Educate Children Living on Construction Sites

In addition to running a comprehensive day-care centre for children, MMC hosts monthly meetings with parents that focus on different important topics ranging from finance management to hygiene and nutrition. MMC recognises that parents play a pivotal role in the growth and development of children and identifies the community as the central focus for creating awareness and sustainable interventions. The meetings, held over a cup of tea (Chai), provide parents and community members with a platform for open and informal discussions. A specialized MMC Program Officer leads the meetings and facilitates open discussion. 

We would like to highlight the efforts and innovative measures taken by our team especially at one of centre Airoli, in Navi Mumbai to increase participation of parents in these meetings.

As parents at the site work during the hours that the centre operates, the centre staffs was finding it very difficult to get parents to attend the meetings. The Parental meetings (chai paani meeting) numbers were extremely low due to the short period of lunch breaks and no leave from the construction site to attend meetings.

To improve the numbers, the centre staff decided to meet the safety officer onsite and made two requests

1. To give an extended lunch break on the scheduled meeting date
2. To allow the Program Officer to hold a separate chai paani meeting for men as they have an equally responsible role in child development and towards the community

The safety officer agreed to our requests and also ensured that he was present for all meetings from the month of February.  After gaining support from the site safety officer there has been immense improvement in the number of parents attending the meeting. Only 66 community members attended the meeting in January whereas after continuous dialogue and sustained efforts with builder 104 community members attended the meeting in February. The centre staff was nervous as they were holding the first “males only” meeting. The responses were overwhelming and 47 male community members attended the meeting. The centre reached 104 community members in total in the month of February.

Similarly in the month of March, 43 male community members attended the community meeting with a total reach of 93 parents.

Due to the cooperation and positive response from both male community members and site office, now we are hoping to pilot only male chai paani meetings across other centers.

Here are few achievements with respect to outreach activities with parents in the last three months (January –March 2019)

• No of meetings held with parents across our centres: 63
• Average no of parents reached every month: 492
• Varied topics covered in these meetings: Maternal Nutrition,    Importance of Birth Registration, Information on disease -Tuberculosis