Help 50 Tribal Women Make Neemola to Fight Malaria

This report is going to friends of The Advocacy Project who donated last year to our appeal on behalf of tribal women in India. Thank you for your support!

First, a recap.

The project is managed by Jeevan Rekha Parishad (“Lifeline”), our partner in the Indian state of Odisha. JRP has worked in tribal villages for many years and developed a deep understanding of tribal life.

Our first collaboration, in 2022, helped almost a thousand tribal villagers get vaccinated against COVID. We then jumped at a proposal by JRP in 2023 to apply the same community-driven approach to the scourge of malaria. Malaria is a particular concern because many of the villages are in heavily forested areas where mosquitoes flourish. The villages are also isolated and far from health centers, which means villagers lack access to government health services.

JRP selected ten isolated villages and reduced the rate of malaria to zero among vulnerable villagers. We described this remarkable achievement in this news bulletin.

During a Zoom meeting with JRP in 2023, we learned that tribal people use products from Neem trees, which grow in abundance in the forests, to protect themselves against malaria. Neem is known for repelling mosquitoes and during the rainy season villagers collect Neem leaves which they then boil and bathe in before sleep. They also burn Neem leaves and find that the smoke keeps mosquitoes away.

Villagers were not, however, using the Neem seeds that litter the forest floor when the trees were in flower. So we agreed to support a third start-up by JRP to see if Neem seeds could be turned into a mosquito repellent. We posted our appeal on GlobalGiving and the project bergan in the spring with help from your donations.

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At this point we recruited a Harvard graduate student, Adin, to volunteer at JRP as a Peace Fellow. Poor Adin arrived to brutal heat and suffered through the monsoon, so he experienced the full range of weather in India! It did not, however, stop him from doing a great job and we have sung his praises (and that of other Fellows) in reports to GlobalGiving which you can find here.

Adin helped JRP form a cooperative of 50 women from ten tribal villages. The women divided themselves into two groups – collectors and bottlers. During June and July, 34 members collected 1,200 kilos of seeds in two villages where the Neem flourishes (photo). Not only did this exceed their target (one ton of seeds - 1,000 kilos), but it showed how women could work together in teams and turn nature’s debris into something of value.

Once the seeds had been cleaned and weighed, the second group of 16 cooperative members processed the seeds at JRP’s field office in Despalla, a bustling country town. They fed the seeds into a small electrical press that JRP had commissioned from a local engineer and watched as the machine produced a thick, dark oil and a nutrient-rich manure. Both products are entirely natural and free from additives.

Meanwhile intensive discussions were also under way about a name for the new oil. We settled on Neemola, at the suggestion of Surajita from JRP. A new brand had been born!

Once the name was selected, JRP designed an attractive label and ordered 4,000 bottles. By the end of the year, cooperative members had filled 2,700 bottles with Neemola oil (photo) and distributed 1,531 bottles in the villages. Most were given out as free samples, but some were sold at 25 rupees a bottle and yielded 7,655 rupees ($89) which was shared among the 50 women. The amount was small, but its significance was huge because this was their first-ever paycheck. (All disposable income in tribal families is managed by men.)

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Late in November, I went to Odisha myself to assess the Neemola experiment. I was more fortunate than Adin had been in the summer! The climate was balmy and I was able to visit the ten villages in the company of Abhilipsa, who heads the JRP project team in Daspalla.

By now, the cooperative members were busy promoting Neemola oil as an anti-malarial. It was an easy sell because villagers are familiar with Neem products and revere the Neem tree. But villagers were not accustomed to applying Neemola oil on their skin. Aware of this, JRP wisely decided to include the oil in a kit, together with a new mosquito net and a bar of Neem soap as an additional incentive. The nets were important because the government had stopped handing out free nets a year before. The soap would help with personal hygiene.

The kits are given out by JRP through women’s self-help groups (SHGs) and the first village we visited, Gunthapaju, had already distributed scores of kits to pregnant women and their families. Sumati, the SHG president, told us that the new oil was being well received, widely used and even purchased. One reason, she said, was that it reduced the itch from mosquito bites and cured skin diseases. This was totally unexpected but music to our ears and another win for the Neemola start-up!

Sumati then smeared oil on her child to show how it’s used and met with no resistance (photo). We encountered similarly charming scenes in other villages, and by the end of my 3-week visit it was clear that the Neemola project was part of the tribal toolkit against malaria. This bodes well for the future and JRP is preparing to expand the number of women who will collect Neem seeds this coming summer.

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It is not clear, however, whether Neemola oil will have an impact on malaria.

We know the oil reduces itching and cures skin rashes, and that is a big step forward. We can also assume that the oil will help to keep mosquitoes at bay except perhaps during the height of the rainy season, when the creatures descend on the villages in massive swarms. Hopwever it is difficult to show cause and effect: even if there is no malaria among our target groups at the end of the year, it will be difficult to show that Neemola was responsible.

Even more important, it is clear that malaria is far from being the only health challenge facing these villagers. Older women do not use sanitary pads and suffer from high rates of Reproductive Tract Infection. Very few families use toilets. Cows amble around the villages and leave large piles of unhealthy dung near water pumps. Health centers are far from the villages. There is no phone connection in the villages, to help in emergencies. Education at tribal schools suffers when children are called away to work in the fields.

None of this should be taken as a criticism of the tribal way of life, which has much to offer the moder “developed” world. These villagers respect their natural environment and use herbal products from trees and plants like the Neem. They do not use plastic. They grow their own food, which is nutritious and entirely free from pesticides. Their culture - music and traditional dancing - is rich. They are delightfully friendly to each other and to outsiders.

All of which made it easy for me to agree with Manu, the founder and director of JRP, when he said: “I like tribal people and try to model my own life on theirs!”

But it has also become clear that we need to broaden our focus from malaria to the many other challenges referred to in this report, including sanitary hygiene, disposable income, and education.

As a result, JRP has set a new goal for 2025 - to focus on women’s empowerment rather than malaria, and to help tribal women overcome the challenges together while making the most of their strong community ties and love of nature. This year, at the request of the SHGs, JRP will train women to produce and use sanitary pads, work with girl students in tribal schools, use Neemola manure in a project of “smart farming,” and plant Neem saplings to produce more Neem seeds and increase forest cover against climate change.

At the same time, the project will retain the catchy name of Neemola and the oil itself will remain at the heart of our work. This is not just because of the oil’s healing qualities. We also see that the entire Neemola process builds teamwork among the SHGs, produces an income, and nurtures friendships – while also requiring personal discipline and self-care in applying the actual oil.

It all amounts to a new blueprint for development for women in one of the world’s richest, yet least-known communities. We thank you for your help and will keep you posted. In the meantime, please spread the word!

In appreciation,

Iain and the AP team