section. Hence it was even more crucial for Vacha to work towards catering to their immediate need and survival following the unprecedented lockdown.

COVID relief work: Assessing the dire situation, we disseminated groceries and medical kits, making it a point to include sanitary napkins in each one of them. We have been undertaking the Covid Relief Drive from April 2020 to July 2021, thereby completing 16 phases of distribution which has greatly supported the participants and their families especially as many lost their jobs and daily wages in these difficult times. Even in these dreadful times, our girls have shown extreme courage, resilience and skills of collectivizing and leadership. From participating actively in our relief drives to assisting the community members, they have been very proactive. Additionally, youth from our communities conducted Vaccine Awareness drive in their community and virtually as well. To add to their efforts, Vacha carried out a vaccination drive for our staff, participants and their family members.                                                                                                               

  Virtual activities: In these terrible times, the education of our participants, especially that of girls has suffered a blow. With everything shifting to the virtual medium, the digital device seemed more real and alarming. Our interventions were focused on bridging this gap by devising methods like, providing community mobile phones, internet recharges, educational supplies taking sessions to orient the staff and the participants about features of the virtual world; all this was done prioritizing the wellbeing of our participants.

Class 10th results: In these unprecedented times, our participants have scored exceptionally well in their 10th board examinations which is a critical examination to gain admissions in colleges for higher education. Out of the collated scores, 88 girls and 16 boys appeared for their Grade 10th exams, out of which 24 of them scored more than 75%, 60 participants scored between 60% to 74% and 18 scored between 50% to 64% and results of 3 participants are held up due to some technical issues. We are happy to report that the highest score is 96% and 15 participants scored above 80% .

Mobile Library: Vacha believes that each and every child should be helped in inculcating the habit of reading. Library as a resource has always been a critical part of Vacha’s programmes. We did however shift it to the virtual medium for our programme participants as a response to the Covid 19 pandemic in 2020. We created an online repository of books, magazines, newspapers etc., to provide virtual access of books to our participants and also taught them to write book reviews. Participants were overjoyed to be a part of this virtual library program. We have now planned to extend and open our virtual library for everyone in the age group of 10 – 18 years. This will help us reaching out to children who have not had the access to books and engage with them to discuss books and review them together! We are looking forward to the relaxation of the lockdown measures to engage with our participants on site and conduct our activities in the Vacha resource centres itself. We are thankful for your continued support and encouragement which has helped us to overcome challenges and strengthen our efforts towards girls’ empowerment. Wishing all of you good health and peace!